How This Teacher Squashed $20K in Credit Card Debt and Hit Coast FI by 32

Mindy:
Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast, where we interview Yanely Espinal, MissBeHelpful, and talk about the mission to teach financial literacy to our youth. Hello, hello, hello. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my financial education proponent co-host, Scott Trench.

Scott:
Great be here, Mindy, love talking about financing personal finance.

Mindy:
I love talking about personal finance. Scott and I are here to make financial independence less scary, less just for somebody else, to introduce you to every money story because we truly believe financial freedom is attainable for everyone, no matter when or where you’re starting.

Scott:
That’s right. Whether you want to retire early and travel the world, go on to make big-time investments in assets like real estate, start your own business or help speed along the introduction of legislation that will teach financial literacy to high schoolers in your area, we’ll help you reach your financial goals and get money out of the way so you can launch yourself towards your dreams.

Mindy:
Scott, today is a fantastic episode. We have an absolute fireball of a guest, Yanely Espinal is so excited about financial literacy and so excited about bringing that to our high school students across America. This is her mission in life, and the whole reason it is her mission in life is because she grew up not knowing what she was doing with money. Does that sound familiar, Scott? Have we ever talked to anybody who didn’t know what they were doing about money? Only, I think everybody ever on the show, so this is absolutely necessary, and I’m so excited to bring her in today.

Scott:
Yeah, I think that there’s been a lot of people who didn’t know what they were doing with money and not a lot of people who are making a bigger dent in solving that problem than Yanley. So I think it’s a pleasure to hear from her today, and I think you’ll be very impressed with the work that she’s doing and the mission she’s on.

Mindy:
Absolutely. Before we bring her in, we have a new segment on our show called The Money Moment, where we share a money hack tip or trick to help you on your financial journey. Today’s Money Moment is, did you know that you can use apps like Ibotta to earn money back on what you already spend? It’s simple. You just scan your receipts from the app-approved stores like Walmart at Target, and you start earning money back. Yanely Espinal is a millennial financial educator who is known on the internet as MissBeHelpful. She started her career as a teacher and now serves as the director of educational outreach at Next Gen Personal Finance. She is currently on a mission to convince lawmakers across the country to make personal finance a high school graduation requirement. Honestly, I think that is about the best personal finance mission I have heard so far. Yanely, welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.

Yanely:
What an intro. Thank you so much. I’m glad that you’re excited about the mission because I feel like a lot of … it’s tricky, right? Talking to people about adding another requirement to school. They’re already so overloaded, but this one, man, this one class is so important.

Scott:
So I feel like there’s some that you can cut in there to make room for this.

Mindy:
Yeah. Cut a semester of gym to put in a semester of financial independence, financial education in general. I’m older than all of you, I learned how to fill out a check, not what it means to go overdrawn, not how to make a balanced budget. I learned how to balance my checkbook. I learned how to fill out the two section in the check and the number goes here, and then you write it out in English. Then you sign it here, and you can put a little memo here. That is essentially worthless now that I’m the only person on earth who still writes checks.

Yanely:
Oh, no. No, trust me, there’s a lot of people that write checks. Actually, when I work with teachers, they’ll tell me all the time, “It’s embarrassing, these students, they don’t know how to write a check. They don’t know what a check is.” I’m like, “No, that’s not embarrassing. That’s just a testament to how technology has changed and modernized the way we utilize our financial systems.” These students are mobile banking. They’re investing on apps. They’re using buy now, pay later. They’re not doing this writing check stuff physically, it’s all happening electronically. So it’s interesting because the teachers themselves, they learned like you very much like some of the older, traditional methods of handling money, and now they have to relearn and learn again all these new systems so that they can be confident to teach it to the students in their classes.

Scott:
Awesome. Well, we are going to spend a lot of time hopefully, talking about the work that you’re doing and the impact that you’re having and the success in a general sense that the country is having in many parts of the country and getting more financial literacy requirements. But before we do that, I would love to hear a little bit about who you are and what your journey with money is and how you got to where you are today.

Yanely:
Yes. Well, there really would be no me working in finance if there wasn’t me messing up with my finances. My entry point into personal finance was being a hot financial mess. I was probably, oh, maybe 14, 15 when I got my very first job in high school, and I was working as an intern at an architecture firm. I never saved a penny. I would get my paychecks, would use them up, wait for the next paycheck, use that one up. I never had a desire to save. I just wanted to spend always, and I grew up in a family of low-income immigrants. My parents are from Dominican Republic, so they never really talked to us about money. It was very much this taboo, unspoken, undiscussed topic because they didn’t know much themselves. My household was cash-only pretty much my entire life, and I talk about it in my book.
But the first time that my parents actually got bank accounts was because they were applying for Social Security benefits, and there no longer are physical checks mailed out to people. Paper checks are no longer mailed for Social Security benefits. You have to have a bank account to claim your benefits, and my parents, they were like, “What do you mean?” So I was like, “Don’t worry, we’re going to go online.” Mind you, this was all during COVID where banks were pretty much shut down. My parents were having a panic attack. I was like, “Don’t worry. We’re going to open up your online account, and then you’re going to be able to use that to claim the benefits.” So I held their hands through a lot of the things that they were dealing with, and thank goodness that I had that eye-opening experience with them being new Americans, immigrating here, not knowing English, not knowing the financial systems.
They had little education. They went to the second or third grade. So for me to just constantly be comparing myself to my parents, I recognized how lucky I am to have been able to go to college, get a master’s degree, get a job that pays five, six figures, be able to achieve these things that my parents never had access to. So for me, that was my wake-up call like, “Okay. I could keep being a financial hot mess and swiping my credit cards not knowing how much I owe or even what my total balance or what my interest rate is, or I could take serious action so that I don’t just continue to repeat negative cycles, especially the cycle of poverty.” Because for me, that was a big, big thing that I felt like I had this weight on my back that I needed to make a change so that the next generation of my family wouldn’t be repeating these negative cycles again.

