Mindy Jensen: Today’s guest is Naseema McElroy. In the last 20 years, she has gone through a bankruptcy, a divorce, another breakup, and now has 3 kids as a single mom, yet still managed to become a millionaire by age 45. We are going to be hearing her actual numbers and how she’s built this impressive portfolio. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and with me as always is my loves-a-money-story-with-many-twists-and-turns co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott Trench: Thanks, Mindy. This is definitely an up and down story here, and wow, the resilience and the foundation that Naseema brings are really what saved her financial story here, and it’s incredibly impressive and incredibly powerful. We’re also going to get into it much later in the episode in detail, but we’re going to be talking about how Naseema paid off $1 million in debt. That debt consisted of a mortgage, student loans, car payments, and expenses, all resulting from her divorce. Naseema is the founder of Financially Intentional. She is a labor and delivery nurse and the author of the book Smart Money. We are so excited to be joined by you today. Welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast.
Naseema McElroy: Thank you for having me.
Scott Trench: Let’s get some background here to set the stage. Could you tell us where your journey with money begins and set the stage for helping us figure out the big catalysts in your journey?
Naseema McElroy: I guess my formal money story starts kind of in 2015, being a single mom, owning this McMansion with just me and my baby, and earning a lot of money for a long time, but feeling really, really poor. And just like, well, what does it take to really feel wealthy? And really feeling like, man, the only people I really see that are wealthy are people who were born into it, people that don’t look like me, or people that are scammers. Where is my place in this story, and trying to navigate that? So yeah, I started on this journey of learning about finances, which I thought was going to be like this PhD-level intensive kind of thing to understand my finances. And it set me on a path to creating this brand and building wealth for myself and my daughters. And it’s been an incredible journey.
Scott Trench: Let’s zoom in on that 2015 start here. How did you arrive in this position as a single mom? Help us understand what the McMansion looks like and what your income and expense profile looked like at that point.
Naseema McElroy: Yeah, so it was a 4,000-square-foot, 5-bedroom, 5.5-bath house in Northern California. So the house at that time, we were coming off of the housing market decline. So it wasn’t super expensive by California standards, but probably by every other standard. So it was about a $630,000 house. At that time, I was making about $200,000 a year as a labor and delivery nurse. I remember I had an FHA loan, so I think my mortgage was like $4,000 with hella high PMI, or MIP, I remember at that time. But I also had $200,000 in student loans where my minimum payments were $1,900 a month. And just your normal everyday debt—I took some money from my 403(b) to put a down payment on my house. And so paying that back, you know, normal stuff.
Scott Trench: Did you say you had a $200,000 income as a labor and delivery nurse?
Naseema McElroy: Yep.
Scott Trench: I think that’s something that people need to wrap their heads around with the Bay Area, right? Because people think, oh, that job probably is $100,000, $110,000 in many other metros around the country, but everything’s more expensive—incomes and salaries and taxes and all those other things in California broadly, in the Bay Area specifically. We’ve seen how that plays out in some of the datasets that we’ve been working with here. Where’s that going? You have $200,000 coming in. How much feels left over at the end of the month, given the $200,000 in student loans, the $600,000-ish mortgage with a $4,000 payment? Where does that go?
Naseema McElroy: I did not know initially. I just knew that every month I did not have any savings. I just felt really, really broke. And I think where a lot of people are is that we simply do not sit down and understand the real numbers of what’s coming in and going out every month. That was one of my biggest lessons, right? I thought I wasn’t wealthy because I didn’t know how to invest, because investing had to be like this crazy thing, like in Trading Places, where you’re on the floor of the stock market and you got to know how much pork bellies are and all this kind of stuff. So I thought that’s what it was. But it was really me not understanding what was going on with my money and not being in the driver’s seat of that. I could not tell you honestly where my money was going. It wasn’t like I said—it was on normal things. It was on housing, it was on the cars, it was on the things I was supposed to have because, you know, I was well off. And I do want to make a caveat: $200,000 in the Bay Area as a labor and delivery nurse is not abnormal. But at that time, I was working 2 jobs. I had a part-time job as well as a full-time job, which I was working 5 days a week still. But I just want to preface that so people won’t be like, oh my God, is that how much nurses make? Yes, you can make that much, but it just depends on how much you work.
Scott Trench: So I imagine that was 5 days a week and more than 40 hours, because some of those shifts can be longer, right?
Naseema McElroy: A little over 40 hours. I’d do like 2 12s and 2 8s or something like that. So it’s like 50 hours maybe.
Evan Lawler: And so, what was the catalyst here?
Scott Trench: So that’s— we set the stage. Here’s the position that we’re in. What changes and begins to shape your trajectory going forward?
