Gen Z Advisor Cracks the Code: Barnum’s 21 Year Old Designs Wealth Plans for Immigrants and Women

By Spencer Hulse

How a 21-year-old advisor at elite firm Barnum Financial Group created planning methods that actually work for immigrants and women.

First-generation Americans are a powerful and underserved demographic. According to a 2022 study by The Motley Fool, 67% of first-generation Americans expect to support their aging parents financially, and 71% already help their families manage finances. Despite their growing financial impact, many feel overlooked by traditional financial advisors who often fail to understand their unique challenges, such as multigenerational obligations and a different cultural approach to saving and planning.

At Barnum Financial Group, one of MassMutual’s top-performing agencies, 21-year-old Angelina Shyltsyna has cracked this code. Her groundbreaking approach has senior colleagues asking to shadow her client meetings and copy her intake processes. More importantly, she’s helping clients who previously struggled with traditional advisory services secure millions in coverage and build sustainable wealth strategies.

Breaking Through Traditional Barriers

Shyltsyna knows firsthand what it’s like to walk into a financial advisor’s office and feel completely lost. She understands the confusion about the U.S. financial systems that many of her clients experience today. That perspective became her biggest professional advantage at Barnum Financial Group, a top-tier MassMutual agency managing billions in client assets and serving over 250,000 clients nationwide.

Where other advisors see difficult clients who ask too many questions or seem hesitant about standard products, Shyltsyna sees people who simply need different conversations. Her approach, which she calls “empathy-based advising,” starts with understanding why someone might distrust insurance companies or feel overwhelmed by retirement planning concepts that seem foreign to their family’s financial traditions. That distrust is well documented: according to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, only 56% of people globally say they trust insurance companies, and trust in financial services overall remains among the lowest across all sectors (Edelman, 2023). This shows the problem isn’t just about products — it’s about how people are being heard. Shyltsyna’s method builds trust not through persuasion, but through connection.

Her Human-Centered Financial Planning Framework starts with questions that sound nothing like traditional financial intake forms. Instead of asking “What’s your risk tolerance?” she might ask “Tell me about the first time your family talked about money” or “What financial decision keeps you awake at night?” These narrative-based questions reveal cultural attitudes and emotional barriers that standard questionnaires miss entirely.

The visual component is equally important. Shyltsyna creates decision trees that show clients exactly how different choices affect their financial future, using familiar scenarios rather than abstract concepts. For young women entering high-earning careers, she shows how early planning creates compound advantages that traditional advice often glosses over.

“Many traditional financial services models fail to address the emotional hesitations, cultural nuances, or psychological barriers that clients face when navigating insurance, retirement planning, and wealth management,” Shyltsyna explains. This approach has proven particularly effective for women, immigrants, and first-generation professionals who often struggle with conventional financial advisory services.

Academic Excellence and Early Recognition

Shyltsyna’s analytical approach stems from her distinguished academic background at Trinity College, where she earned a Bachelor of Science in Economics and completed a competitive Independent Research Study on the economic potential of the mushroom substrate industry. As Captain of the Varsity Tennis Team and Vice President of Marketing for the Trinity Entrepreneurship Club, she demonstrated leadership skills that would later distinguish her client work.

Her academic excellence led to selection for the highly competitive Tuck Business Bridge Program at Dartmouth College, where she completed intensive coursework in financial accounting, corporate finance, and business strategy, culminating in a team valuation analysis of JetBlue Airlines. Her outstanding performance resulted in her appointment as a Bridge Ambassador, a selective position where she represents the program publicly and advises prospective students.

Shyltsyna has also contributed to scholarly discourse through her publication “Application of Significance Levels for Decision Making in Financial Planning,” bridging theoretical knowledge with practical applications in financial services.

Building Trust in High-Stakes Cases

When Barnum Financial Group’s top producers need help with complex cases, they increasingly turn to Shyltsyna. She’s now working on joint cases that the firm typically assigns only to advisors with significant tenure and proven track records. Her colleagues have begun adopting her client intake templates and objection-handling techniques, with several advisors requesting to observe her client meetings and incorporate her presentation language into their own practices.

Many family businesses struggle with insurance structures that might have made sense years ago but have become tax inefficient as the company has grown. The classic trap: continuing with employer-provided group life insurance when individual policies could offer better protection and significant tax advantages.

This exact scenario landed on Shyltsyna’s desk when a high-earning family business needed to restructure its coverage. The traditional approach would involve standard conversion options and basic policy comparisons. Instead, Shyltsyna mapped out how the transition would affect three generations of family members, factoring in changing income levels, estate planning needs, and tax implications across different life stages.

The result: over $1.5 million in optimized coverage that actually reduced their long-term tax burden while providing better protection. More importantly, each family member understood exactly why their specific policy structure made sense for their situation, something that rarely happens in traditional group-to-individual conversions. As financial tools, from insurance to blockchain-powered assets, become more sophisticated, this kind of tailored, visualized guidance is increasingly essential.

Beyond Traditional Advisory Work

The industry has taken notice. NAIFA, the 134-year-old association representing the country’s top financial advisors, invited Shyltsyna to join as a member. At MassMutual Academy in Washington, D.C., she found herself among the youngest participants in advanced workshops.

“I was sitting in workshops designed for people who’d been in the business longer than I’ve been alive,” she recalls. “But when they started discussing client objections and cultural barriers, I realized my perspective wasn’t just welcome — it was needed. These were seasoned professionals asking me how to connect with clients who felt alienated by traditional approaches.”

Her influence extends beyond client work. Shyltsyna mentors young advisors entering the field and serves on Trinity College’s Entrepreneurship Center Alumni Board, where she was appointed shortly after graduation to help guide student programs, review pitch competitions, and advise on strategic direction for entrepreneurship education on campus. She’s also published research on financial planning decision-making frameworks and is building what she calls a “digital resource bank” for younger advisors while pursuing her CFP certification.

Fluent in English, Ukrainian, Russian, and conversational in Polish and Spanish, Shyltsyna brings linguistic diversity that enhances her ability to serve varied client populations. The financial industry is taking notice. Shyltsyna’s methods are spreading beyond Barnum Financial Group as other firms grapple with serving increasingly diverse client bases. Her next move involves pursuing CFP certification while building what she calls a “digital resource bank” for younger advisors.