Mindy: Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money podcast where we interview Yanelli Espinal, Miss B helpful, 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 to 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 fire ball of a guest. Yanelli 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. Um, does that sound familiar, Scott? Did have we ever talked to anybody who didn’t know what they were doing about money? Um, 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 I think that there’s a lot of people who didn’t know what they’re doing with money and not a lot of people who are making a bigger dent in solving that problem than Yanelli. 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.
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Mindy: Yanelli Espinal is a millennial financial educator who is known on the internet as Miss B Helpful. 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 law makers across the country to make personal finance a high school graduation requirement. And honestly, I think that is about the best personal finance mission I have heard so far. Yanelli, welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. I’m so excited to talk to you today.
Guest: What an intro. Thank you so much. I’m I’m glad that you’re excited about the mission because I feel like a lot of it’s 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: I also feel like there’s something you can cut, you know, in there. make for this.
Mindy: Yeah, cut a semester of gym to put in a semester of financial independence, financial education in general. I mean, what did I learn in 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 and 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.
Guest: Oh no. No, there’s just a lot of people that write checks. Actually when I work with teachers they tell me all the time like it’s embarrassing these students, they don’t know how to write a check, they don’t know what a check is and 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 system. We these students are mobile banking, they’re investing on apps, they’re using by now pay later. They’re not doing this writing check stuff is physically, right? Like it’s all happening electronically. And so it’s kind of 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 like all these new systems so that they can be confident to teach it to the the students in their classes.
Scott: Awesome. Well, we are going to spend a lot of time, um hopefully talking about the work that you’re doing and the impact that you’re having and and the success in a general sense that the country is having in many parts of the country and getting uh 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 to the the where you are today.
Guest: Yes. Well, I mean it really would be no me working in finance if there wasn’t me messing up with my finances. I mean 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. Like I would get my paychecks, would use them up, wait for the next paycheck, use that one up. I just I I never had you know, a the 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 kind of taboo, unspoken, undisscussed topic because they didn’t know much themselves and my household was cash only pretty much my entire life. Um and I talk about it in my book but like the first time that my parents actually got bank accounts was because they were they were applying for social security benefits and there are 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? And so I was like, don’t worry, we’re going to go online and maybe this was like all during COVID where banks were pretty much like 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 sort of held their hands through a lot of the things that they were dealing with and you know, thank goodness that I had that eye opening experience with them being, you know, new Americans, immigrating here, not knowing English, not knowing the financial systems. They had no education, I mean 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, you know, five, six figures, be able to achieve these things that my parents never had access to. And so for me that was like my wake up call. It’s like, okay, I can keep being a financial hot mess and swiping my credit cards not knowing how much I owe or even like what my total balance or what my interest rate is, or I could, you know, take serious action so that I don’t just continue to repeat negative cycles especially the cycle of poverty because, you know, for me that was a big, big thing that I felt like I had it like 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: So could you dive one level deeper into the specifics of the trouble you found yourself in, I think in college, uh and then how you kind of dug yourself out of that and achieved financial independence as I understand it in a couple years after that?
Guest: Yeah, so honestly, um it was kind of just peer pressure, but I got to college and well it was a combination of peer pressure I would say and like some of the psychology coming, you know, out of uh poverty, right? 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. Um for groceries and food, it was food stamps and for paying for school supplies was pretty much the only thing where my dad would give us money if we 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, you know, pay for everything that we need. My parents have nine children. So for context, you know, it’s not just me saying, Dad, I need this. It’s all eight of my brothers and sisters plus me coming up to dad 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 this sports fee. like, if he was overwhelmed and he was the only working parent because my mom was taking care of all of us because imagine paying for child care for nine kids. It’s it doesn’t even make sense. And so basically that environment growing up in that that type of household is what led me to have the type of mindset around like 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, um and thankfully, you know, I got a full scholarship to college and that was when like everything kind of changed. Like it was a complete shift in my environment, the type of people that I was surrounded with, the way that they were speaking, everything about my life changed dramatically one moment to the next. And 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 group dinner for your birthday. Where was all this money coming? I just didn’t understand like where all the money that my friends were 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 buying my laptop, my laptop, my textbooks and a few things here and there. So that’s when I got a second credit card, then a third, then a fourth and 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 get sh they’re shocked to hear that. Like I don’t understand, you got a full ride to college like what happened? and 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, uh, you know, with a lot of wealthier peers around me.