Naseema McElroy: Really, it was just like— most moms are like, if I don’t do better for myself, I got to do better for this baby I have. If something were to happen to me, I need to know that my daughter would be cool. So I started off and just thought, okay, well, I got 2 master’s degrees, I’m not dumb, I know how to study things. So I’m going to put the same level of intentionality into learning about my finances as I’ve used for my other degrees. I have an hour commute to work. Every minute of that is going to be spent listening to podcasts and audiobooks and reading and doing all of the things to change my circle of influence, to now normalize those messages around wealth. Yeah, I just started learning and implementing along the way.
Mindy Jensen: What were some of the changes that you made?
Naseema McElroy: Really learning how to budget and paying myself first, and understanding finally what that meant. I’ve heard it my whole life, but what does that mean in application? Making sure that I had a goal. And initially my goal was just, you know what, I’m probably behind because I got hella debt. So let me focus on paying off that debt and setting a number and being like, hey, if I want to be debt-free by this time, this is how much money I need to be putting towards my debt. And like I said, I started at having zero savings, nothing put aside, to being at a point where I was consistently putting like $4,000 a month towards my debt, just because I flipped that relationship with my money where I prioritized my debt and then everything else just fell into place.
What were some of the things that you had to give up in order to put that $4,000 towards your debt every month?
Honestly, nothing. It was really just a shift. And people think I worked more or I cut down. I didn’t. My lifestyle in itself did not change. I just had to get intentional. And it was also a very challenging time in my life where I couldn’t work more. I had gotten married, then my marriage turned really, really abusive. And I couldn’t work because I had to stay home with my daughter. I couldn’t work extra. So a lot of people were just like, you just work more and paid off your debt. I did not. I was just really, really intentional about every single dollar that came in.
Evan Lawler: How long did it take you to ramp from nothing to that $4,000?
Scott Trench: And how long did it take you to pay off the debt?
Naseema McElroy: So it was only a couple of months once I finally figured out budgeting, and I started using zero-based budgeting, where I was giving every single one of my dollars an assignment. Once I got really intentional, it took a couple of months to ramp up to getting good with that system. And then after that, in under 3 years, I was able to pay off nearly $1 million in debt.
Evan Lawler: 30-year mortgage, a couple of young kids, maybe a spouse mid-career. In 15 years, the mortgage is going to be smaller and the kids are almost launched. So instead of buying one giant 30-year policy you’ll overpay for, you stack a few—say a 10-year, a 20-year, and a 30-year layer. So your total coverage steps down as your actual obligations step down.
Scott Trench: You only pay for what you actually need when you need it. You just mentioned that you were paying off about $4,000 a month towards your debt. It sounds like you made some other really big capital allocation moves, if you will, to knock out $1 million in debt, in addition to, of course, this $4,000 a month that’s going towards it. Can you tell us about what those big moves were?
Naseema McElroy: Because the house was connected to a lot of trauma, and I was starting kind of fresh, part of me starting over was—when I had $58,000 left—kind of wiping everything out by selling my house, which was, like I said, in the $600,000 range at that time. So on top of everything, it was close to $1 million that I had paid off in just under 3 years.
Scott Trench: That’s amazing. So the 3 mechanisms to understand are: selling the house, which brings $600,000 into the situation; we have $4,000 a month, which is $150,000-ish over a 3-year period; and we have cleaning up some other messiness that had come along with the divorce. And the opportunity to clean that up, however it manifested, resulted in those 3 things generating $1 million in proceeds to pay down debt. Is that the right way to frame what we’re understanding here?
Naseema McElroy: Yeah, I guess.
Scott Trench: That’s amazing. That’s an incredible amount of progress. How much did the content you were consuming—that podcast in your ear, the books you were consuming—count here in helping you build towards making at least the $4,000 a month in savings, but also that major house and capital reallocation move, with paying off the house and using the proceeds to pay off debt?
Naseema McElroy: It just normalized putting your finances in order. It normalized the concept that paying off massive amounts of debt is possible. And then it just changed, again, my circle of influence—what I saw other people doing. It made it even more attainable to me, because that had never been my experience. I’d never been around someone who could even feel confident talking about money, let alone talking about paying off massive amounts of debt or becoming millionaires or any of those kinds of things. So it just changed the landscape of what was possible in my life.
Mindy Jensen: So this started in like 2015. So about 2018, 2019, you have paid off all this debt. What would you estimate your net worth to be after you paid off all the debt?
Naseema McElroy: It was actually—I paid it off in November 2017.
Scott Trench: Oh, okay.
Naseema McElroy: Yeah, so it was about 2 years and 8 months or something like that, I can’t remember. At that point, I would say I still had investments in the background, and I did profit a little bit, so I think for the first time I was kind of in the green. No, I do remember what my net worth was, because I was starting to track it. It was under $100,000, but it was around there. Yeah.
Scott Trench: Give us the picture of your life the month after December 2018, after you’ve made all these moves.
