Maria Melchor

speaker

185 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 12 Feb

Maria Melchor’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 1.

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Inspired Budget · #247: First-Gen Money Struggles and How to Overcome Them with Maria Melchor · 12 Feb 2026 podcast

and so I knew that they were like low low earners and so then that was also part of it not just like fear about what to do but also like a bit of like feeling could I be earning more than my parents and is that I don't know I guess I felt a little bit guilty about that or a little bit self-conscious like how can I a 22 year old be out earning my like parents were in their 40s 50s mm-hmm

Yeah.

I would say that it is pretty self-imposed.

They never said anything like to make me believe that I shouldn't be proud of myself, you

I guess I call this more like first-gen guilt.

It's not that I feel that it's wrong or that they made me feel that it's wrong, but it's more like, oh, is this fair?

Is it fair that under this job market, my parents who are blue-collar workers are earning less in their midlife than...

a young person coming straight out of college and so i was more like upset about it as like how it related to like the the justice in the world i guess but no i think they

are proud of me and they were proud at the time it was definitely more of like my view on the situation and if i wasn't thinking about my parents and i was just thinking about 50k in new york city at the time because i was so young i was like making it work and also this was 2018 which believe it or not was actually like a way more affordable time than 2025

And I would say it was when I compared myself to my other, like the rest of my graduating class.

So I actually went to Yale University.

And so a lot of my classmates went on to enter the like high earning corporate industry.

world earning 100k plus straight out of college in 2018.

So when I compare myself to them, I was like, Oh, yeah, it's not, it's not a lot.

So it's always like living in this kind of in between of feeling like I'm earning a

I will say I also had that pull toward, oh, I have money for the first time.

Should I buy a whole new wardrobe?

Yeah.

And should I start dining out every weekend and maybe travel to all the places that I've been wanting to travel to?

So I would say it was like the usual experience kind of reeled in by my background of like

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