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Earlier this year, in a wash of inflation and unexpected expenses, I found myself in serious credit card debt. Despite the fact that I had never received financial guidance at school or home, the shame was sharp and immediate: How could I have let this happen? a sticky, insistent voice asked again and again. During a quiet ride home from Upstate New York with my gay besties, I opened up about the debt. To my surprise, many of them shared the same experience. We swapped stories of rapidly accruing interest and frustration about student loans. I had berated myself for months, even though keeping people in debt — and loaded with personal shame about it — is a systemic feature of American life.
This is particularly acute in LGBTQ+ communities. According to a 2023 study by the Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research, only half of LGBTQ+ respondents could pay all of their monthly bills on time. My desire to understand how we can find personal financial stability amid the systemic challenges of capitalism brought me to the work of Leo Aquino.
As a journalist, certified educator in personal finance, and content creator, Aquino examines the impacts of capitalism and wealth inequality on queer and trans people. While insistently critiquing the system we live in, they provide people with the tools they need to make empowered financial decisions. Lately, that has meant sharing information about the Biden Harris’ administration's SAVE plan while simultaneously advocating for a national debt strike.
Aquino says they were attracted to finance because few people they knew had access to guidance about topics like saving for retirement, building up an emergency fund, or paying off their student loans. This meant that people who needed it most — such as those who are undocumented, living paycheck to paycheck, or in cash economies — often don’t receive guidance. “I wanted to know: how do we solve that?,” they say.
Unlike traditional finance coaches, they argue that our decisions around money do not need to follow a strict set of rules. For Aquino, we are in a fluid relationship to our resources, and each of us has to make the decisions that are right for us. Whether that’s occasionally stopping credit card payments to protect your mental health, as Aquino has written about for Insider, or practicing generosity as a form of resistance, a healthy financial life depends on a person’s values, commitments, and needs.
Below, we discuss the specific problems that queer and trans people face in their financial lives, the importance of collective action, and what the restart of student loan payments really means.
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How do you define anti-capitalist personal finance?
For me, it means that we are acknowledging the oppressive systems at play while making educated financial decisions. We are listening to traditional financial advice while contextualizing it and saying, “Okay, this is how this is a part of a greater economic system that is seriously marginalizing a lot of people, especially queer and trans folks."
Why is it so important to center trans and queer people in this conversation?
There are so many examples. One is split credit scores. If you go through a legal name change process, all of your finances are upended because financial systems are hinging on you having one permanent gender marker and one permanent name. It stops us from accessing credit. It stops us from being able to rent apartments and get stable housing. It's just another barrier, right?
Another [example of discrimination] is our elders. I've spoken to a fair amount of LGBTQ+ folks who can't afford to retire. They grew up in the ’80s and ’90s during [the height of the] AIDS epidemic. That is a very serious, emotional, psychological, and physical trauma. It was also financial. The money that was being circulated to fill in the gaps of what the government should have provided was money that could have been put into retirement accounts so that people could live comfortably in their old age.
Now, we see [that financial impact] in the anti-trans legislation that's sweeping the country. It is so tough. We're in an environment where people are having to move, but picking up your whole life and moving to a different state is incredibly expensive. Not everyone can afford to do that.
There's this real desire as queer community to exist in our own world and resist capitalism. I'm curious how you approach that tension in your work between the critique of capitalism and the material realities of living in America.
First, I’ll say I never do anything alone. Right now, I'm in an “Anti-capitalism for Artists” study group. One question that has stayed with me recently is: how can we find the weaknesses within capitalism and keep tugging at them?
One of the weaknesses I find is that capitalists don’t think about generosity. Capitalism underestimates how pleasurable it feels to be generous. It’s a major superpower that we can use to fight back. As queer and trans people, we come from that legacy. We come from housemothers who adopted unhoused young people. We come from communities of sex workers who raised tens of thousands of dollars for gender-affirming surgery. And then once they got theirs, they asked, “How can I help someone else get their hormones or get their surgery?” Mutual aid is part of queer and trans legacy, period. And I think that the more that we lean into that, the stronger we are on our side of this fight.