Naseema McElroy: So I sold my house, I moved into a 2-bedroom apartment. I went from the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area back to Oakland, in the city, in a 2-bedroom apartment, and stayed there for about a year. I condensed a lot, but it was all good.
Scott Trench: And what happens to your savings rate? Because previously we had $4,000 a month and the mortgage payment—it sounds like you’re putting another fourth—it didn’t even sound like you were accounting for that mortgage payment towards the debt reduction that you’re putting in at $4,000 a month, plus you don’t have student loans anymore. What happens to the spread between your income and expenses?
Naseema McElroy: It immediately shifted. It’s interesting—so I kind of went from this Dave Ramsey aggressive debt payoff camp to more of a FIRE, aggressively-invest mindset. So I was gung-ho. I had a 403(b), I had a 457(b), a Roth IRA—all of those things were maxed immediately. And then I started saving for my daughter’s college fund. So I just super bumped up my savings rate.
Scott Trench: Fantastic. So I’m struggling to do that math in my head here. About how much a year are you accumulating at this point, almost immediately?
Naseema McElroy: So it’s almost like $50,000 a year going directly just into investments.
Scott Trench: That’s fantastic. And I assume that you also were able to build out a nice strong cash position as well, and just fortification of the financial position in that period.
Naseema McElroy: Yep, definitely.
Mindy Jensen: I want to know what your rent went to after you paid off the $4,000-a-month mortgage payment, because I have friends who live in the Bay Area and it is not inexpensive.
Naseema McElroy: Interesting time, though—it wasn’t expensive. I think I went to like $2,400 a month. It wasn’t bad. There were these deals—all these deals, you know, when you live in these bigger apartment complexes, they always have these rent reduction kind of deals, like reduced rent for a year or something like that if you sign a year lease. So yeah, it wasn’t bad at all. I just remember my portion, because I’d gotten into a new relationship by then—my portion was like $1,000 a month.
Scott Trench: You said you lived there for a year. What happens next? Let’s fast forward to 2019 or 2020.
Naseema McElroy: Let’s talk about that, because then there were a lot of transitions. So that move kind of took me to moving 4 times in 5 years, because my partner had different jobs. We moved out of state, we moved to Reno for a little while. I was doing a little deal arbitrage where I was living in Reno but working in the Bay Area. So I went from working 5 to 6 days a week to 6 days a month for a year, then moved back and rented here for another year, and then bought the house that I’m currently in, in 2020. So between 2017 and 2020, I had moved 4 times, which is a big blow to your finances.
Evan Lawler: It can be.
Scott Trench: I want to reframe that a little bit, because I think moving is just a huge pain in the rear. It’s a big disruption to your life, and then the mail and all that stuff. But I moved a similar amount for almost 10 years in a row while house hacking or doing that kind of stuff. And the moves you made were clearly part of a new financial plan, a new way you were thinking about managing your money. It seemed like at first— no, okay, you’re laughing.
Naseema McElroy: At first it was, but after that it was not.
Scott Trench: Okay, fair enough.
Naseema McElroy: These were all family decisions that weren’t based on finances. It was based on— initially it was for a job. And then it was like, listen, we’re out here on our own, I need more support, we need to move back home. And then it was like, okay, this is a good time to buy, which I’m happy that I did, but it landed me into getting a home with a 2.5% mortgage, which was great. But it was very expensive. It was not strategic financially. It was just life and family and having kids and navigating support and all of those kinds of things.
Scott Trench: In 2017 through 2019, 2020, is what I’m hearing—we moved 4 times. Are you still able to save during that period and accumulate wealth, and keep the investments in the 403(b) and the other retirement accounts going?
Naseema McElroy: I was able to still save. I was able to still max those accounts out, even though I was working significantly less for a year-long timeframe. But that’s what I prioritized over everything. So yeah, my net worth was still growing. I was still aggressively investing. But it still was very costly overall.
Scott Trench: And then tell us about the home purchase where you live now, and with the low interest rate, what fueled that decision? And what’d you do there?
Naseema McElroy: It’s interesting why we actually moved back here. We actually moved back to the city where I had originally sold my home. We were looking in Oakland and the Bay Area—like, Oakland real estate is older houses, so you would pay $1 million for a house to basically tear it down and build it back up. And I had owned 5 houses by the time I was 25. So I wasn’t new to real estate, and I wasn’t new to construction, all those kinds of things. And I went through that housing market crash, so I was very leery of big real estate projects. So where I live now, there’s more of a family environment—it’s more new homes, bigger land, newer construction that has very favorable terms. And it was during COVID—I’m a nurse, they had all these discounts going on—so I was able to get into a home with a relatively low down payment, with a relatively good interest rate, even though I did almost have to sue my mortgage company, because the initial builder and their mortgage company tried to cheat me out of a good rate. But that’s a whole other story for another day.
