Halftime, Dimes 🏁 our midyear review and H2 lineup
Our Mailbox is going public, more New Dimes Radio podcast episodes, and our first product enters alpha 👀
Ok so by now, y’all know that we looove to keep us all humming with a regular rhythm in our finances. Check in with it regularly. Review what happened. Decide what’s next. Adjust without judgment.
So we thought we’d partake, organizationally. Start our own practice of sharing a New Dimes midyear review with our community. 💛 And what better day than today bc Jupiter Cazimi??
The first half of 2026.
H1 was an extension of 2025. It was an adjustment and building season. With the shift of our programming over to Substack (and a few life changes across our cofounder team), a lot of it happened on and off the feed:
We hosted our monthly Wealth Coworking Sessions where members knocked out all kinds of things like budget resets, planning a family member’s funeral, providing support for a friend going through cancer treatment, researching what it looks like for your business to get acquired, and tetris-ing kids’ summer camp schedules.
We answered a chunky set of Member Mailbox questions behind the scenes. Y’all reached out with a range of things from marriage prep between business partners to untangling a parent’s surprise unfiled tax returns, to how to build your very first bench of vetted wealth specialists.
We produced a handful of New Dimes Radio conversations, including our first deep dive with adrienne maree brown and one hefty conversation with our own tax strategist, Liz Hanley.
AND we quietly started building our first Dimes product (more on that in a second 👀)
Off the clock, we lived a first half that looked a lot like yours probably did.
Renna navigated a surgery, a remodel that went sideways, and digging into Medical and below-market senior relocation options for her parents to better support her mom’s declining health.
Berna has been rebuilding her personal $ runway from the studs (essential for business bootstrapping) with a dream job scenario that unfolded at Monarch. AND she just passed her Accredited Financial Counselor certification!
I (Kristen) have been supporting my dad through a heavy mental health season and navigating a family property situation in the Philippines (I was there for my wedding and the property sitch was a departing surprise weeeee 🙃). All while opening a third location for our family’s food business and running a startup accelerator cohort.
We’ve maintained bootstrapped status, still owned by us three first-generation breadwinners, so when we say our lives inform the build, we mean it li-ter-ally. Everything we just listed is definitely integrated into the upcoming half of New Dimes programming. 😅
What we learned: the things that compound are worth more than the things that perform. Fewer, better, realer. That’s the H2 plan.
Which brings us to the fun part.
The second half: what’s coming
📬 The Member Mailbox goes public
For over a year, members have been sending us their realest first-gen progressive money questions. The ones you can’t exactly ask at the dinner table you’re funding. The LLC you started with your partner before you got married. The tax returns you found out your parents never filed. The credit limit that got slashed mysteriously, until you realized a family member you forgot was on the card had been spenddddding.
I have been answering these behind the scenes with deep research and referrals to specific vetted professionals in our network. Starting next month, that research is getting anonymized and shared right here. And each one comes with a second opinion from a specialist in our provider network. A public benefits attorney. An enrolled agent. A CPA. A financial therapist. The people we barely knew we needed for situations we could not have predicted.
Paid subscribers can submit their own questions. That’s part of the heart of our membership. We never do math or research alone.
🎙 New Dimes Radio keeps rolling
We’re going to continue to host hella raw conversations about how Dimes in our orbit are doing wealth differently. The experiments. The windfalls. The pitfalls. All the things.
New episodes are coming this half, including conversations with:
Candice Morgan on the racial wealth gap and economic mobility
Chanice Anderson on building the legal infrastructure for a first-gen family office
Michelle MiJung Kim on reconciling the cost of caregiving and the cost of going all-in on values-aligned work
🗄 DimeVault enters alpha
Our first product! SCREAM. Renna officially made the jump from W2 baddie to full-time founder, and she has been building a Chrome extension of our first-gen dreams. It scans your inbox and organizes your important financial and legal documents into safe folders on your own device. It’s built for the moment a CPA says “just send me everything” and your stomach drops.
Which is exactly what happened to me last month. I will be alpha tester number one. My stomach did to the drop when my CPA emailed: “Extension time is almost up. It’s time to prepare for taxes.” I have done zero prep bc life as listed above. But I like to think that this was the universe’s timing. Because I will now have a chance to use DimeVault to pick my guts up off the floor, and I’ll be sharing my experience doing our first user test.
🎁 New Dimes Perks (coming soon)
Another obsession that’s been on my list is helping New Dimes achieve AARP status with y’all. I will be enlisting some help from product and program friends to build a pilot perks space with resources that help improve Dimes’ quality of life. Some of the bennies on my initial dream list: Traditional Chinese Medicine, menopause support, meal prep programs, travel concierge services, caregiver credits, and styling subscriptions. More soon.
🤝 Wealth Coworking Sessions continue
Monthly sessions where we sit down collectively and do all our first-gen money admin. Reset and reorganize our parents’ passwords (again lol), review our investment performance, plan for a sabbatical, set up that 529 savings account. Get all the things done, in Dime company.
If you want in
Become a paid subscriber and you get the Mailbox, monthly Wealth Coworking Sessions, and Perks (when they launch). You’ll also be funding a fully independent company accountable only to the people it serves. That independence is the whole reason we can do what we do, how we do it.
Now we want to hear about your midyear review. What have been some of your highlights? What are you looking forward to in your H2?
💚 Kristen, Berna & Renna