In addition, we have to remember that there’s no perfect way to make money as an anti-capitalist. We’re always going to be making negotiations until we reach a point where things are different. It’s important to remember that this fight against capitalism is going to go beyond our generation. We need to think about what we can do right now, and then the generation after us will continue to pick up that work.
Okay, this is your area of expertise. Student loan payments are about to restart. What do people need to know?
Student loan payments are due in October. So, my number one advice to folks is this is time to really review your budget, your monthly spending, and get clear on how money is moving through your life. This is a no-judgment zone. Around student loans, a lot of people are like, “I’m never going to be able to pay this off, so I just won't look.” The numbers are the numbers. It doesn’t mean you’re good or bad. It just is.
I would suggest setting aside 30 minutes a week. Maybe you make it a co-working day with one of your buddies. Start to open your student loan account so that you can find out the details. And again, try to take the moral judgment out of it; the real immorality is loaning $100,000 to an 18-year-old. Use that time period to do one or two tasks. Really spread it out. Maybe you don’t know who your student loan servicer is, and you’ll have to look it up because servicers change. By October 1, you should know what your payment options are, and what the monthly payments might be under, for example the graduated plan versus an income-driven repayment plan. You’re going to want to know how much you owe in total and the interest rate. Again, this is really scary shit for people, and understandably so, because student loans are really emotionally loaded.
And then, zooming back from the personal, what are some of the ways people are collectivizing around these payments and why is that so important?
I’m going to focus on the debt strike. The basic definition of a debt strike is you stop paying back your debt because you don’t believe it’s valid. The main organization that is organizing a national debt strike is the Debt Collective. Besides the debt strike, they host in-person and virtual sessions for debtors of all ages. I’ve connected with some folks who are in the 50+ age group of debtors, and this debt has really affected their ability to retire.
Collective action around debt is really important because the more of us band together and say, “You know what? I refuse to let my student loans define me,” then the more powerful we become as borrowers. I think that debt strikes are really important because they [let us] say, “No, I’m a human being, and I get to have consent over the way that I live.”
Can you say more about the intersections between money and consent?
For example, I do not consent to working until I'm 65 and then having a few years to chill out and not work. I do not consent to that. But the fact that I have six figures of student loans, that takes away my ability to act in accordance to my consent, and I have to do things that I don't consent to in order to survive.
Speaking of, can you tell me a little bit about your retirement practice?
My retirement practice started when I decided to do nothing for at least one hour a day. I was inspired by the book Rest Is Resistance by the Nap Ministry. I was working legit 80, 90 hours a week, and I was like, “I just need one hour to breathe.” Even though I didn't do it perfectly, I just kept going. It's been really life-changing because I now find that hour really sacred, and I crave even more time doing nothing. It's really an “F-U” to hustle culture. I reject this idea that you have to wait until you’re in your 60s to retire. I think that you can microdose retirement right now, just doing nothing and unplugging from work. I want us to believe life is long and therefore, we can afford to have periods of time where we’re doing nothing, and it’s okay.
What is the future for Queer & Trans Wealth and what programs are you building for our community?
I hope in the next few years, we will become a nonprofit organization that provides low-cost financial planning services for queer and trans folks. I also hope to provide housing grants to help queer and trans folks access stable housing. We’d help folks if they need the first month’s rent, the security deposit, a co-signer for your lease, or if they don't have a credit history. Not everyone has that, so I hope to become a nonprofit organization that can vouch for people in that position.
I would also like to be able to provide emergency grants to help folks who are impacted by anti-trans legislation — if they need to pick up and move, or even just queer and trans folks going through regular emergencies. We also intend to provide grants to help people with their surgeries — not just the actual cost of the surgery, but the aftercare, because usually people are not able to take extended periods of paid-time-off for major surgeries, which affects the way that they recover. So I’m working very diligently and hoping that Queer & Trans Wealth can grow, so we can provide material support to folks in need and build real wealth in our community.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
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