Scott Trench: So how much was the home? And how much did you put down? And what was the interest rate on it?
Naseema McElroy: The home was $630,000 again, but it was a little bit smaller, so now my house is about 2,500 square feet. I did 10% down; I ended up getting a 2.5% or 2.85%—I’m sorry—interest rate. But initially the mortgage company… you know, when you get a new construction, the builder has a preferred lender. And this is Pulte—I’m gonna put them on blast, it’s Pulte Builders, Pulte Mortgage, right? And so with the pristine credit score, with everything that I had going on with all of my assets, they gave me a subprime offer, which was like 8.5%. And I’m like, I’m not new to this, I’m true to this. Like, you’re messing with the wrong person. So I just went to my friend who’s a mortgage broker, and she immediately was able to give me that rate. And I got some incentives back from the builder because, you know, they give you extra incentives for going through their mortgage, like discounts on upgrades and all those kinds of things. And because they didn’t offer me the best rate, I negotiated that they were still going to give me those things regardless, or I was going to back out of the deal, because it was truly ridiculous. And it was definitely discriminatory.
Scott Trench: This is terrible that happened. There’s no reason at all it should have been a 6-7% rate at that time—today, that would be… wouldn’t blink twice at it, right? But in this case, yeah, that’s clearly absurd. So you got this very low-interest-rate mortgage on the house. What was the payment when you started, after you closed on this thing?
Naseema McElroy: I want to say it’s like $2,300.
Scott Trench: Okay, so it’s about the same or even less than the first place you were renting.
Naseema McElroy: I’m sorry, no, no, no, I’m sorry—it was like $3,000 with everything, with interest and everything. Yeah.
Scott Trench: Okay, with taxes, insurance—yeah, okay, so $3,000. And then things are going well; the house is purchased. This was a real pain in the rear, and they were treating you terribly in the closing process here, but we emerge with the end result of a good mortgage rate on this house, right? Or a reasonable one. You got the $3,000 payment. What happens next in your financial journey from here?
Naseema McElroy: You have to think, like, a lot of the story—it’s 2020, and I’m a nurse, right? So it’s a hard time. Overall, I’ve done 4 moves in this amount of time. I didn’t buy this house alone, but after a month and a half of being in this house, I became a single parent again and had to do it all on my own. So my portion of what I had to pay shifted drastically. But, you know, still on this journey—in that time I wrote a book. There were a lot of stressors, you know, that list of all the things—life events—that lead to major stress. I probably had about 10 of those things on that list going on simultaneously. The thing is, when people look at stories like mine and see, like, “oh, she paid off $1 million in debt, then she became a millionaire 7 years later,” they think it’s this linear process. It’s like a freaking roller coaster, and things are going on in the background, and life is happening, and it’s just not all straightforward. The math doesn’t always math, and things don’t always line up. But at the end of the day, one lesson that I learned is that that intentionality of getting me out of that debt and building a safety net around me has provided so much security that can never be taken away from me.
Scott Trench: Mindy and I—or me in particular—I tend to drill down: where did the money story start, what was next, da da da. And you’re telling me, bravely so, you’re missing some key details with all this. Could you help us fill in those blanks? Because it seems like there is a lot—like, how do I unpack that? 4 years of moves—I was like, okay, we moved 4 times, we bought a house, let’s move on to the money story. You’re telling me no, no, there’s a lot there that’s really critical here.
Naseema McElroy: Yeah, there’s a lot.
Scott Trench: Maybe help me reframe and tell us what that story looked like for you, so that other people who are going through the same things can relate a little bit and understand the power of the foundational finances that we’ve gotten to. But what was swirling around above that in your life during this period?
Naseema McElroy: The things that have helped me build is, number one, the financial security to leave an abusive relationship, even if I had to pay to get out of it. That’s number one. Even after that, I was in a financial position where I was still, like, the breadwinner in the relationship, and then trying to help my partner navigate his financial issues and helping him build and all of that kind of stuff. But, you know, giving up a lot for a relationship—while I was pregnant, moving to a different state, having to drive 3.5 hours to work while pregnant, having a preterm baby, going through postpartum depression, needing to move back home to get family support. It was just a whole lot of things going on in the background for me. And not only was I doing this financial journey, I was also building this platform, because once I was, like, a couple months into my journey, I realized that more people needed to understand the importance of getting their finances together, and that it didn’t have to be hard. And so that’s how I started Financially Intentional—to share with my group of girlfriends what I was doing, to document my journey. So building a business, going through relationships and life challenges and all of these kinds of things, but putting the systems in place that run in the background of your life so that when the shit hits the fan, everything doesn’t fall apart. And I just think that with all of this stuff that’s happening, all of the moves that are going on, that’s the thing that stayed consistent. And that’s the thing that has protected me all these years.
