Latino Wall St Presents: Gabriela Berrospi with Elena Cardone at CPAC Latino 2025

A welcome and have the pleasure of listening to speaker, author, real estate investor, businesswoman and mentor Elena Cardoni with founder of Latino Wall Street, Forbes Financial Council member Gabriela Perozzi. Elena, I wanted to start by acknowledging you for whatever it took for you to get here. I know it wasn't easy. You were running across the freeway. You were running with a high heel in the bag. And really, that's a strong message, right? For me, that speaks volumes that you care about our community. You want to contribute. You want to add value. And quite frankly, everyone who knows anything about, you know, you don't need to do this, right? And I really love that you're here because it says everything about the contribution, right? That you give to others. And we really need that. You're very generous with your time. So thank you. Thank you. It's a spiritual legacy play for me at this point. 100%. I love that. So let's get started. So in a country that promises freedom, most people live financially enslaved by debt, by fear, by a system they don't understand. If we truly want freedom for our families, our communities, and our people, doesn't that start with learning how to master money? So the question is, Elena, what shifted in your own life? What was your before and after when you decided to take full control of your financial future? OK, so and you get the pleasure of seeing Grant Cardone come up here next, who's really the authority in that area and still to this day is my mentor in that area. But what changed for us? Well, I'll just speak for myself. In 2008, we were on the verge of an economic collapse, and I knew that something needed to change. And it was at this moment that I made a mental mind shift change. And that's where I said, you know what? I'm tired of always living from the past to the present to the future, like everyone teaches you how to do. Because every time I live from the past, if I had a failure, it just reinstated that I was a previous failure, that I'm never going to make it because the future me had never happened. So it kept being a setback over and over and over again. It kept feeding insecurities. And so in 2008, I said, we've got to do something different. We have to change our operating basis. And the thing that we did that made the biggest difference is we said we're severing ties from the past. That's only to use to help us for the future, like putting policies in place. But what we're going to do is we're going to live from the future and then reverse engineer into the present. So it made a huge difference because we mocked up and created what we wanted our lives to look like, who we had to be to have altitude. What targets we had to have? What kind of people would we be around? What kind of influence? And then we were what kind of a family and parents and wives and husbands did we need to be? We created this whole future picture. And even though we were on the verge of losing everything in present time, this is back in 2008. At that time, we wore the beingness as if we already had created that. Now, at the time, it seemed like an outrageous concept that we could be financially successful. Like, I mean, I always believed it, but like I didn't know if I really believed it because that doesn't happen for people like us. You know, a little girl from New Orleans, never went to college, never really thought she was smart. Grants from Lake Charles, Louisiana, even worse. And so, but I wore and we wore the beingness as if we already were. Now, there's a difference. We didn't go out and spend money to look like we were something that we weren't because that's not what billionaires or successful people, since you said finances, we'll just take that one. They don't spend money stupidly. They understand money. So, what did we have to do to connect the bridge between the beingness of a billionaire and the actual attainment of the picture? How do we just pull the future, which you agree your future one day is going to be the present and then it's going to be in the past. It's going to do it that way no matter what. And so, then how do we wear the hat of a billionaire, just like you would a cop or a fireman? How do you wear that? Well, now, if we lost a job or a commission or this or that, then it was like, okay, well, my future self in five years, if I really was already a billionaire, do you care in this moment that you lost that commission? You wouldn't even think twice about it. So, that's what I mean mentally. We had to just keep practicing and out creating and falling forward. And how was that a lesson to grow us into that person that can handle all of those type of situations? Who wouldn't pick up the phone for a billionaire? Why not make 20, 100 calls? Who cares if you get hung up on if you're a billionaire? I just kept doing that over and over. But then I also had to look at, okay, what finance courses do I need to take? I took five grants. He already knew. I studied grants material. I studied how to speak on stages, getting comfortable in rooms that I wasn't normally comfortable with, working out, training, expanding where I thought my mind and body could go. I just started putting myself into situations that forced me to grow so that one day when that future picture was finally here, which we did it, it's there. And now there's a new picture and a new future that we're going to live into. But really, actually being, doing gets you to the half of the picture. And that's really the mind shift of living from the future. So, everything was intentional. Everything, there was no mistake. If we ran into the betrayer partner or lawsuit or whatever, it was just an opportunity to learn and protect and fortify or fill in the weakness or it exposed the hole. How do you make that empire stronger going forward so that you can't be broken? And that's, and I've looked at all of that, not as a setback to go, see, you're a loser. You see, you can't do it. Oh, they take you down. You're a victim. Like, that's what I used to be doing. And now it's like, okay, I had to go through that to understand this or to understand that's a red flag or to take responsibility. I knew it. Sometimes I knew it and I chased the dangling carrot because I just wanted it instantaneously. I didn't have complete certainty in my own self. And I thought somebody outside of myself had it. All of these things were lessons I personally needed to learn and be able to walk into my That is so powerful. Let's give her a round of applause.