Scott: And and where did you go to college? Because you with with all these wealthy peers? Like what was the context of that?
Guest: So I would I got a scholarship to Brown University. They have a a special program there for low-income students that if your parents make under certain threshold, then they make a commitment to ensure that you graduate without having to borrow any student loans. And so I was part of that program. It’s called the Sydney Frank scholarship program.
Scott: Awesome. And and the people who attend Ivy League institutions like Brown tend not to be from backgrounds that involve generational poverty and have lots of spending money. So I can see how that would be a lot of a lot of pressure.
Guest: Yeah, and 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 like host events and dinners and things to help us get together to like network because they knew that it’s like finding a needle on a hay stack walking around campus trying to find another kid who grew up in poverty is very difficult because most of the students there are their families are, you know, have a lot of wealth and have a lot of success and, you know, all kinds of accolades and the connections that have been able to get them in or maybe they’re legacy. I mean, there’s just it’s a different world than anything I have 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. I mean, 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 sort of stipen from the school to to cover some expenses? What did your scholarship look like?
Guest: Yeah, so the scholarship was um 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 build for one time, which is amazing. But then of course, there were like school fee like certain classes that had science lab fees or other types of supplies that you have to, you know, pay out of pocket, textbooks, things that were not included in the tuition but still, you know, cost a lot of money. So those things weren’t covered. And pretty much within the first week or two of of college, I knew that I had to work because to your point like if I hadn’t worked, it would probably would have been even worse the amount of debt that I would have had. So I started working at the pizzeria my freshman year, by sophomore year, I was the supervisor of that pizzeria because 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 and then I picked up a bunch of other jobs too. Um I was a resident advisor in my dorm. so, you know, the resident counselor, some colleges call it, but I basically managed events and hosted things and made sure everybody was like following the rules in the dorm and that was a couple hundred bucks every every two weeks. So I I kind of 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 like, okay, like this is stipen based or this is like a grant based, like work study program allowed me to kind of get that money and pay for the textbooks. And 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, you know, spring break trip to Cancun. I’m pretty sure I was like kissing dolphins in Mexico one year because I was putting it all on my credit card. like I’m trying to live, you know, I’m trying to live similar to my friends and peers because I didn’t want to feel like I deserve any less than them. We’re all in the same class. We’re all doing the same hard work. We all deserve the same, you know, it felt so psychological to me this thing that I felt like I deserved what they, you know, what they had, I deserved too.
Scott: And what did you end up doing um after graduation and how long did it take you to to tackle this credit card debt?
Guest: Yeah, so I graduated in 2011, right away I became a classroom teacher. So I joined a program called Teach for America and I studied when I was in school, I kind of thought maybe I want to go back to New York and do some type of um urban studies work. I thought I might wanted to do like urban planning or some type of museum education because I was very much into art. But I took a class my senior year in college which was um the history of African-American education in the United States. And that professor, that class but the professor too just completely changed my entire perspective about my role to, you know, uh help within education. And my role wasn’t to come back to New York and do museum education or arts education as much as that’s fun. How could I be teaching kids to paint when they can’t read? Like, so I felt this calling, like I just knew that I had to be in a classroom helping kids to read because this the gap that exists between specifically black and white students, um and especially students that are black in poverty versus their white counterparts in wealthy areas is so wild. I mean, that that gap is just so wide that the amount of work that it would take is like you really have to be working with kids pretty much all day every day so that they can catch up. Um so I learned about things like, you know, the 30 million word gap which is that by the time kids turned four years old, they have heard for they have heard 30 million words when they’re in an affluent household versus their uh 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. Like 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 $1,200, $1,300. and you know, I mean I thought I felt rich. Like 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 just, I felt like, oh, I have I have money now. And so I just um 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. And then in 2013 or 2014, um I just started looking at my expenses and like, you know, this doesn’t make sense. I think I just paid this credit card and now it says the balance is higher, but I made a payment. and I I’m not I don’t know too much about credit cards but I know basic subtraction. if I pay you, you subtract that from the balance, right? 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 kind of shocked me and struck me and that was in 2014 when I kind of sat and pulled all of my credit card statements and I actually started reading them and seeing all these interest fees and I was like, okay, what is going on? What is this interest thing? Like I do not like this. Um, and then I just started googling, I started researching and I read a book uh by Suzie Orman called Women and money that taught me to sit down and actually put together a debt payoff plan. And her book talked about a nine month plan. Um 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: And you were doing this while working as a teacher. Did you have any other sources of income during that period?