Scott Trench: What was, like, the time when it was, like, this is the absolute rock bottom, hardest part of this period of my life?
Naseema McElroy: I don’t think there was, like, one rock bottom. I think there was just, like, a feeling of, dang, you can have everything set up perfectly, but things still can go wrong. You think you can plan, you can do all of these things, but it happens. But the thing is, like I said, I have never had to start from zero. Even if I had to bounce back for a little while, I could bounce back easier, and I wasn’t left destitute. And my kids have never wanted or needed for anything.
Scott Trench: Was there a moment in this period when you thought to yourself, wow, I am so glad I put in place those systems, because if I hadn’t, I’d be screwed? Was there a moment like that?
Mindy Jensen: I think about that every day. Yeah, getting those systems in place, getting your baseline finances in order, is one giant thing that you don’t have to think about anymore. Imagine if you were in these same situations, but you still had the $200,000 in student loans and you still had the $4,000 monthly payment for the house—the original house that you were in. You would have had so much more pressure. You had moved to a different state and were driving, you know, 3 hours, and instead of working 5 days a week, you were working 6 days a month. What if you still had to work 5 days a week while also taking care of all these other things that are going on? Setting up these systems in place is so, so, so important.
Scott Trench: Yeah, that capital allocation decision that you made to pay off the debt and not keep it all on the books—aside from this most recent mortgage on the house—leading up to this point, I think that was critical. And I think a lot of people will sit there, and, you know, they’re doing the math in their heads because it’s a personal finance podcast: what if she’d kept the house, and the appreciation on the first one would have been this? What if she had invested the money instead of paying off the debt? Well, the problem with that counterfactual is that it presumes that it’s going to be a linear path the rest of the way, right? Which you just said this is not how it played out. For some people it will play out that way, and there’s a financial spread to be gained from investing versus paying down the debt, and that is a bet that I think a lot of people make and take for granted, because reality often does not work out that same way. And you can certainly imagine situations, in the volatility context, where if you had invested instead and those moments had come in at bad times, that could have put you in a really, really tricky financial position that would’ve piled on top of all the other stuff that was going on in your life. Am I getting closer to how things played out and how the strategy of your decisions benefited you in a turbulent period?
Evan Lawler: Yeah.
Naseema McElroy: Definitely, definitely.
Scott Trench: Okay, so I’m gathering it’s around 2021, 2022 in our story. You’ve broken up from this next relationship here—it’s a tough time. But we’ve got a house, we’ve got a low-interest-rate mortgage, you’ve been investing steadily for at least 6 or 7 years, imagining a several-hundred-thousand-dollar net worth somewhere in that ballpark and beginning to compound. Where does the story take us next?
Naseema McElroy: It’s really just controlling the costs where I could. You know, living in the San Francisco Bay Area was like—well, you can make $200,000 and still be poor, and I think that is true, depending on what your life decisions are. And, you know, we talked about the latte factor, but I really lean into making sure my 2 biggest costs, my housing and transportation costs, are low. And so I always have a room in my house that I rent out to, like, a labor and delivery nurse, and that’s like $1,000 off my mortgage.
Scott Trench: House hacking.
Naseema McElroy: Yes, house hacking for real—like trying to control expenses. If I’m not using my car, that car is going on Turo. Things like that—just steady making decisions to optimize my finances and making sure that they’re going in the direction that I needed to go, and focusing on investing. So still, like, focusing on maxing out that 403(b), maxing out that 457(b), maxing out that Roth IRA—like every year, consistently, that was the goal.
Scott Trench: What is your take on the decision about whether to pay off this current low-interest-rate mortgage or invest? How do you think about that decision?
Naseema McElroy: I would never pay this mortgage off to invest—like, versus invest, it doesn’t make financial sense for me. For me, I just feel like this mortgage is a hedge against inflation, and I don’t foresee paying it off. But, for example, I mean, I know this is, like, BiggerPockets, real estate and all those kinds of things, but if I was to get back into real estate like I used to be, it would be more focused on, you know, buying really cheap properties and renting them out—like $20,000, $30,000 properties I can buy in cash. Other than that, I don’t believe in, you know, having a house mortgage-free. But also, real estate isn’t my game. Like I said, I did that whole thing—I had a whole other life in real estate that I never fully recovered from, in the early 2000s—so the 2008, 2009, like, it was not fun.
Scott Trench: Could we hear a little bit about that? We actually touched on that for a few minutes, because we started our journey, you know, post the divorce in 2015. But I’d love to hear about this—the, the what sounds like a roller coaster that resulted in starting from scratch, effectively, in 2015, 2016.
Naseema McElroy: Oh yeah, I definitely started from scratch. Like, if anything people could take away from this, I am like a bounce-back queen, okay? I have gone through so many different iterations of my life. I graduated—I went to USC, University of Southern California, in 2005 with my master’s degree. So during that time, you know, it was like the real estate boom—it’s very interesting. I don’t know if you guys know Patrice Washington.
