Mindy Jensen: Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to the BiggerPockets Money Podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen, and today I have a very special surprise for you, my dear listeners. Today, we’re going to share another episode from the FIRE YouTube series that I host on the BiggerPockets Money YouTube channel that features stories of people who are either on their way to or have actually reached financial independence. Today, we’re featuring Marisa Mae and her financial journey. Not long ago, Marisa was living paycheck to paycheck with maxed-out credit cards, no emergency fund, and constant financial anxiety. Now she’s on track to retire a millionaire after learning how to pay off debt the right way, and that fixing your finances does not have to be an agonizing slog like most financial influencers would have you believe. We’ll dive into how she got on the right track in today’s episode. Before we get into the show, we want to thank our sponsor. Marisa, I am so excited to talk to you today.
Marisa Mae: Hello. I’m excited too. Thanks for having me.
Mindy Jensen: So let’s jump into your financial history as an adult. In a nutshell, what did your financial life look like before you hit your breaking point?
Marisa Mae: I mean, “hot mess” is a great descriptor, I feel like. I would rack up my credit card, not really know how, just day-to-day spending, just living my life, right? It’s not like I was frivolously going and buying Chanel bags every weekend. Somehow I’d rack it all up, then hit that “enough is enough” moment, have to pay it all down with a hyper-restrictive budget, and pay it all off, or hit a tax return and use that to pay it down. And then a couple months later, there I am again with the card racked up again and having no clue how it happened. And I just had no reality other than, I’m just going to live paycheck to paycheck in overdraft, and I’m never going to be credit card debt-free. That’s just not a thing that’s for me. That’s for other people. Somehow other people have it figured out. Other people are good at math. Other people are good at money. That’s just not me.
Mindy Jensen: This is a common thread that I have heard from a lot of people. I just assumed that debt would be part of my life, and I just assumed I would always be in debt. So what was your breaking point?
Marisa Mae: Well, picture this. There I am in Las Vegas, and I’m Canadian. I’m over there in Vegas, and I’m curled up in a ball in the hallway of a conference center. You know that stage past hysterical crying where it’s just completely shut down, paralyzed—just a terror feeling where you can’t even cry anymore, you’re so shut down. Well, yeah, that’s me, curled up in a ball in Vegas, because I was there for a work conference that was supposed to be covered and paid for by my employer, but I forgot I was paying in USD instead of Canadian dollars. And so I got some excursions and forgot to factor in the exchange rate. I accidentally got the dates wrong because it was a last-minute trip, and I had a couple nights that I needed to fund at a hotel that I wasn’t expecting. And this after this, after this, after this. So there I am on the last night—well, what was supposed to be the last night of my trip—and I have no hotel booked for that night. I don’t know anyone in Vegas, and my credit card is not only maxed, but over limit from this trip. I’m negative overdraft. Somehow I was $50 over my overdraft. I literally had $0 to my name, less than $0, and no idea if my card would be approved to stay in a hotel room that night. And it was just that moment of panic and terror, and more than that, the embarrassment of, I cannot believe this is my life. This is it. I get to say, and I say, that this isn’t how the rest of my life goes. Enough is enough.
Mindy Jensen: I’m getting heart palpitations just listening to that story, because I know where you’re coming from. I hear those—desperate times call for desperate measures.
Marisa Mae: So I was fine. I made it. I made it to today. I’m still here. And yeah, I mean, as far as after that—do you want me to get into what I did?
Mindy Jensen: I would love that.
Marisa Mae: After that point, that “enough is enough” moment, I’d already been poking around on TikTok following content creators. Specifically, I was resonating with—I’d found a couple of Canadian content creators and neurodivergent content creators, ’cause at the time I only knew that I was ADHD. I didn’t know that I’m also autistic and have a math learning disability. I threw myself into personal finance and financial literacy, and I read over 20 books in the span of probably 8 months, and just was like, okay, the information has to be out there. And it was.
