Five LGBTQ+ personal finance experts you’ll want to follow.

Finance doesn’t have a reputation for being inclusive or diverse. It was historically a province of white, wealthy men. However, it has never been known to be a place where LGBTQ+ people can freely express themselves.

This was also true in personal finance, where the people who give financial advice are typically white, male, and straight.

Pride Month is centred on acceptance and awareness of the LGBTQ+ community. However, this celebration cannot conceal that personal finance still needs to be improved. According to a 2018 Experian survey, more than 60% of LGBTQ+ people have experienced financial difficulties due to gender identity or sexual orientation.

We spoke to five people as part of Pride Month initiatives.

These experts make personal finances more inclusive and reflect the real world. They are helping to educate their online audiences about saving, investing, and growing wealth and raising awareness of the systemic inequalities that the LGBTQ+ community still faces.

Give your social media accounts a boost and follow them.

Suze Orman

She is one of the most influential and powerful voices in finance. She is the author of 10 New York Times bestsellers on personal finance. She also won two Emmy Awards and eight Gracie Awards throughout her career.

She is also gay but doesn’t adopt her financial advice to gay people. She believes that personal finance is the same regardless of whether you are gay.

Gay Husbands at FIRE

G and J are the married couple behind Gay Husbands, which prefers to remain anonymous. FIRE is an acronym for “financial independence. Retire early.”

Both are in their 30s and live in NYC. They plan to achieve financial independence by 2031. J is originally from Colorado, and G is originally from Colombia. They met in Philadelphia in 2013 and were married in 2017. Since marriage, they have merged all their financial resources and paid off $100,000 of student loans.

Carmen Perez

Carmen Perez is the founder of Make Real Cents. This personal finance platform aims to help people attain financial independence and avoid making the same mistakes she did early in her career.

Carmen was in terrible credit and had no savings. She was also sued for defaulting her student loan. She decided that 2016 was the year to change and get debt-free. In just three years, she paid off $57,000 worth of debt. Carmen and Elise, her now-wife, managed to pay cash for their New York City wedding of 120 guests in 2018 while working on her debt.

Daniella Flores

Daniella Flores is a queer and nonbinary financial expert and founder of iliketodabble.com, side hustle and money resource website. After paying off $40,000 of debt with their wife, they fell in love with the idea of side hustles — or “dabbling” as they call it in their online community — and the idea that they could leverage their creative energy to pursue financial freedom.

According to Flores, society makes LGBTQ+ individuals feel like they don’t have a lot of options to build wealth. Their mission is to change that. 

Lexa VanDamme

After graduating from a master’s program, Lexa VanDamme founded The Avocado Toast budget in June 2020. She was struggling to find work after her graduation. It began as a blog. In September 2020, it moved to TikTok. She started to share her story of paying off $20,000 credit card debt within a year and how she reformed her relationship with money. Her tips and resources are now available for free on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.

VanDamme states that The Avocado Toast Budget is an online community that millennials can use to become more confident in managing their money in a way that makes sense for them and their lives. Two beliefs influence her content: “Money is political” and “debt can be morally neutral.”