Evan Lawler: Yes.
Scott Trench: Mm-hmm.
Naseema McElroy: Her last name used to be Cunningham. So we were really good friends in college, and her and her husband had a mortgage business. I did hair in college, and my shop was attached to a real estate company. So the only thing I knew about investing was buying real estate. And so by the time I was 25, working with the lady that owned the real estate company and working with Patrice, I had 5 houses all throughout the country. I had 2 in LA, 2 in North Carolina, and 1 in Atlanta. And, you know, it was a time of subprime mortgages and all these illegal mortgages and all these kinds of things. But it was just like, well, this is what the norm is to get into these mortgages. And then we got to the point where people weren’t paying their rent, and/or I had a builder that just wouldn’t finish the house on time, but I still had a mortgage on it. It was just a whole lot of things. And then the housing market crashed in 2008, and I had to go through 2 short sales and foreclosures, and ultimately had to file bankruptcy in 2010.
Scott Trench: Oh my gosh.
Naseema McElroy: Yes.
Scott Trench: The path to that bankruptcy in 2010—tell me about what happened in the months or years preceding that. How did it feel? What was the activity set that you were doing? What was within your control? And was there a little bit of a helpless feeling of watching that come?
Naseema McElroy: No, it was just a lot of things. So I had a condo—that was my first purchase. The condo was falling apart. I had all kinds of assessments and all these fees for the HOA that was on my primary residence. I mean, I didn’t even have—if you didn’t take a shower between, like, 8 and 8:15, you weren’t gonna get hot water. It was crazy like that. So that was one. And then I bought another duplex in LA. People paid rent when they wanted to or didn’t pay rent. I had a drug dealer that used to live there—they used to pay me a box of, like, balled-up fives whenever he felt like it. And, you know, getting people in and out of that, or dealing with Section 8—that was like something that, basically, for all these properties, there was always a reason why I wasn’t getting rent consistently. And it wasn’t because it wasn’t properly vetted and all those kinds of things upfront. It was just that when people say, “oh, that’s the worst-case scenario,” the worst-case scenario would always happen to me. The place that I had in Atlanta was a new build, but the builder never finished it. Even though the property closed, it couldn’t be lived in. So I had to physically have somebody go to the builder’s house. And then, in order to finish my house—like, everything that could have happened wrong happened wrong. On top of the fact that I was getting these mortgages that were interest-only for a certain period of time or had balloon payments, and then I had to refinance, and then they wouldn’t refinance. And then it was just like everything bad that could have happened happened. And my only recourse was to either short-sale or foreclose. And whichever one was the better option during that time is what I had to do—except I kept my primary residence, which was the condo, until 2015.
Scott Trench: Wow. I mean, what a world that time was for real estate investing.
Mindy Jensen: And people who didn’t go through it then are like, “oh, this couldn’t have happened.” This absolutely happened. People stopped paying rent and then didn’t leave. It was a very, very difficult time. And then your house—what did you pay, like $100,000 for it? And now it’s worth $30,000. You’re like, what am I gonna do?
Naseema McElroy: Yeah, so that’s what I’m saying—you can’t refinance it because it’s not worth anything. It was, it was the worst time. And so when I say I haven’t recovered from that real estate, there was some real deep trauma there.
Scott Trench: What happened from 2022 to the present? And how does that inform what you’re doing today with your money?
Naseema McElroy: I think the biggest thing is that the systems that I put in place in 2015, in 2017, when I made that big shift to start investing, are tried and true and steady, and they work in the background of my life when everything else is falling apart, and I don’t have to think about it. And I’ve gotten to the point right now, financially, that I can probably have—and I’m not trying to put this out there, but some really major things happen to me. I’ve been off of work for months. I was just in a car—I just got rear-ended a couple of months ago, and I was off for like 3 months. And it could have been a huge financial setback, but it wasn’t. Still, my net worth continues to grow and grow and grow and grow, just because I made a couple of what are called basic, boring investment decisions and had the system in place that runs just in the background of my life. And so that’s what’s consistent. And it’s like, you know, barring big major global tragedies, there’s probably nothing that can take me out at this point, because I have built so much financial resilience in my portfolio and what I’ve built just from staying steady and doing all the boring stuff—not flashy, not waiting until I got paid more, not waiting—but just doing those things every day, that aggregation of marginal gains, the small things, staying boring and hella simple.
Mindy Jensen: It sure is boring to have money and security.
Naseema McElroy: Listen, yeah.
Mindy Jensen: Remember 2015, 2016, 2017? That was a little more exciting in your life, right? Boring’s better.
Naseema McElroy: Boring is way better.
Scott Trench: So what does your financial position look like today?