Scott:
Could you dive one level deeper into the specifics of the trouble you found yourself in, I think, in college, and then how you dug yourself out of that and achieve financial independence as I understand it in a couple of years after that?

Yanely:
Yeah. So honestly, it was just peer pressure, but I got to college. But it was a combination of peer pressure, I would say, and some of the psychology coming out of poverty. So I grew up in a household where every time I wanted to get something, it was a no, “No, we don’t have money for that. No, we can’t afford that.” For groceries and food, it was food stamps. For paying for school supplies was pretty much the only thing where my dad would give us money if we could show him a list of school supplies that the teacher said we had to have. Otherwise, it was like, “Nope, we need every dollar to pay for everything that we need.” My parents have nine children, so for context, it’s not just me saying, “Dad, I need this.” It’s all eight of my brothers and sisters plus me coming up to that at multiple different points in time saying, “We need this. We need this much money. We need that. There’s a class trip. I have to pay these dues. I got the sports fees.”
He was overwhelmed, and he was the only working parent because my mom was taking care of all of us, because imagine paying for childcare for nine kids, it doesn’t even make sense. So basically, that environment, growing up in that type of household is what led me to have the type of mindset around a scarcity mindset like, “No, I can’t ever have the things that I want, name brand things that my friends at school have I can’t get.” So when I got to college and thankfully, I got a full scholarship to college, and that was when everything changed. It was a complete shift in my environment, the type of people that I was surrounded with, the way that they were speaking, the way … everything about my life changed dramatically one moment to the next. All of a sudden, I was expected to be like, “Yeah, I’m down to go bowling. Yeah, let’s go to the movies. I’ll come. Sure. Oh, it’s your birthday dinner tonight? I’ll chip in 50 bucks for a group dinner for your birthday.”
I just didn’t understand where all the money that my friends was spending was coming from, and I didn’t really think too much about it. I just went ahead and got a credit card, and my first credit card was $1,500. I pretty much maxed that out within a week behind my laptop my textbooks and a few things here or there. So that’s when I got a second credit card, then a third then a fourth. By the time I graduated college, I had over $20,000 of debt. Even though I was one of those lucky kids to get a full ride, I still ended up with pretty close to the average amount of student loan debt you would have. So I think people they’re shocked to hear that like, “I don’t understand. You got a full ride to college, what happened?” It was just me misusing the credit cards and feeling like I had to buy everything so I could fit in, especially being on a campus with a lot of wealthier peers around me.

Scott:
Where did you go to college, because with all these wealthy peers, what was the context of that?

Yanely:
I got a scholarship to Brown University. They have a special program there for low-income students that if your parents make under a certain threshold, then they make a commitment to ensure that you graduate without having to borrow any student loans. So I was part of that program, it’s the Sidney Frank Scholarship program.

Scott:
Awesome. The people who attend Ivy League institutions like Brown tend not to be from backgrounds-

Yanely:
Yes.

Scott:
… that involve generational poverty and have lots of spending money. So I can see how that would be a lot of pressure.

Yanely:
Yeah. I remember my group of the other students that were in that scholarship program with me, it was probably about 30 in my class year, and they would always host events and dinners and things to help us get together to network because they knew that it’s like finding a needle in a haystack. Walking around campus, trying to find another kid who grew up in poverty is very difficult because most of the students there, their families have a lot of wealth and have a lot of success and all kinds of accolades and the connections that have been able to get them in or maybe they’re legacy. There’s a different world than anything I ever knew. When I got there, I didn’t realize exactly how much my life was going to change. So yeah, you’re absolutely right about the environment not being something that I had ever been exposed to before.

Mindy:
So when you graduated, you still had similar debt load. Honestly, only $20,000 in credit card debt is pretty impressive with the type of spending that you were doing. Did you have a job to help cover some of your expenses? Did you get any stipend from the school to cover some expenses? What did your scholarship look like?

Yanely:
Yeah, so the scholarship was all tuition paid, room and board paid, and three meals a day on the meal plan paid. So all of that was something that I never got billed for one time, which is amazing. But then, of course, there were school fees, certain classes that had science lab fees or other types of supplies that you had to pay out-of-pocket, textbooks, things that were not included in the tuition but still cost a lot of money. So those things weren’t covered. Pretty much within the first week or two of college, I knew that I had to work because to your point, if I hadn’t worked it probably would’ve been even worse, the amount of debt that I would’ve had. So I started working at the pizzeria my freshman year.
By sophomore year, I was the supervisor of that pizzeria ’cause I was working so many hours. They were like, “You’re here all the time. You’d make a good supervisor.” I was pretty much there night and day. Then I picked up a bunch of other jobs too. I was a resident advisor in my dorm, so the resident counselor, some colleges call it. But I basically managed events and hosted things and made sure everybody was following the rules in the dorm, and that was a couple of hundred bucks every two weeks. So I tried to be strategic about the jobs that I did so that I wasn’t exchanging my time for money so much.
I was doing things that, “Okay, this is stipend-based, or this is a grant-based,” like Work-Study program allowed me to get that money and pay for the textbooks. So I would say most of the stuff that I was putting on credit cards was not technically related to school. It was really the social spending, the clothes, the shoes, the spring break trip to Cancun. I’m pretty sure I was kissing dolphins in Mexico one year because I was putting it all on my credit card. I’m trying to live similar to my friends and peers because I didn’t want to feel like I deserved any less than them. We’re all in the same class. We’re all doing the same hard work. We all deserve the same … felt so psychological to me, this thing that I felt like I deserved what they had, I deserved too.

Scott:
So what did you end up doing after graduation? How long did it take you to tackle this credit card debt?

