How ditching the homeownership dream allowed this finance coach to retire early

Delyanne Barros says that investing is not as complicated or intimidating as people imagine it to be Delyanne Barros got a late start with investing. She was 37 years old before she knew a thing about index funds or the power of compound interest. “I mean, I started contributing to a 401(k) when I was 28, but I thought it was a savings account,” she says. “I did not understand that it had anything to do with the stock market.” It wasn’t until she was a decade into her career as an employment lawyer that Barros, burdened with student loans and locked out of New York’s competitive housing market, began researching other ways to build wealth. “In the minority community, we’ve been told for so long that owning a home is the way to build wealth,” said Barros, who was born in Brazil and came to the US at age eight. “I just started thinking: ‘There’s got to be another way, right?’” She went down a personal finance “rabbit hole” and discovered investing is not as complicated or intimidating as she had imagined it to be. “It was mind-blowing,” Barros recalls. “I didn’t know that you could manage your own investments. I learned that there was a pathway to retiring early, which was great for