Yemi Rose

Wiley · On sale 27 January 2027

This book is about money,
but it isn’t really a money book.

Cover of What Color Is Your Money? by Yemi Rose. The title is set in heavy uppercase type, with What, Is Your and Money in red and Color in black, against a weathered pale ground.

What Color Is Your Money? Healing Financial Trauma, Building Wealth, and Realizing the American Dream

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About the book

It's about how building wealth in a system not built for you shapes your mind, your sense of self, your capacity for hope. It leaves scars that understanding alone can't erase.

A creased studio portrait with one corner torn away. My father as a boy, standing between his mother and his younger sister.
Kingston

In Jamaica, color and money were never quite the same thing, but colonialism had tied them together long before I was born. My grandmother's light skin opened doors, but staying in required constant performance. Color was capital, and like all capital, it needed upkeep. My grandfather was dark-skinned and danced for no one.

My mother saw money as power, counting every day's earnings herself and trusting no one else. My father, more carefree, never knew our bank balance. From them, I learned to hold trust back, from people and institutions both.

My mother as a young woman, laughing, sitting barefoot on the grass with heavy foliage behind her.
My parents' wedding. My mother signs the register while my father stands beside her and the officiating pastor leans in.
My parents
My two sisters sitting close together on a bed, cheek to cheek, laughing. An orange date stamp in the corner reads 96 3 24.
My father as a young man, reclining in a striped lawn chair with me as an infant lying against his chest.

My sisters and my father

I grew up watching The Cosby Show, believing King's dream lived in their brownstone. Arriving in America, I entered Blackness rather than inheriting it. My ignorance helped briefly, but at the cost of others who looked like me.

I spent nearly twenty years in American finance, at BlackRock, KPMG and Prudential, before founding OfColor. I believed money problems were math problems, solvable with the right teaching and the right tools.

Kingston 1980

My sisters and me as children in school uniforms, standing in a driveway in front of a car in Kingston.

I didn't realize I was in for my own education. You can teach every strategy ever devised, but if someone doesn't believe they deserve to succeed, none of it holds. Change began when someone believed they were worthy and saw the mindset holding them back. Systemic discrimination mattered, but determination to overcome it mattered almost as much.

I now know that there is a level of trauma that comes with trying to generate wealth as a person of color in America, and trauma is paralyzing. I know that terrain because I've lived on it. My own family moved through more than its share, and I was a participant observer working to understand what it takes for people of color to be all the way free.

Why this book, now

I wrote this for those doing everything right on paper. Money is deeply personal; people of color carry it twice, once for a system not built for them, again for a childhood absorbing lowered expectations.

We're being sold scarcity, and it's working.

Underserved people keep splitting into smaller groups, competing for position instead of building. Black immigrants and Black Americans, to name the split I live inside. I named my company OfColor on purpose, because I wanted the tent to be bigger.

The problem didn't leave when we stopped talking about it.

After COVID and George Floyd, the country acted as if race was solved. The DEI programs came down, the conversation moved on, and the gap widened. The backlash was as manufactured as the categories it claimed to fix, and the advice on offer is still to skip the latte, as if that were the variable.

Nothing is more personal than race, and personalization is where the industry is going.

The industry is racing toward extreme personalization while avoiding the most personal variable, race. That costs the people it serves and the ones it can't reach. What worked one-on-one and in small-group financial therapy never scaled. It's starting to, and this book is a thesis for what that could look like.

Preorder interest

Know when it's out.

I'll send one email when the book is available, and maybe two or three before then if there's something worth your time: an excerpt, an event, a place to hear more. You can leave whenever you want.

Your email is for this book only. I won't sell it or hand it around.

Where to preorder

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Bulk & corporate orders

This book is meant to be read and shared. It's built for the groups that carry these conversations: employee resource groups, financial wellness and DEI programs, HR teams, book clubs, and university courses. Volume orders come with discounted pricing.

Enquire about bulk orders

About the author

Yemi Rose seated, wearing a grey marled cardigan over a white t-shirt, against a charcoal studio backdrop.

Yemi Rose is an entrepreneur, strategist, and thought leader working at the intersection of work, technology, and financial well-being. A first-generation Jamaican immigrant, he spent nearly two decades in financial services, including senior roles at BlackRock, KPMG, and Prudential Financial, before founding OfColor, the workplace financial health platform for workers of color that served Fortune 100 partners and was acquired by Financial Finesse in 2024. Today, he leads WeGood Equity, a lab focused on Black economic development, building culturally relevant fintech tools, and using technology to support skilled workforce development and ownership.

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