Maria Melchor, 25, lives in New York, NY, and earns $62,000 a year as a paralegal case handler at the Legal Aid Society of New York. Maria also has a side hustle called FirstGenLiving where she offers money coaching services to her clients.

This is an installment of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the globe and details how they earn, spend and save their money.

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Ask Maria Melchor how she spends her money, and the 25-year-old pulls up an elaborate budgeting system she has fine-tuned over the past few years. Whether it’s going toward one of her many financial goals, is earmarked for rent or is slotted into the “unaccounted for” column, Melchor can account for nearly every cent she earns.

She didn’t grow up being so fastidious with her finances. But the system is one of the ways Melchor has taught herself to make sense of her money, a topic she once found difficult to navigate.

From 9 to 5, Melchor works as a paralegal case handler for the Legal Aid Society, helping low-income New Yorkers access government benefits and affordable housing. She is paid around $52,000 a year and receives generous health benefits.

On the side, she offers financial coaching for individuals and couples via FirstGenLiving, a community she founded in 2020 as a space for first generation immigrants, college students and young professionals to unpack “their histories with money and design healthy financial lives.” In the beginning of 2021, she was earning around $800 per month from her coaching sessions, and pocketing $400 of that.

Her side business was inspired by her own experience as a first generation immigrant in the United States. Melchor, who is currently a permanent resident and is applying for her citizenship, moved to the U.S. from Veracruz, Mexico, when she was 9. Her father had been working in the U.S. for years at that point, and Melchor and her mother joined him in Connecticut (she also has two siblings who were born in the U.S.).

Growing up, her father, who was undocumented when he came to the U.S., took on odd jobs, working as a day laborer, in restaurants and as a carpenter. Her mother stayed home with Melchor and her siblings when they were young, before getting a job as a house cleaner.

“My parents are very, very hardworking. They always have been,” Melchor tells CNBC Make It. “But given that my dad and my mom were undocumented for a while … we were pretty poor.” Her parents bought her new clothes just once a year, at the start of the school year, and her mother kept a strict grocery budget.

Melchor first became interested in personal finance when she started attending Yale University in 2014. Money took on a different meaning when she got to college and saw how other people outside of her immigrant community lived.

“I was naïve. I didn’t understand I was going to school with the 1%,” she says, recalling being shocked to learn that some of her classmates owned designer jackets worth thousands of dollars. “I’m like, ‘Wow, these are $1,000 jackets, and you leave them on the couch at a party.’”

Melchor earned just over $46,000 her first year out of school at the Legal Aid Society and remembers feeling “overwhelmed” by her first paycheck. Although she wasn’t making much compared to other Yale grads, it was an “incredibly high” amount for someone from her background, she says. After paying for rent and groceries, she was amazed to still have money left over each month.

While finances were an ever-present concern in her life growing up, Melchor realized that she didn’t know how to manage her money on her own. To learn, she “inundated” herself with financial information, reading books — “Get a Financial Life″ by Beth Kobliner is a favorite — listening to podcasts and watching YouTube videos. She learned the basics of saving and investing, and created her elaborate budgeting system.

She hopes sharing her story will show other first generation Americans that finances don’t have to be scary.

“I’ve learned that everyone needs a basic, minimum living wage and government benefits in order to leverage financial literacy to reach their biggest money goals,” she says. “But I believe that, above a certain income level, everyone can set up wildly easy and successful financial lives.”

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Living On $62K A Year In NYC | Millennial Money

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