The generation that chose to learn

I thought about all the adults I grew up around. The raised voices at the dinner table. The arguments were never really about anything except money. Money is always not enough, never too much. All the adults had jobs, families, and obligations. Somewhere between kinsenas at katapusan, the money always just disappears, and no one could explain why.

That frustration is what eventually pushed me to start talking about money online. Not because I had the answers, but because I saw everything I thought was wrong, and made sure I never repeated them. It worked for me; why would it not work for others?

Bakit ang hirap mag-ipon? It is the question I get asked more than any other. And the honest answer is: because nobody ever showed us how.

An OFW once messaged me. “Six years abroad and still nothing saved.” Thirty-five years old and starting from zero. She was not irresponsible. She wasn’t lazy. She was sending money home, paying rent in a foreign country, keeping a family afloat from thousands of kilometers away. The problem was never the willingness to save. It was that no one had ever sat her down and shown her structure; the simple, unglamorous discipline of treating your future self like a bill you have to pay on time.

A college student: a breadwinner looking out for his siblings, contributing to the household. Working part-time at a siomai stall for P350 a day, asked how to budget for an OJT he could not miss and a graduation his parents would not show up to. He had already done the math. He just needed someone to confirm that his plan made sense. That he was not crazy for trying.

These are not unique cases. These are the majority of Filipinos who are quietly trying to figure out a system that was never designed for them to understand. The financial world speaks in acronyms. Some financial advisors start with complicated life insurance jargon, and some boast about investments and interest rate structures. We enter a world where we’re expected to know calculus and trigonometry, but do not know that income minus expenses = net cash flow.

I am not a licensed financial advisor. What I am is someone who got very frustrated, very early, and decided to find the simplest possible way to explain the things making people’s lives harder than they needed to be. TikTok, it turns out, is a remarkably good place to do that. When you only have 60 seconds, there is no time for jargon. You have to speak like a person.

@heyfintechfounder #taxes #election #adulting #money #budget #salary #financetips #philippines #corruption #vote ♬ original sound - Fintech Founder

What I have learned from nearly 10 million interactions is that some Filipinos are not financially illiterate because they are incapable. They are financially illiterate because the knowledge was gatekept: dressed up in complexity it did not need, distributed through channels most people could not access, and spoken in a voice that did not sound like them. The moment you strip all of that away and say, "Here is how a credit score actually works" in plain Filipino, the response is not confusion. It is relief. Sometimes it is grief for all the years they missed, only because the information arrived so late.

But Andrew is proof that it is never too late. And he is not alone. The OFW who had nothing saved after six years abroad made a plan and started. The student working ₱350 a day showed up with a spreadsheet and a goal. These people were never the problem. They were simply never given the tools. And the moment they were, everything changed.

We are that generation, the one who did not wait to be taught. We went and found it ourselves—in comment sections and DMs, in 60-second videos watched on a commute, in the quiet determination of millions of Filipinos who decided that not knowing was no longer an option.

Financial literacy does not require a finance degree. It never did. It only requires someone willing to ask the question and someone willing to share from experience.