Guest: I had a couple other sources of income but they were very sporadic. So babysitting, tutoring, you know, the things that like a teacher could do very easily because parents trusted me to take care of their kids, I could also help them with their homework like double win. I could I could charge way more than the average babysitter because I’m helping with homework and so um I tutoring and babysitting combo worked for me and then um I was also taking on some like on screen work that I found through a lot of like digital learning companies would need these like 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 like side gigs that paid well. I would just I would show up, we would get on a call and they would give me a lesson plan and I would just be like, hey learners, today you’re going to be doing some basic addition. Are you ready? And they would just record my lesson cuz I’m very animated. It was like being in the classroom was such an easy way to practice that kind of stuff. And 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, you know, 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. and if I could learn these principles and these strategies and skills that, you know, I could apply right away and take a few, you know, 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: 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 making criminally low wages and you have $20,000 in 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 a 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 and 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.
Guest: I mean, I was tempted. I’m not gonna lie, I was tempted especially because there were teachers in the school building that I worked in that were like living together and like they they room together and would like 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 and 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? And it was a little closer to the school compared to my parents’s house but not that much. And so I started paying like $800 a month when I didn’t need to. I could have continued to live in the base. I had my routine, I had a little private entrance, I had the food covered, I like there was so much about my situation that worked and that’s why I call that advantages because I do think there are advantages. A lot of people don’t have that, right? They moved to a new city, they don’t have their parents anymore. They don’t have their family, right? They have to buy food and pay for rent. So, I now I look back and I’m like, I should have stayed another year or maybe two more years, but I did eventually give him. I don’t want to give myself too much credit. I did eventually move in with one of my uh teacher friends and and then that’s when ordering sushi and buying wine and then the and then I broke the budget again, right? Eventually had to kind of get a come to Jesus moment to eventually to kind of get my money back on track, but yeah, I’m not completely uh innocent here.
Scott: And many other people don’t that are moving towards financial independence don’t come from a background of generational poverty. Um, you know, that so I I think we can allow you your advantages. Everybody has a few advantages when it comes to this this journey, right? There’s no perfect uh situation perfect in the sense that there’s literally no advantages whatsoever to take advantage of on the path of financial independence. Everyone’s got a few and it’s up to you to play your hand your dealt with the best of your ability which you did.
Guest: I love that point. I love that. Yes, totally agree.
Scott: Let’s talk about the the you you paid off this debt. You just told us, you alluded to it here. you’re, uh, getting a new, um, you you’ve moved into a new place with a friend. Walk us through the journey to financial independence. How does that transpire over the next 8 to 10 years?