Yanely:
Yeah, so I graduated in 2011. Right away, I became a classroom teacher. So I joined the program called Teach for America. When I was in school, I thought maybe I wanted to go back to New York and do some type of urban studies work. I thought I might wanted to do urban planning or some type of museum education ’cause I was very much into art. But I took a class my senior year in college, which was the History of African American Education in the United States. That class, but the professor too, just completely changed my entire perspective about my role to help within education and my role wasn’t to come back to New York and do museum education and arts education. As much as that’s fun, how could I be teaching kids to paint when they can’t read? So I felt this calling.
I just knew that I had to be in a classroom helping kids learn to read because the gap that exists between specifically Black and white students and especially students that are Black in poverty versus their white counterparts in wealthy areas is so wild. That gap is just so wide that the amount of work that it would take is you really have to be working with kids pretty much all day, every day so that they can catch up. So I learned about things like the 30-Million Word Gap, which is that by the time kids turn four years old, they have heard 30 million more words versus their peers who are in a lower income household that have heard 30 million words less than their wealthy peers at the age of four, four years old.
This kind of stuff, it just opened my mind and I was like, “Okay, I really have to teach.” So I joined Teach for America. I started teaching third and fourth grade, and I got my first big girl paycheck, which was like 1200, $1,300, and I felt rich. I had, again, never had that much money. I think that’s probably how much my dad made in maybe two months of work. So I felt like, “Oh, I have money now,” and so I just continued to spend. I continued to pretty much live spending mindlessly like I was doing in college throughout the first two years of teaching. Then in 2013 or 2014, I just started looking at my expenses and I’m like, “This doesn’t make sense. I think I just paid this credit card and now it’s says the balance is higher? But I made a payment, and I don’t know too much about credit cards, but I know basic subtraction. If I pay you, you subtract that from the balance.”
But the interest was accruing so aggressively that my balance was going up no matter how many payments I made. So that was the first thing that shocked me and struck me. That was in 2014 when I sat and pulled all of my credit card statements and actually started reading them and seeing all these interest fees. I was like, “Okay, what is going on? What is this interest thing? I do not like this.” Then I just started Googling. I started researching, and I read a book by Suze Orman called Women & Money that taught me to sit down and actually put together a debt payoff plan. Her book talked about a nine-month plan. I actually did it twice through, so I just committed to 18 months and paying over $1,100 a month every month was pretty much how I was able to get out of debt in 18 months.

Scott:
You were doing this while working as a teacher. Did you have any other sources of income during that period?

Yanely:
I had a couple other sources of income, but they were very sporadic, so babysitting, tutoring, the things that a teacher could do very easily because parents trusted me to take care of the kids. I could also help them with their homework, so double win. I could charge way more than the average babysitter ’cause I’m helping with homework, and so tutoring and babysitting combo worked for me. Then I was also taking on some onscreen work that I found through a lot of digital learning companies would need these onscreen instructors pretty much for virtual learning, which is wild to think that there was virtual learning going on back in 2013. But yeah, those were some of my earliest side gigs that pay well. I would show up, we’d get on a call, and they would give me a lesson plan.
I would just be like, “Hey, learners. Today, you’re going to be doing some basic addition. Are you ready?” They would just record my lesson because I’m very animated. It was like being in the classroom was such an easy way to practice that kind of stuff. So naturally, that led me about a year-and-a-half later to start posting videos on YouTube and talking about that I just finished paying off $20,000 of credit card debt, and I wanted everybody to know that if you’re in debt, you don’t have to continue to be in that much debt. Even though it might feel like it’s something that’s a forever problem, it doesn’t have to be. If I could learn these principles and strategies and skill sets that I could apply right away and take a year or two of my life to fix my money, then I wanted to share that with more people so they could do that too.

Mindy:
So that’s interesting. You’re a teacher making criminally-low wages and you still managed to pay off $20,000 in debt in two years. That’s really impressive.

Yanely:
I’ll tell you, I had a couple of advantages. One is, I was living at home for the first year in my mom and dad’s basement, and that is huge. A lot of people, they’ll move to a new city when they graduate college and they have no choice but to start paying rent. So I was very lucky that first year I didn’t have to pay rent. I was just helping with one of the bills at home. So I think my mom made me pay the electric bill or the cable bill, but that was my bill. Each one of my sisters and brothers had, we each owned one bill. My dad jokes about that to this day. He’s like, “Why you think I had nine kids? You think I just did that for no reason? Each kid takes a bill, I don’t have any bills to pay,” and he jokes about it. He jokes about-

Scott:
It sounds like a great early retirement plan.

Yanely:
Literally, he’s like, “If I collect $100 a month from each of my kids, I got $900 a month of income.” I’m like, “Real funny.” It’s funny ’cause he says it now and I’m like, “You did not think of that before you had the nine kids. You joke about that now afterwards.” But he did not plan strategically for his nine kids to be his retirement plan. But yeah, at that point, it was a lot of juggling things. So I knew that I had to take advantage of wherever something was easy. Like, “Let me just take that easy way.”
So living at home was easy because I didn’t have to pay rent. It was super close to the school that I was teaching at, maybe a 20-minute commute on the subway. Also, I didn’t have to spend too much money on food because my mom and dad were always cooking. So every time I would come home, rice and beans, they were cooking all the time. So I could pack lunch from leftover from dinner, and so it helped me in a lot of ways to save and cut costs in the areas where people spend the most money, which is housing, transportation, and food.

Mindy:
Okay. This is interesting because when you said, “Oh, I had a lot of advantages,” I’m like, “What advantages did you possibly have? You are a teacher,” and I’m going to say this every single time I bring this up, “You are a teacher making criminally-low wages and you have $20,000 in debt. What advantage do you have?” You have the advantage, and I hear a lot of people saying that same thing, “Well, I’m in debt. I guess I’ll just always be in debt. This is just my way. What am I going to do about it?”
You have to do something about it, or you’re right, that will always be your way, so you stayed at home. You could have gone out and gotten an apartment. You could have even house hacked and gotten an apartment with a friend, which is still more expensive than $0, and being in debt sucks. Living at home as an adult probably sucks, but getting out of debt doesn’t suck. Getting out of debt is fantastic. So I love that you decided not to fall into that trap that so many other people do of, “Well, now I have my first job. I have to leave the house.”

