Catalina Franco-Cicero jokes that she became a financial planner at age 8. The Colombian native, whose single mother came to Miami with three small children, was the first in her family to learn English, “so I became responsible for writing checks and dealing with money while my mother worked,” she said. A good student, Franco-Cicero went to a local community college where she was in the honors program, winning a scholarship to nearby Barry University for her last two years of college. Regarding student aid, she said she “never abused the system because I didn’t even know there was a system,” explaining how she borrowed money from her brother and started a summer camp to earn money. Later, she got a master’s degree in sports management and was studying for her doctorate to teach on the college level.
One day, her husband asked her to take notes at a financial planning class she had urged him to take. “I discovered my passion,” she said, boldly dropping out of her Ph.D. program — “career suicide in education” — to eventually become a certified financial planner, joining her current firm in 2017. Now serving on the first advisory board of CHIP (Changing How Individuals Prosper) and recently a member of Morningstar’s Hispanic Heritage Month panel, she is committed to bringing financial planning and financial literacy to underserved populations. “Our industry does a good job of intimidating people into believing they are not wealthy or smart enough to be a client, which is isolating. I want to change that.”