Family finance lessons: Mamiverse CEO Rene Alegria
The most important lessons we learn about money don’t come from our accountants or our radios. They come from our family. Each week, we invite someone to tell us about the money tips they inherited from the people they grew up with.
This week, our guest is Rene Alegria, the CEO of Mamiverse, a website that caters to Hispanic mothers and families. He was a founding publisher of the Rayo imprint of HarperCollins.
Alegria grew up with his grandparents and says that they taught him a lot of the skills that he uses today with his own business. His grandfather was a copper miner, and Alegria describes his upbringing as ‘very blue collar.’
“I was raised with an atmosphere of ‘work hard, you will get your due,'” Alegria says. “We didn’t go out a lot, there just wasn’t the means to, so there was a lot of us playing cards [and] a lot of us listening to the radio.”
There was also one unusual money-saving strategy that Alegria’s grandfather employed: “On his days off he would go to different banks … and close an account and open another account where a bank would give him better interest rates.”
As it turns out, the method was effective.
“Saving and transferring and switching banks and whatnot he was able to really save up quite a treasure chest,” he says.
He says this was illuminating, and helped him realize what he needed to do in order to save, penny-by-penny, for rainy days. “I learned a lot about what it takes to make the American dream possible,” he says.
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