Yanely:
I was tempted, I’m not going to lie. I was tempted, especially because there were teachers in the school building that I worked in that were living together. They roomed together and would come to work together. So my second year teaching, that’s when I was like, “All right,” I gave in and I was like, “I’m a grown woman now, so I want my own apartment.” Then I ended up moving in with one of the teachers that taught in the same grade level in the department that I taught in. Her roommate was moving to China for a teaching abroad program, and she needed a roommate. So she mentioned it to me, and I was like, “Where do you live exactly?” It was a little closer to the school compared to my parents’ house, but not that much. So I started paying $800 a month when I didn’t need to.
I could have continued to live in the basement. I had my routine, I had a little private entrance, I had the food covered. There was so much about my situation that worked and that I call that advantages because I do think there are advantages. A lot of people don’t have that, right? They move to a new city, they don’t have their parents anymore. They don’t have their families. They have to buy food and pay for rent. Now I look back, I’m like, “I should have stayed another year or maybe two more years,” but I did eventually give in. I don’t want to give myself too much credit. I did eventually move in with one of my teacher friends, and that’s when ordering sushi and buying wine, and then I broke the budget again, eventually had to get a come to Jesus moment eventually to get my money back on track. I’m not completely innocent here.

Scott:
Many other people that are moving towards financial independence don’t come from a background of generational poverty, so I think we can allow you your advantages. Everybody has a few advantages when it comes to this journey, right? There’s no perfect situation, perfect in the sense that there’s literally no advantages whatsoever to take advantage of on the path to financial independence. Everyone’s got a few, and it’s up to you to play the hand your dealt with the best of your ability, which you did.

Yanely:
I love that point. I love that. Yes, I totally agree.

Scott:
Let’s talk about, though, you paid off this debt. You just told us, you alluded to it here, you move into a new place with a friend. Walk us through the journey to financial independence. How does that transpire over the next eight to 10 years?

Yanely:
So it was in what, 2013, 2014 when I finally started paying attention to my finances, and I’m actually tracking my spending and had a clear debt payoff plan in place where I knew the date I was going to be debt-free. So that was motivating. It definitely felt a little bit lonely. So I took to social media because I didn’t really know anybody in my family that was nerding out about money like me. They just weren’t. At a certain point, people were actually telling me to shut up because I was talking too much about, “Do you know that if you invest in a Roth IRA, you never have to pay taxes on the gains if you wait till you’re 59 1/2 to take out the money?” They’re like, “What are you talking about? We don’t care about that,” so-

Scott:
I can relate.

Yanely:
Right. When you find other money nerds, everybody’s like, “Yep, yep, yep, that’s me.” But I felt like I was compelled to talk about this stuff because I was going down this rabbit hole online and reading books and more books and more books. After I read Suze Orman, I read Thomas Stanley, The Millionaire Next Door. I read Your Money On Your Life. I read The Simple Path to Wealth. I read Automatic Millionaire. I read Five Years Before You Retire. I just became obsessed. I started reading every book about money that popped up in a Google search. It felt to me like there was this area of education, even though I have two master’s degrees, I’ve been to an Ivy League university, I was deprived of this whole area of education, which is financial education.
So now I started to feel a little bit angry, like, “Wait, what? I did so well in school. I excelled academically. If one of my classes was about money, I would’ve excelled at money. It’s not fair that they didn’t teach me.” It felt so wrong. So I just became obsessed with teaching myself. I read every book. I watched every video on YouTube. I listened to all the podcasts. I became obsessed with all of the blogs. Now, I feel it’s wild because I went to FinCon last year and spoke on the stage and got to meet all of these people who I’ve literally been fangirling over online for years, so I’ve come full circle. But at that time, it felt to me this was a totally different world of ambitious people on the internet that I would probably never meet, but how cool was it that I could tap into that community? Because my real community, my siblings, my family, my friends weren’t so into this financial stuff like I was.
So once I committed to paying off the debt, I realized I could just go right back to spending again and end up in debt again, or I could take what I’ve been learning from these books and apply it, which is to continue to pretend that I’m still in debt, continue to live a little more frugally than I might otherwise, and all the payments I was making to the credit cards, put them into my high-yield savings account. Once I hit $10,000, I was like, “Oh, that’s my money. What if I keep going and I have 20 or 30, $40,000?” Now, it felt like the thrill of the save. But at that point, I knew that I couldn’t just save the money, I had to start investing. So I began to learn about the stock market and index funds and ETFs and how does this all work?
Then once I did that, I was like, “Oh, there’s this whole community of FIRE,” which I thought FIRE was so, so intriguing and tempting for me to immediately jump in and be like, “I’m part of the FIRE community.” But with two parents who have zero assets, I knew it wasn’t going to be feasible for me because I’m not going the corporate route making multiple six figures. There were so many choices that I made to do mission-driven work, to live pretty minimally to help my family that I knew, “Okay, I’m probably not going to hit Fat FIRE. It’s not going to happen. But I could definitely do Coast FI if I get really serious, and I did. I hit Coast FI probably right before my 32nd birthday, which is amazing to know that even if I have to stop contributing to retirement because I need to maintain my parents or pay for whatever, I’ll still be able to retire with dignity even if I don’t add another penny. That feeling is like you just sleep like a baby at night. It’s so amazing.

Scott:
So we joked about it earlier, but did the relentless talking about money, investing, personal finance and all those related concepts, did that have any impact on friends and family after they asked you to stop talking about it a few times? But did this begin to spread around your community?

Yanely:
Yeah. So when I first posted on YouTube, it was really just my Facebook friends and my family that was watching the videos. Then I think I realized that something was shifting, and there were random strangers watching me on YouTube, because my little brother texted me one day and said, “Oh, my goodness. Look what my friend Brian just sent me.” It was a screenshot of his friend Brian recommending that he watch a video about credit cards that I posted on my YouTube channel. So my little brother was like, “That’s my sister,” and Brian was like, “Yeah, okay, bro.”
He’s like, “No, no, that is literally my sister.” So that’s when I realized, “Oh, wow, this is reaching people.” I think at that point, my family noticed, “Wow, she’s reaching people and what she’s posting is legit, and she knows her stuff. Maybe we should consider ourselves lucky to have her so close to us.” Then, of course, from there on, it was like a million text messages a day, “Where do I set up the 529? How do I do it?” “Do you think I should have, a Roth or a traditional?” “Can you help me pick investment funds in my 401k?” Then it was just endless.

