Claudia Camargo is a licensed clinical social worker and founder of Blue Moon Counseling, a practice dedicated to helping Latinos access mental health support that actually understands our community. She grew up in a first gen immigrant household, watched her mom work her way up from housekeeper to manager, and became the first in her family to graduate from college. Her path to becoming a therapist started when she went to get help herself and realized her own therapist had no idea what it meant to grow up Latino.

In this conversation, we talk about financial trauma, identity, the difference between being broke and being poor, and why healing your relationship with money might be the most important financial move you ever make.

If you know someone who needs to hear this, share it with them.

But something changed. A wife who believed in him. A grandmother who prayed for him. A soccer flyer on a community college wall that led him to a coach who saw something worth developing. None of it was a straight line. None of it was easy. He tested at a seventh grade reading level when he started college. He failed classes. He took out loans he couldn't afford. He sat at a kitchen table during a pandemic, writing his dissertation while his abuelita was dying in the next room, and he made a decision to finish.

Today he is an assistant professor, a founder, a researcher, and a doctor. But the title he leads with is dad.

In this episode, we talk about identity, about what it means to rise out of an environment that never expected you to, about the financial mistakes he made along the way and what he learned from them, and about what financial dignity actually looks like when you build it from nothing.

This is the kind of story our community needs to hear. Not because it is perfect. Because it is real.

If you know someone who needs to hear this, share it with them.