Guest: So, it was in, what, 2013 or 2014 when I finally kind of started paying attention to my finances and I actually tracking my spending and had a clear debt payoff plan in place that I knew the day I was going to be debt free, right? 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 like nerding out about money, like me, like they just weren’t, you know, and at a certain point people were actually telling me to shut up because I was talking too much about like, do you know that if you invest in a Roth IRA, you never have to pay taxes on the gains if you wait to your 59 and a half take out the money, they’re like, what are you talking about? We don’t care about that. So I can relate. When you find other money nerds, everybody’s like, yep, yep, yep, that’s me, but I just, I felt like I was compelled to talk about this stuff because I was, you know, going down this rabbit hole online and reading books and more books and more books. You know, after I read Susie Orman, I read um Thomas Stanley, the millionaire next door, read your money or your life, read the simple path to well, I read automatic millionaire, I read five years before you retire. I mean I just became obsessed. I started reading every book about money that popped up in a Google search. and it just, it felt to me like there was this area of education, even though I I have two master’s degrees. I went to an Ivy League University. I 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 excel academically. If one of my classes was about money, I would have excel that money. It’s not fair that they didn’t teach me. Like it just it felt so wrong. And 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 the blogs and, you know, now I’m it I feel it’s crazy because I went to Fincon last year and spoke on the stage and got to meet like all of these people who I literally been fangirling over online, right? for like years. So, you know, it’s a full I’ve come full circle but at that time it felt to me like this was a totally different world of like 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 like weren’t so into this financial stuff like I was. So, um, you know, once I committed to paying off the debt, I realized that I could just go right back to spending again and end up in debt again or, you know, I could kind of 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. And when I hit like $10,000, I was like, like that’s my money. Like what if I keep going and I have 20 or 30, $40,000? Like now it felt like, you know, the thrill of the save. Um, 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 like the stock market and index funds and ETS and like how to how does this all work? Um, and then once I did that, I was like, oh, there’s this whole community of like fire, which I thought fire was so so intriguing and like tempting for me to immediately jump in and be like, I’m part of the fire community. But you know, with two parents who have zero assets, I knew it wasn’t going to be feasible for me because I’m not like going the corporate route, making multiple six figures. I’m not like 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 that fire. It’s not going to happen, but I could definitely do coast fy if I get really serious. Um and and I did, you know, I hit Coast I probably right before my 32nd birthday, which is 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, um I I’ll still be able to retire with dignity even if I don’t add another penny. That feeling is like just you sleep like a baby at night. It’s so amazing.
Scott: And you mentioned earlier that you were Coast Fi. Can you describe what that is? And can you also describe how the journey towards Coast Fi and your switch from being a teacher to a full-time financial educator? how do those have any interplay?
Guest: Good question. Uh so Coastfi 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 9 or 10% for the next few decades of your working career will reach a million or more or will reach however much you need. Most people nowadays want to say, I think I need at least a million dollars to retire, right? 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 kind of started, let’s see if I can hit 1.5 million, can I hit a little more than that? And so for me that was hitting $120,000 in my investment account by my 30th or 31st, 32nd birthday as close as possible. Um and and 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. and that’s the key of Coast fi that you’re coasting to retirement because you don’t have to keep on working to add, you know, to pull money from your income to put into this retirement account. So, uh, once I did that, I was like, okay, that’s I do continue to add. I’m not going to lie. I max out my retirement account every year, I max out my Rath, I like 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, you know, $10,000 a year to my investment for my retirement, I could. I could and it wouldn’t mess up the thing. I would still be on track to coast. So, that’s the thing that kind of gave me peace of mind. Um, and then in terms of the shift with my work, like I mean I was teaching through 2013, then in 2014, I said, okay, I’m going to I 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 kind of discovering. So in 2013, 2014, I decided to pivot to business and start learning how to run a financial or how to run an education business. So I was a director at an education center which did math and reading tutoring after school and I was responsible for collecting monthly tuition for 400 plus parents and managing the schedules for all these students coming in and out the door and 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, you know, talk to clients, to collect the the tuition, right? Like there were all these components to that that I never dealt with in the classroom. So it was a nice complement to the skill set that I developed teaching and running a tutoring center, I think was great for me following the classroom, it paid just a little bit more than teaching, you know, 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 try to get an eight-year-old to get excited about learning how to do a fraction. Like, so I knew that I had skills. I was like, I’m creative, I’m animated. I I can come up with something and can sell something. I can put these skills together, communication was really good, you know, 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 and that’s I realized that that’s pretty rare. So I wanted to capitalize on that. And so that’s when I decided to shift. I was like, okay, if I keep teaching and I keep working at education, pretty much you’re capped at a certain amount of money, right? Because you can only really move up so much. If you’re a teacher, you can become, you know, a teacher leader, you can become an administrator, you can even become the superintendent but at a certain point in time, you’re sort of limited into how much you could make. So I realized, okay, let me kind of pivot outside of education and start thinking about a business. What would my business be? And luckily YouTube just started to take off pretty naturally and organically and so I just pivoted out of YouTubing 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 like my expertise and the work that I’m doing for financial education, but also my personal story, which I think is like, you know, you all mentioned is is can be unique a lot of times in the financial space.