Scott:
You mentioned earlier that you were Coast FI. Can you describe what that is? Can you also describe how the journey towards Coast FI and your switch from being a teacher to a full-time financial educator, do those have any interplay?

Yanely:
Good question. So Coast FI is a concept where your goal is going to be to reach a certain dollar amount in your investment account that when compounding at an average rate of the stock market, which historically has been about nine or 10% for the next few decades of your working career, will reach a million or more, or will we’ll reach however much you need. Most people nowadays want to say, “I think I need at least a million dollars to retire, because at a 4% rate, that’s $40,000 a year.” That’s at least a decent amount, but most people want and need more than that. But for me, I just started, “Let’s say if I can hit 1.5 million, can I hit a little more than that?” So for me, that was hitting $120,000 in my investment account by my 30th or 31st, 32nd birthday as close as possible.
Again, when you do the math, and you can pull up any compound interest calculator, I like the one on investor.gov, but you can use any one, and you just type in the starting amount. So let’s say 120,000, and you say an average rate of return at 9%, you do this for 25 to 30 years, you’ll see that that’s going to be your final amount, even if you never add another dollar. That’s the key of Coast FI, that you’re coasting to retirement because you don’t have to keep on working to add extra … to pull money from your income to put into this retirement account. So once I did that, I was like, “Okay,” I do continue to add. I’m not going to lie. I max out my retirement account every year. I max out my Roth IRA. I keep going because I’m privileged enough to now have multiple sources of income, and several of them are passive.
So it’s like, “Okay, well if I can, why not?” But in the event that I needed to stop adding whatever, $10,000 a year to my investment for my retirement, I could. I could and it wouldn’t mess up a thing, I would still be on track to coast. So that’s the thing that gave me peace of mind. Then in terms of the shift with my work, I was teaching through 2013. Then in 2014, I said, “Okay,” I wanted to combine the two things that I was really passionate about, which was obviously teaching and this new personal finance thing that I was discovering. So in 2013, 2014, I decided to pivot to business and start learning how to run an education business. So I was a director at an education center, which did math and reading tutoring after school. I was responsible for collecting monthly tuition from 400+ parents and managing the schedules for all these students coming in and out the door.
I think it was good because it was a nice transition from education over to learning about running a business. What is it like to market, to advertise, to talk to clients, to collect the tuition? There were all these components to that that I never dealt with in the classroom. So it was a nice compliment to the skillset that I developed teaching. Running a tutoring center, I think, was great for me following the classroom. It paid just a little bit more than teaching and pretty comparable. Honestly, it wasn’t like I was making a whole bunch of money, but the experience was invaluable because I realized that as a teacher, I knew how to market and how to sell. I had to sell kids on fractions. Try to get an eight-year-old to get excited about learning how to do a fraction, so I knew that I had skills.
I was like, “I’m creative. I’m animated. I can come up with something and sell something. I can put these skills together.” Communication was really good. Presenting in front of a large group of kids, adults, parents, teens, anybody, put me in front of 100, 200, 1000 people, I’m good. I’m not nervous. I love that. I realized that that’s pretty rare, so I wanted to capitalize on that. So that’s when I decided to shift. I was like, “Okay, if I keep teaching, and I keep working in education, pretty much you’re capped at a certain amount of money because you can only really move up but so much.” If you’re a teacher, you can become a teacher leader. You can become an administrator. You can even become the superintendent. But at a certain point in time, you’re limited into how much you could make.
So I realized, “Okay, let me pivot outside of education and start thinking about a business. What would my business be?” Luckily, YouTube just started to take off pretty naturally and organically. So I just pivoted out of YouTube and speaking on camera to speaking in person and being able to collect pretty high speaking fees to motivate teenagers at youth conferences, to speak to women at women’s conferences, to speak at FinCon, to speak at all of these different places where it’s a combination of my expertise in the work that I’m doing for financial education, but also my personal story, which I think like you all mentioned is it’s can be unique a lot of times in the financial space.

Mindy:
So Yanely, let’s change course a little bit here. Generational wealth tends to stay with families just like generational poverty tends to stay with families. We want to break this cycle, and you are working to break this cycle. What are some of the things that you’re doing with regards to policy and education?

