Harris Financial Coaching Blog

You can work hard, pay your bills, stay out of trouble, and still feel like your family is one emergency away from falling behind. That feeling is real for many households. It is not because Black families do not work hard enough. It is not because they do not care about money. The bigger issue is that many Black families have been trying to build wealth without the same starting point.

The United States did not become wealthy by accident. That is a hard sentence to sit with, but it is an important one. Wealth does not just appear. It is built through systems, labor, access, ownership, policy, and power. In The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptist makes a clear argument: slavery was not separate from America’s economic growth. It was deeply connected to it.

Sometimes convenience is worth paying for. Other times, convenience becomes another subscription quietly pulling money from your account. That is why I wanted to try CookUnity for myself and look at it through two lenses: the food experience and the budget impact. In this video, I unboxed my first CookUnity order, which included 16 vegan meals delivered fresh to my door.

There are some places you visit that are not meant to entertain you. They are meant to make you pause. That is how I felt walking through the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. From the moment we stepped inside, the quiet felt different. It was not just silence. It felt like the building itself was asking us to slow down, pay attention, and truly see what happened.

When your dependent gets approved for Chapter 35 benefits, it can feel like a major financial relief. For many families, that monthly payment can help cover food, books, transportation, supplies, housing needs, and other expenses that come with being in college. It can also reduce how much parents feel pressured to send each month. It is a valuable benefit, but it also comes with rules that can affect your household budget if you do not understand them up front.