Naseema McElroy: So right now I’m sitting at about $1.3 million in assets. Over $1 million of that is just invested in all my regular, boring stock market index—I have 3 index fund accounts. That does include the accounts that my daughters have. I have 3 girls; they each have a brokerage account, a 529, and a custodial Roth IRA. And, you know, my house and all my other things that are assets—but that’s where we’re at.
Scott Trench: Fantastic. Any debt besides the mortgage?
Naseema McElroy: I do have debt, and you know where the debt is from? From running a business—this accidental business that I built. But other than that, just education and resources around that. But, you know.
Scott Trench: What a wild ride. So the journey really starts in, it sounds like, 2005, results in bankruptcy in 2010, divorce and reset in 2015.
Naseema McElroy: 2017.
Scott Trench: 2017, sorry. Yes. And then a wild roller coaster for the last 9 years to end as a millionaire, well on track to be way, way ahead financially going forward. What amazing lessons learned and then principles that you’ve applied to just keep that snowball going through all the ups and downs that have been going on around it. Thank you for sharing this with us. Any other last pieces of advice or things you’d want to share with people listening to this?
Naseema McElroy: I’m just proud that I get to go on this journey and that my daughters get to see that, and that I have changed the trajectory of their lives because of the decisions that I’ve made. So they get to opt out of a lot of the BS that I had to go through because I made a couple of intentional decisions.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, she’s financially intentional, Scott.
Evan Lawler: Mm-hmm. Application times may vary and rates may vary.
Mindy Jensen: So, Naseema, I don’t remember if we ever shared how old you are right now.
Naseema McElroy: 45.
Mindy Jensen: 45. Okay. Yes. Do you intend to retire early or pursue early retirement?
Naseema McElroy: I was definitely on the retire early track. The thing is, I really love being a nurse. I love being a labor and delivery nurse. I don’t like the politics of it sometimes. 99% of the time it’s okay. But during those times, I feel like I’ve built in the security to be able to opt out of some of that stuff. But now I have a dream schedule. I literally work 3 days one week, I work 2 days another week. If I wanted to have 2 weeks off, I’d only have to take off 1 day. And so I could see myself doing that for as long as I want to. But I also can take 2 years off and just travel the world with my kids if I want to, and then come back and be a nurse. The thing that this journey has provided for me — and I love the FIRE movement — but what it has provided is that work optionality and the possibility of doing so many things, and it can change in a heartbeat. And me being able to have the finances in place to support that.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah. We did an episode about careers for people pursuing financial independence, or people who are post-FI and want to have a lot more flexibility in their schedule. And nurse was near the top of the list for the reasons you said. You work 3 days this week, you work 2 days the next week. You could literally have 2 solid weeks off taking off 1 day. If I needed 2 solid weeks off, I would have to take off 2 solid weeks. Having this flexibility is so powerful. And you’re in labor and delivery — you get to see babies all the time.
Naseema McElroy: It never gets old seeing a baby born, and I’ve been doing it for over 16 years.
Scott Trench: One last thing — you are driving from Reno to the Bay Area?
Naseema McElroy: That was just for a year I did that.
Scott Trench: All right, okay, so that we don’t have to commute anymore either with that.
Naseema McElroy: Well, my commute is still an hour, but that’s different.
Mindy Jensen: Where can you go in the Bay Area and not have to drive an hour?
Scott Trench: Many people drive an hour every day. You do that a few times a week.
Naseema McElroy: 100%. Some people don’t understand that. I’m just like, that’s just our job, period. My thing is I still work nights. That’s another thing that a lot of people are like, “Oh my God, I could never,” but it works for me. I work nights so I don’t deal with traffic. I don’t like traffic. I don’t like a lot of noise. I don’t like a lot of stimulation. I don’t like a lot of visitors. It works incredible for me. I have so much autonomy in my job. Working nights is the bomb.
Mindy Jensen: That’s when all the babies are born anyway.
Naseema McElroy: Tell me about it.
Mindy Jensen: I work nights on a full moon.
Naseema McElroy: Oh my God.
Scott Trench: And an hour-long commute also is like just about the length of a BiggerPockets Money Podcast, plus like 3 songs of the Chainsmokers, right? So there you go.
Naseema McElroy: That’s actually how I learned. I use that commute time to do my learning, to have quiet time, because usually it’s kids screaming in my car, you know, but I love that hour.
Scott Trench: Where can people find out more about you?
Naseema McElroy: So I’m at Financially Intentional everywhere, financiallyintentional.com. I have hundreds of episodes on the Financially Intentional Podcast, but I mostly live on Instagram at Financially Intentional.