Mindy: So, Yanelli, let’s let’s change course a little bit here. Generational wealth tends to stay with families, just like generational poverty tends to stay with families and we want to break this cycle and you are working to break this cycle. What are some of the things that you’re doing uh with regards to policy and education?
Guest: I love this question. So, in 2018, I found out about an organization. Well actually I had an email from someone at an organization called NPF.org, which stands for NextGen Personal finance. Um it’s a 501 C three, so 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 most amazing resources ever, lesson plans, assessments, homework, every everything that a teacher needs. But if the teacher themselves has 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 sort of knew, okay, we have to couple the curriculum with teacher training. So in 2018 I got an email. It was like, hey, we offer these teacher training modules and one of them is kind of like this podcast format where we invite speakers to come and inspire the teachers. and we think your story would be great. You know, you have YouTube content, you’re doing all this work, you used to be a teacher. And so I was like, oh sure. I joined the podcast and met with the founder, co-founder of the organization, Tim Renzetta. And he’s from New Jersey. he had moved all the way out to California because he went to stand for business school and then had a lot of success as an entrepreneur and started to think about, okay, what did he want to do with his success? And for him the number one mission he wanted to achieve was getting every American access to financial education. So he created NextGen 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 that call. He was like, I just can’t stop thinking about this podcast conversation. I can’t stop thinking about your story. I like 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, you know, what is it like to be a YouTuber because that’s a great hook for high school kids. They all want to be YouTubers and Tik Tok. So I was like, what is it like to be a YouTuber? How much money do you make? You know, what is your day-to-day like? And then like, okay, well, what about money? Like let’s talk about the money part. Like 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 and then at the end the teachers would ask me about the resources they could use to teach and I would say, oh great, NPF has a bunch of them. It’s all free. This is like mind-blowing for teachers that is all free and it always will be. So they, you know, would leave, they would kind of sign up and start using the curriculum and at that time in 2018, there were about 5,000 teachers that on total that were using NPF. And today in 2023, there’s over 70,000 teachers. So just, I mean talk about what is the business term? hockey hockey stick or Nike check when the growth is like exponential like that. So I realized like, wow, like this this is something, this is really impactful. And um have loved working with NPF. My role there is 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 um has since kind of 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 that organizational mission is that by the year 2030, all 50 states will have guaranteed access to a full semester of personal finance. you mentioned earlier that this is effective when it’s done the right way. Do you have any statistics that kind of articulate how what effective means and and what the outcomes are, what positive outcomes associated with this learning are?
Guest: Absolutely. So this is one of actually the key parts of my job. When I go talk to law makers, I like bring documents. I’m like, okay, we have evidence backed research, we have policy papers, we have studies, right? Depending on what it is that you’re looking specifically to show that improves, there are so many studies that point to different uh aspects. So the first thing is credit behaviors. When you actually teach or when you require financial education, students’ credit behaviors improve tremendously. And this is especially true for students like me who are first generation in their family to go to college and the key differentiator is that they take on not necessarily less debt but they take on less a lower interest rate debt. So what they do is they are more strategic about how they’re borrowing 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 is lending them money for college, they just borrow. So they’re taking really high interest rate, per uh 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 a comparable amount of debt, the interest rate on that debt is significantly lower for students who are choosing to go to college. and 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 uh 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. and all of this uh research that was conducted, most of it comes from Dr. Carly Urban and um Anna Maria Lusardi who are both phenomenal professors. Anna Maria Lusardi is more of an economist internationally known. Dr. Carly uh Urban is known for her work at the University of Montana, specifically looking at United States based uh research around financial education. But there’s so many studies now which is wild because when I first started going into the space, the 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. they did do a little better on their test scores but 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, you know, 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 and you can’t, 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 Fasa in school today. And guess what I have to do tomorrow, fill out my Fasa and submit it. Oh, I learned about car insurance yesterday. Next week and my dad and I are going to go buy a car and I have to buy some car insurance, right? 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? Right? Like these students are not doing that. We need to be teaching them about Fin tech apps, mobile banking by 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. And 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 you’re free from 12 to one on Thursdays and and Fridays. Okay, you’re going to be teaching this financial literacy, you know, unit over here with these kids on Thursdays and Fridays because you’re you’re the only one in the building free at that time. Look, I I understand firsthand what 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 can just teach this stuff. No, they have to be qualified. And so the legislation that proves to be effective specifically mentions the criteria and licenses required whether that’s economics, mathematics, social sciences, but it’s very clear that not just anybody can teach this.
