Maria Santos left a corporate accounting job in 2020 to teach the budgeting and debt-payoff strategies she wished someone had shown her family growing up. Her whiteboard breakdowns of real budgets quickly found an audience among young professionals navigating student loans and first jobs.

She now runs a weekly YouTube series walking through reader-submitted budgets, and her "50/30/20 for beginners" video remains one of the most-shared personal finance explainers among first-generation earners online.