Yanely:
I love this question. So in 2018, I found out about an organization, well, actually I got an email from someone at an organization called ngpf.org, which stands for Next Gen Personal Finance. It’s a 501(c)(3). It’s a nonprofit that focuses on offering free curriculum so that teachers can actually teach personal finance without having to come out of pocket to buy the materials, the lessons, the materials that they need to teach these lessons. But that organization realized pretty soon that you can put together the bomb curriculum, the best, the most amazing resources ever, lesson plans, assessments, homework, everything that a teacher needs. But if the teacher themselves have never learned personal finance, it doesn’t matter how stellar the curriculum is, they don’t have the competence and the confidence. So that organization knew, “Okay, we have to couple the curriculum with teacher training.”
So in 2018, I got an email that was like, “Hey, we offer these teacher training modules, and one of them is like this podcast format where we invite speakers to come and inspire the teachers, and we think your story would be great. You have YouTube content. You’re doing all this work. You used to be a teacher.” So I was like, “Oh, sure.” I joined the podcast and met with the co-founder of the organization, Tim Ranzetta, and he’s from New Jersey. He had moved all the way out to California because he went to Stanford for business school and then had a lot of success as an entrepreneur and started to think about, “Okay, well, what did he want to do with this success?” For him, the number one mission he wanted to achieve was getting every American access to financial education. So he created Next Gen Personal Finance, and when he met me on the podcast interview, he didn’t stop emailing me.
He just kept on emailing me after that call. He was like, “I just can’t stop thinking about this podcast conversation. I can’t stop thinking about your story. We got to work together more. I got to figure out ways to loop you into this work.” So we started with a multi-city tour where I was just going to different schools and talking about “What is it like to be a YouTuber?” ‘Cause that’s a great hook for high school kids. They all want to be YouTubers and TikTokers. So I go, “What is it like to be a YouTuber? How much money do you make? What is your day-to-day like?” Then, “Okay, well, what about money? Let’s talk about the money part. Even if you make all the money, if you don’t know how to manage it, you’ll lose it all.” So we started then having real talk about money. Then at the end, the teachers would ask me about the resources they could use to teach.
I would say, “Oh, great. NGPF has a bunch, and it’s all free.” This is mind-blowing for teachers that it’s all free, and it always will be. So they would leave, they would sign up and start using the curriculum. At that time, in 2018, there were about 5,000 teachers total that were using NGPF. Today in 2023, there’s over 70,000 teachers. So talk about what is the business term, hockey stick or Nike check when the growth is exponential like that? So I realized, “Wow, this is something. This is really impactful,” and have loved working with NGPF. My role there as director of educational outreach in 2018 started very formally with doing teacher training and creating curriculum videos for current events that they could use in the classroom, but has since shifted a little bit, and it’s a little bit more of a mix. So we have an affiliated organization called Mission 2030 Fund, and that organizational mission is that by the year 2030, all 50 states will have guaranteed access to a full semester of personal finance.

Scott:
You mentioned earlier that this is effective when it’s done the right way. Do you have any statistics that articulate what effective means and what the positive outcomes associated with this learning are?

Yanely:
Absolutely. So this is one of actually the key parts of my job. When I go talk to lawmakers, I bring documents. I’m like, “Okay, we have evidence-backed research. We have policy papers, we have studies.” Depending on what it is that you’re looking specifically to show that improves, there are so many studies that point to different aspects. So the first thing is credit behaviors. When you actually teach or when you require financial education, students’ credit behaviors improve tremendously. This is especially true for students like me who are first-generation in their family to go to college. The key differentiator is that they take on not necessarily less debt, but they take on a lower interest rate debt. So what they do is that they are more strategic about how they borrow money. Before, when you look at data sets of students that don’t take financial education classes, they don’t exhaust their federal student loan borrowing options first because they don’t know the difference between government money and private lenders.
So they just borrow whoever’s lending them money for college, they just borrow. So they’re taking really high interest rate student loans because they don’t know the difference between subsidized, unsubsidized, government loans versus private student loans. So when they take a class like this and they learn about interest rates and understanding how to compare loans, even if they have a comparable amount of debt, the interest rate on that debt is significantly lower for students who are choosing to go to college. Then even for students who choose an alternative pathway who don’t go to college, their credit behaviors improve because they have higher credit scores, higher savings rates, and they just have better credit usage in general. So they’re more likely to pay off their credit card bills and not carry a balance from one month to the next.
All of this research that was conducted, most of it comes from Dr. Carly Urban and Annamaria Lusardi, who are both phenomenal professors. Annamaria Lusardi is more of an economist, internationally known. Dr. Carly Urban is known for her work at the University of Montana, specifically looking at United States-based research around financial education. But there’s so many studies now, which is wild, because when I first started going into the space, the thing that everybody was saying was, “It’s not effective. It doesn’t work.” Because there was a study conducted prior to 2010 that did show that education doesn’t really make much of a difference on their test scores. Even if they did do a little better on their test scores, their behaviors wouldn’t change. Of course, because the way the course was taught wasn’t sticking.
They weren’t actually getting hands-on experience. So when you look at the research now, what is most effective is three things. First of all is when it’s taught at a just-in-time phase in their life, which means not when they’re 14 years old, not even when they’re 15 years old, because you can’t learn about car insurance if you can’t get a driver’s license or buy a car. You have to be 16 to even get a driver’s license, so why are you learning about car insurance when you’re 14? It doesn’t make sense. So 16, 17, 18, so we’re looking specifically at junior and senior year of high school is what is most effective based on the data because it’s just in time for them to apply it. “Oh, I learned about FAFSA in school today, and guess what I have to do tomorrow? Fill out my FAFSA and submit it.”
“Oh, yesterday I learned about car insurance. Next weekend, my dad and I are going to go buy a car. I’m going to have to buy some car insurance,” making sure the students are getting it right when they’re about to apply it so that they don’t lose it to make sure that it’s actually sticky and relevant. So that’s junior and senior year. The second thing is making sure that the course is taught with 21st century relevant materials. If you’re teaching students how to balance a checkbook, what are you doing? These students are not doing that. We need to be teaching them about FinTech apps, mobile banking, buy now, pay later services. They need to understand all of these things that are happening in the current economy and with their current financial situations, not how we all grew up thinking that money works. It’s just not like that anymore.
Then the last thing is the teachers who are teaching it have to be highly qualified. No, you cannot just pull the football coach off the field and say, “Coach, you free from 12:00 to 1:00 on Thursdays and Fridays? Okay, you’re going to be teaching this financial literacy unit over here with these kids on Thursdays and Fridays ’cause you’re the only one in the building free at that time.” Look, I understand firsthand working in a school is extremely difficult. Scheduling was the biggest pain in my backside for two years trying to schedule all the kids and all the classes they needed to get, I get it. But we’re doing a disservice to students when we say, “Any breathing human can just teach this stuff.” No, they have to be qualified. So the legislation that proves to be effective specifically mentions the criteria and licensures required, whether that’s economics, mathematics, social sciences. But it’s very clear that not just anybody can teach this.

Scott:
When you go in to meet with a lawmaker, do you just go through that spiel and they’re like, “Yeah, you’re right. We’re going to do it now?” How does that process work?

Mindy:
How do they say no to that?