Scott: And you you just do you just kind of go through that speel and they’re like, yeah, you’re you’re right, we’re gonna we’re going to do it now. How how how does that process work?
Guest: I wish it worked like that where they’re like, yeah, let’s do it. Um, so it’s it depends, right? Like I’ve heard from some law makers immediately they’re like, I’m with you 100% everything you said, yes. Like, how how can how can I, how can we get this set? What do we need, right? Like 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. It’s it’s interesting how I literally every single governor, treasurer, every single, you know, representative or senator, they all say, well, we’re a local control state and 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 principles, 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, right? 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 states that have passed uh legislation, Indiana, West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kansas, Michigan, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, uh in Rhode Island, right? 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. And 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 these very core topics are in the law, but that’s not saying we’re going to pigeon hole 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 law makers that they’re going to disappoint a lot of the the key stakeholders that have supported them, right? in 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 law makers on both sides of the aisle, the general public, I mean, there’s so many the banker’s 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, right? So that’s kind of 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 and but we don’t but we have limited capacity and we have a sub shortage and there’s so many things and if you’re trying to solve for everything at once, it’s really difficult.
Mindy: Okay, that’s a, that’s a good point. There are a lot of things that we maybe don’t consider when we’re pushing for for financial education. Um, 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.
Guest: Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, taking action is my favorite thing to tell people about because hello, it’s what gets things done. Um so actually on the NPF 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 and it’ll be the first thing that pops up because nobody else is tracking financial education bills except for NPF because we really are committed to this mission of 2030. So, 2023 financial education bill tracker will get updated every year following and 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 kind of fell off at some point because 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. And then nine bills were already signed into law in eight different states. I was directly involved in so many of those, which is uh my little hair is like standing on end now how much progress that we have made, right? Because in 2018 when I joined the organization, there were only five states, right? 2019, there were eight states. So we’re talking about very slow incremental growth and 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 kind of do a little bit more of what you’re describing now, which is like, what what can we do to take action and do some grassroots work? So, type up bill tracker MGPF 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 is just a fancy word for the law makers 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, right? So, you want to find out who the sponsors are and you want to email them, tweet at them, po tag them at on every social media, wherever they are, like reach out to them, send letters via zemail, 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 if you live in their specific Zips, you can tell them, hey, I, you know, 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, you know, 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 and 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 a little, you know, off the radar issue anymore. This this matters to people and this is a hot topic and then they cannot ignore it. This is a nice email that you send to the person who’s sponsoring the bill. This is the one who’s fighting for the bill. just just as just to enforce that point.
Guest: I love that, Scott. First of all because I had to learn that when you’re talking to law makers and I know this can seem a little controversial, but what I’m going I’m going to say it because it’s true. When you’re addressing a law maker, first of all, this person ran for office. That is not an easy feat. They are an accomplished person, okay? You want to speak to them with the utmost respect and also they’re going 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, right? I always come to them with first of all, if they’re a representative, representative, if they are a senator, senator, I always say they’re full, you know, if they’re a chairperson, chairperson, this, right? I never just say their name. hey Scott, like no, hey chairperson Scott, hey chair member Scott, hey, you know, Senator Scott, full name, like everything, super polite, respectful. And 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 you know how much it matters and 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 just not, it’s not even going to come up, right? So we need them and we need to really thank them, honor them, respect them. And then you can kind of put all the stuff in the email that you, why you care and why this matters. Um and I’ve even seen people to put to petitions together and literally go throughout the community to their small businesses, to the parents. to I got 100 signatures from all the parents in 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. like that kind of stuff is really what moves the needle with law makers.