Scott Trench: Awesome. Well, definitely encourage people to go check that out and give you a follow. Thank you for sharing this amazing story with us, and congratulations on well over $1 million in personal net worth now. And what seems like a roller coaster that’s on the downhill and moving in the right direction, speeding up, accelerating. So thank you for sharing this with us. It was a really powerful story, and I look forward to seeing where things go for you the next couple of years.
Naseema McElroy: Thank you.
Mindy Jensen: All right, Naseema, I really appreciate you sharing your story, and we will talk to you soon.
Naseema McElroy: Yay! See you in a couple days.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, see you in a couple days. We’re all going to the same conference, and we will see her tomorrow.
Naseema McElroy: All right, bye.
Mindy Jensen: All right, Scott, that was Naseema McElroy from Financially Intentional, and that was a really interesting story. I was going to say fun, and I don’t want to be like, yay, for all those trials and tribulations she went through, but she taught herself that her financial situation wasn’t going to be what she wanted it to be, so she self-educated, put down the foundation that now supports everything she wants to do. I love hearing stories where people had a setback and they didn’t let that define them. They’re like, “Nope, this is not going to be me. I’m going to continue moving forward.” And Continue Moving Forward is another great title for Naseema, because she just continues moving forward.
Scott Trench: Yeah. Mindy, do you think — and this is kind of a leading question, but I’ll ask anyways — do you think that, in the context of relationship and marriage and kids and those types of things, that divorce, family stress, those kinds of things as a group in a tendency will tend to cluster around good economic times or bad economic times?
Mindy Jensen: What’s the number one thing that people fight about, Scott? Couples — what’s the number one thing that couples fight about? It’s money. So I would imagine that if we were in a court, the prosecutor would say, “Objection, leading the witness.” However, I will say, yeah, Scott, those are going to cluster around the bad times.
Scott Trench: Yeah, and I think that’s — not new, but just reinforcing a big nugget in reinforcing the frameworks that I’m trying to build around money as we do these podcasts. I think that paying off your mortgage, keeping debt on the books, investing instead — there’s a real case for that in personal finance. Like she said, you wouldn’t pay off a 2.8% mortgage on your primary in most conditions, maybe at the very end of your journey when you’re just trying to button up some things in your financial position, but few people would do that. But along the way towards that, in between, in this gray zone of debt, 4 to 7%, if you will, where it’s kind of hard — do I pay it off or do I invest instead? That’s a real argument for paying off debt earlier in the journey, because you never know what the ups and downs of your life are going to be like over the next decade or 2 or 3 or 4, and when the hard times are going to come. And that arbitrage only works if you survive those decades financially without that turbulence pulling it apart and forcing you to liquidate those investments at the most inopportune times. You actually have to ride it out for a long period of time to get that arbitrage. And for the last decade or so, people have been getting that arbitrage because the market has provided it. But that may not always be the case. And it may, more importantly, not be the case for you as an individual or your household specifically. So I think that was a really powerful lesson from this that I’m not going to forget, as it pertains to these decisions in the real world of messy personal finance.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, I love that, Scott. I love that we’ve been doing this show for 8 years since 2018, and you still have lessons that you learn with every episode.
Scott Trench: Yeah, like trying to fit somebody’s story into the box. She was right, perfectly right to say, “Scott, what you’re missing here is the maelstrom that was going on in my personal life during this time period.” That was very powerful. And I think, I think it’s a finance lesson.
Mindy Jensen: I like how she’s like, “And I wrote a book during this time.” I’m like, oh my goodness. I have written a book when I wasn’t doing anything else, and that’s a super stressful thing. Yeah. And I had a co-author in you.
Scott Trench: That was a fun one, by the way. First-Time Homebuyer. I forget what it’s about, though. If you want to check it out, you can probably find out when you read it.
Mindy Jensen: That’s a terrible way to sell our book, Scott. It’s called First-Time Homebuyer. If you’re a first-time homebuyer, this is the book for you. We talk about not only the process of buying the house, but also what you should think about when you are looking at buying a house. I give it to all of my first-time homebuyer clients.
Scott Trench: We’d be remiss as well, if we’re going to plug First-Time Homebuyer, not to plug Smart Money: The Personal Finance Plan to Crush Debt, by Naseema here. So go check that out on Amazon, wherever books are sold. That’s a great one. That’s the one she wrote. And if your story is anything relationally similar to hers, you may get a lot of value out of her plan.
Mindy Jensen: Absolutely. And who better to write about crushing debt than somebody who crushed a ton of debt? All right, Scott, should we get out of here?
Scott Trench: That’s biggerpocketsmoney.com/fipro. Go check that out. We’ve got a couple of flat fee and advice-only financial planners that we’ve partnered with over there. We obviously will receive compensation if you use some of those planners, but we think that they’re a great fit for the FI community. So go check it out — biggerpocketsmoney.com/fipro.
Mindy Jensen: All right. That wraps up this episode of the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. He is Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying, gotta jet, baguette.