Yanely:
I wish it worked that were they’re like, “Yeah, let’s do it.” So it depends. I’ve heard from some lawmakers immediately they’re like, “I’m with you 100%. Everything you said, yes. How can we get this done? What do we need? What do you need from me?” But then most of the time it’s, “Well, I hear you, and yes, I understand every point, and I personally agree with you. However, in our state, which is a local-control state,” it’s so funny because every single state says, “We are the local-control state.” They’re all local-control states, you’re not special because you’re local-control states. It’s interesting how I literally, every single governor, treasurer, every single representative, senator, they all say, “Well, we are a local-control state.” I’ll say, “Yes, okay.” So because they’re very concerned with local-control, which basically means that you give the autonomy and the decision-making power to the schools, to the teachers, to the principals, not to the state leaders to top-down tell the schools what they need to teach, but you give the choice to the schools and to the districts.
That is how the legislation actually ends up working out. So what I do is I’ll sit there and explain to them, “Hey, if I just run off the top of my head the past couple of states that have passed legislation, Indiana, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, Ohio and Rhode Island, if we look at those specific states, the legislation is very clear about who is in charge of deciding what curriculum is used and what topics get taught. The law very rarely says exactly what needs to be taught. If it does, for instance, like in the state of Florida where I now live, it does say very specifically, these topics must be taught. But it says, but not limited to these topics, which means this is the starting point for the course. Teachers can add on, districts can add on, but at minimum, they need to learn banking, budgeting, investment for retirement. These very core topics are in the law, but that’s not saying, ‘We’re going to pigeonhole you to teach exactly what we tell you to do, it’s just giving them a baseline.'”
So I think there’s this fear among lawmakers that they’re going to disappoint a lot of the key stakeholders that have supported them and their political campaigns, and even just the fact that they have good relationships with a lot of these folks, and it’s tough to get every single one of the key stakeholders involved on the same page; the Department of Education, the teachers union, the teachers themselves, parents, students, the lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, the general public. There’s so many, the bankers league, the credit union folks, everybody wants to be involved because everyone cares about this as they should. But sometimes it gets to the point where you got the too many chefs in the kitchen problem. So that’s where I see the most difficulty getting education legislation passed is when there’s a lot of different key stakeholders and parties involved with slightly different opinions about, “How this looks and which credits, and is it going to be an AP? But we don’t have limited capacity and we have a sub shortage, and we …” there’s so many things. If you’re trying to solve for everything at once, it’s really difficult.

Mindy:
Okay, that’s a good point. There are a lot of things that we maybe don’t consider when we’re pushing for financial education. Is there anything that we can do or that our listeners can do to help promote financial literacy laws in their local areas? Because I am 100% on board with you.

Yanely:
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay. Taking action is my favorite thing to tell people about because hello, it’s what gets things done. So actually on the NGPF website, there’s a bill tracker. It’s the only one of its kind where you can actually just Google Bill Tracker, Financial Education Bill Tracker. It’ll be the first thing that pops up because nobody else is tracking financial education bills except for NGPF, because we really are committed to this Mission of 2030. So 2023 Financial Education Bill Tracker will get updated every year following. What it does is it essentially just puts together a very quick map of where we are right now in the country. So as of May 2023, there are 94 active bills that have been introduced in 32 different states, 38 bills, which are active in 24 states. So not just were introduced and fell off at some point ’cause many bills die a silent, sad death. But these 38 bills that are still active in 24 states means that they still have hope.
They’re still in the running, in the process of potentially being signed into law. Then nine bills were already signed into law in eight different states. I was directly involved in so many of those, which is, ah, my little hair is standing on end, how much progress that we have made, because in 2018 when I joined the organization, there were only five states. 2019, there were eight states, so we’re talking about very slow incremental growth. Today there are 20 states, but the bills that are being introduced are the highest number historically that we have ever seen, which means there’s a national movement. So when people say, “Oh, why they don’t teach about financial literacy in school?” Many schools are teaching about financial literacy and this is spreading. But we just need to do a little bit more of what you’re describing now, which is, what can we do to take action and do some grassroots work?
So type up Bill Tracker NGPF or Financial Education Bill Tracker, look at your state. Look to see is there an active bill in your state? If there is an active bill, it’s going to be bright green. You’re going to see immediately who the sponsors are. The word sponsor’s just a fancy word for the lawmakers who actually put their name on this bill. They wrote the bill, they introduced the bill. They’re the ones who own this bill and are fighting for this. They speak on behalf of this bill every time. There are hearings or meetings. So you want to find out who the sponsors are and you want to email them, tweet at them, tag them on every social media. Wherever they are, reach out to them, send letters via email. Do what you got to do, but make sure they know who you are, what your zip code is, because they care the most, they care about all of us, but they care the most about their constituents who are in their specific constituency, so the zip codes where they serve.
So if you live in their specific zips, you can tell them, “Hey, this is where I live. I’m in your constituency. I really care about this issue. I want to see you push this. I want the education committee to vote yes.” That’s the key thing, is the education committee, every member of the education committee has to vote yes, or the majority has to vote yes in order for bills to move on to the next step. So they might say, “Great, I’m going to forward your letter to all the members of the Senate Education Committee or of the House Education Committee. That way, everybody in those committees will see, “Oh, there’s 100 emails from random people in this zip code? This isn’t such a little off-the-radar issue anymore. This matters to people and this is a hot topic,” and then they cannot ignore it.

Scott:
This is a nice email that you send to the person who’s sponsoring the bill. This is someone who’s fighting for the bill, just to enforce that point.