Scott: That’s awesome. So, so again, just just to repeat for for folks that were were listening to here, nGPf.org/billtracker. Go in there, look to see if there’s any bills in in the in the state that are that are in there and reach out, thank the chairperson or the person that’s sponsoring the bill, uh ask them to send it to the the committee and uh make it clear how much this issue means to you. very easy, take you a few minutes. um go for it. If your state is not sponsoring a bill yet just yet, uh give, you know, another year and um they’ll be there’ll be sponsoring one next year uh at the rate that she’s going at.
Guest: Honestly, you could even reach out to the education committee members anyway. This is all public information. You can just Google like, for example, me, I live in Florida, if my bill hadn’t just passed in 2019, I could go or 2021, I could go on and say like Florida members of the Senate Education Committee, Florida members of the House Education Committee, and 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 by now pay later services, cryptocurrency, trading apps, Robin 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 gap. like financial education needs to happen today more than ever. So here’s a call to action. when is financial education going to come up? And 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. So this is fantastic. I hope everyone goes and takes that advice. You know, where can people find out more about you, support uh support any of the work you’re doing and or support your future Senate or presidential run coming in 20 2030 after you’ve completed this project.
Guest: That’s the thing when you work so close to politics, you see the ins and outs just how much work. Like I I gotta admit, I was always very cynical about politics coming up in New York City. I just you know, I had that that perspective that like, please, you know, 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 and now that I’ve worked with so many of them, I 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 that the political position. Uh, however, I 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, Miss be helpful.com.
Scott: Awesome. and where can people follow you on social media?
Guest: All at miss be helpful 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 of personal finance and money. We really appreciate you now.
Guest: Thank you for having me. This was great.
Mindy: Thank you, Yanelli. This was a lovely chat and we will talk to you soon.
Guest: Sounds good.
Mindy: Holy cats, Scott. I absolutely love Yanelli 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 and listening to her talk. She’s um going to succeed. All 50, when was her when was her goal? I bet she makes it before her goal.
Scott: Yeah, she’s she’s going to crush this. It was 2030, I think was the goal. The organization as a reminder is Next Gen Personal Finance npf.org. Um so go check that out and yeah, she’s going to crush it by then and uh then she’ll have to look up and be like, how do I uh solve the next major world problem um at that point. So, I’m really excited to watch her career transpire. I’ll I’ll be uh really interested to see which states are the stubborn ones that are the last to adopt something like this and which ones um come along. There are a few that I think maybe maybe potentially we’ll see in the next few weeks after recording this and um wow, what a what a difference an individual can make and an organization like NPF can make.
Mindy: Yes, absolutely. So, to reiterate if you have a state that does not have a uh whole semester of 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. That is there is nothing more important than this.
Scott: Absolutely. I I think I think it’s right. I think it’s one of the biggest opportunities in education today and I think um there actually has been a lot of progress in the last 10 years, um 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 um for my my high school education. but I think that there actually has been progress in a lot of states. There’s a lot of room to run and a lot of more improvements to make, but um thanks to people like Yanelli, um lots of things are lots of progress is is occurring. So, very exciting, very wonderful to see. You have a lot of optimism I think for the next generation 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 Bigger Pockets 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. And if you’re looking for even more money content, feel free to visit our YouTube channel at youtube.com/biggerpocketsmoney.
Mindy: Bigger Pockets money was created by Mindy Jensen and Scott Trench, produced by Calin Bennett, editing by Exodus Media, copywriting by Nate Wineb. Lastly, a big thank you to the Bigger Pockets team for making this show possible.