Yanely:
I love that, Scott. First of all, because I had to learn that when you are talking to lawmakers, and I know this can seem a little controversial, but I’m going to say it because it’s true. When you’re addressing a lawmaker, first of all, this person ran for office, that is not an easy feat. They are an accomplished person. You want to speak to them with the utmost respect. Also, they’re doing public service. This is not easy work. They’re taking on a really difficult task of trying to make the decisions about what to prioritize for all of us, so respect, first of all, and gratitude, second of all. I always come to them with, first of all, if they’re representative, Representative. If they are senator, Senator, I always say they’re full …
If they’re chairperson, Chairperson this. I never just say their name like, “Hey, Scott.” Like, no. “Hey, Chairperson Scott.” “Hey, Chair member Scott.” “Hey, Senator Scott.” Full name, like everything, super polite, respectful. Then the second thing is, “Thank you so much for the work that you’re doing and especially the fact that you’ve sponsored this bill shows that how much it matters. That means so much to me as somebody who cares about financial education,” as a parent of high school students or middle school students, as a teacher, as a community member who volunteers at the local school, whatever your connection is to why you care, make sure you share it and thank them because they’re the one championing this.
If they don’t introduce this bill, it’s just not even going to come up. So we need them, and we need to really thank them, honor them, respect them. Then you can put all the stuff in the email why you care and why this matters. I’ve even seen people put petitions together and literally go throughout the community to their small businesses, to the parents. “I got 100 signatures from all the parents and the two local high schools, and I attached that petition to this email just to show you how much support there is for this issue in this zip code.” That stuff kind of is really what moves the needle with lawmakers.

Scott:
That’s awesome. So again, just to repeat for folks that were listening here, ngpf.org/billtracker. Go in there, look to see if there’s any bills in the state that are in there and reach out. Thank the chairperson or the person that’s sponsoring the bill. Ask them to send it to the committee, and make it clear how much this issue means to you. Very easy, take you a few minutes, go for it. If your state is not sponsoring a bill just yet, give it another year, and they’ll be sponsoring one next year at the rate that she’s going at.

Yanely:
Honestly, you could even reach out to the education committee members anyway. This is all public information. You can just Google, for example, me, I live in Florida. If our bill hadn’t just passed in 2021, I could go on and say, “Florida members of the Senate Education Committee, Florida members of the House Education Committee.” Then I would look at all their names, look at their email address, copy and paste them BCC into one massive email and say, “All of you are on the education committee on both sides of the aisle. You are the ones who get to decide where education goes in our future, financial education is the number one most important topic for our students to learn.
We have the highest student loan debt rates. We have buy now, pay later services, cryptocurrency, trading apps, [inaudible 00:53:26] all kinds of stuff tempting our students. More states than ever are making sports betting legal now, and yet we’re not teaching students about the dangers of being addiction to gambling. Financial education needs to happen today more than ever. So here’s a call to action. When is financial education going to come up?” Then even if there’s no bill that’s active, you’re still getting your point heard. So it doesn’t hurt to send that email.

Scott:
This is fantastic. I hope everyone goes and takes the advice you. Where can people find out more about you, support any of the work that you’re doing and/or support your future senate or presidential run coming in 2030 after you’ve completed this project?

Yanely:
That’s the thing. When you work so close to politics, you see the ins and outs of just how much work … I got to admit, I was always very cynical about politics. Coming up in New York City, I just had that perspective that, “Please, they don’t really do anything. They don’t care. They’re just looking for power and attention.” But the reality is there’s so many trying to make a difference. Now that I’ve worked with so many of them, I have this sense of gratitude that there really are people out here fighting the good fight. So I personally know that my calling is with financial education, and so I’m not going to go and take on the political position. However, I have written a book and I do a lot of speaking, so if you want to find out more about my work, support me or hire me to come speak or to offer workshops, all of that is available, mindyourmoneybook.com, or you can visit my personal site, missbehelpful.com.

Scott:
Awesome. Where can people follow you on social media?

Yanely:
All @missbehelpful, every social media platform. So it’s M-I-S-S B-E Helpful.

Scott:
Thank you so much for all the work you’re doing for students around the country, for sharing your money story with us and for your incredible energy and enthusiasm for the topic of personal finance and money. We really appreciate it, Yanely, thank you so much.

Yanely:
Thank you for having me. This was great.

Mindy:
Thank you, Yanely, this was a lovely chat and we will talk to you soon.

Yanely:
Sounds good.

Mindy:
Holy cats, Scott, I absolutely love Yanely, and her mission is close to my heart. What a great show. What a great story, what a fantastic mission she has dedicated herself to. I’m so excited for her success. Listening to her talk, she’s going to succeed all 50, when was her goal? I bet she makes it before her goal.

Scott:
Yeah, she’s going to crush this. It was 2030 I think was the goal. The organization as a reminder is Next Gen Personal Finance, ngf.org. So go check that out and yeah, she’s going to crush it by then. Then she’ll have to look up and be like, “How do I solve the next major world problem?” At that point? So I’m really excited to watch her career transpire. I’ll be really interested to see which states are the stubborn ones that are the last to adopt something like this and which ones come along. There are a few that, I think, maybe potentially we’ll see in the next few weeks after recording this. Wow, what a difference an individual can make and an organization like NGPF can make.

Mindy:
Yes, absolutely. So to reiterate, if you have a state that does not have a whole semester financial education requirement for high school students, do your part. Reach out to your representatives and ask them to create this bill, to further this bill, to vote for this bill. Ask them to help educate our youth in financial with their financial literacy, there is nothing more important than this.

Scott:
Absolutely. I think it’s right. I think it’s one of the biggest opportunities in education today. I think there’s actually been a lot of progress in the last 10 years, which may surprise a lot of folks that graduated when I did back in 2009 or before, where that was just not a thing at all for my high school education. But I think that there actually is progress in a lot of states. There’s a lot of room to run and a lot more improvement to make. But thanks to people like Yanely, lots of progress is occurring. So very exciting, very wonderful to see. You have a lot of optimism, I think, for the next generations here in America.

Mindy:
I am so excited. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?

Scott:
Let’s do it.

Mindy:
That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money podcast. He is Scott Trench, and I am Mindy Jensen saying in an hour, sunflower.

Scott:
If you enjoyed today’s episode, please give us a five-star review on Spotify or Apple. If you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.

Mindy:
BiggerPockets Money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Caitlin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Weintroub. Lastly, a big thank you to the BiggerPockets team for making this show possible.