Mindy Jensen: The information is out there, but don’t beat yourself up. And anybody watching this, don’t beat yourself up if you haven’t been able to find it yet. You don’t know what you don’t know. So when you’re trying to fix your finances—hey, I want to fix my finances—is a great thing to start Googling, to start seeing what other things are out there. But there’s also a lot of scams in the financial world, like debt consolidation. That is a thing, but there’s a lot of people who are scamming out there. So what sort of credit card debt are we talking about here?
Marisa Mae: Funny enough, I had one credit card. That was it. Thank goodness, thank goodness, thank goodness. I’d only been approved for one card at the time, and it had a $5,000 limit. I’d just graduated university, and it was at 5 grand, and I had a loan for my laptop and a couple of other small consumer things. So over the span of about 18 months, I paid off $10,000 to $15,000 of consumer debt across credit card and those other small consumer loan things.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah.
Marisa Mae: And I did all of that making less than $40,000 Canadian. So even less American, probably about $35,000 American.
Mindy Jensen: That’s awesome. I mean, it’s not awesome that you had that much debt, but it’s awesome that you paid it off in 18 months. And thank you for sharing your income, because a lot of people would hear, yeah, you paid off $10,000 in only 18 months—wow, how’d you do it? Well, when you’re making $40,000 a year, that’s a lot of money that you’re taking out of your salary to throw at debt. So that’s a very impressive payoff schedule.
Marisa Mae: The craziest part about it for me is that I did it all without eliminating impulse spending or the things that brought me joy. I never gave up Starbucks. Very early on, I was like, I’ve tried restrictive budgets, I’ve tried crash budgets, I’ve tried to cut out everything, and that just does not work for me. So what would happen if I kept little luxuries? So I never gave up buying cute candles or fuzzy blankets at HomeGoods or HomeSense. I never gave up Starbucks. I found a way to be intentional with my finances instead of restrictive or eliminating everything. And that’s honestly a huge part of what made the difference.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, now we’re gonna dive into that, because I think that’s fascinating. Most people are like, okay, I’m gonna pay off all my debt. That means no extraneous spending.
Marisa Mae: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Mindy Jensen: How did you keep those in while still paying down debt?
Marisa Mae: Lots of strategy pieces, and I would love to share one of them. The overarching theme—my ethos, my motto—has become: the best financial plan is the one you’ll stick to.
Scott Trench: Yes.
Marisa Mae: So instead of building—yeah, instead of building that perfect-on-paper budget that falls apart in a couple of weeks, a couple months, even 6 months, and then you revert back and just end up in the exact same spot a couple months later, I was like, hey, that doesn’t work. So what if I built a slower, on paper—huge air quotes, “slower on paper”—like it looks like it’s going to take longer, because I’m keeping those little luxuries, but it actually has me get to the end goal instead of giving up halfway through, or a quarter of the way through. I would so much rather do that. I want to actually enjoy my life and enjoy my world. And that is so much more motivating to me, and has proven, not only for me but with my clients, to keep them on track. And one of the ways that I did this specifically with Starbucks: I would load a gift card at the beginning of the month, and that was my Starbucks allowance. So I would load $40 at the beginning of the month, and that was my Starbucks. And so I could use it whenever I wanted and not feel any guilt or shame or blame about using that gift card, because I’d intentionally planned on spending that $40 on Starbucks. And then when it was done, it was done. And I could keep an eye on how much I had left. I could ration it, if you will—I don’t like that word, that’s very lack mindset—but I could be intentional with when I was getting a Starbucks, and I was in control of it. And it eliminated the shame and blame of getting Starbies, as I like to call it.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, I love this idea, and I have never heard it articulated quite like that. I think that’s fantastic. There are very few places where you can shop or spend money that don’t also have gift cards. What a great idea. I’m gonna spend $40 at Starbucks this month, and here’s my $40. So that’s all I’ve got. And if you don’t spend it all, great, then it rolls over to the next month. And if you do spend it all, that was a conscious choice.
Marisa Mae: Totally. And so for people who don’t have that one place that they feel like they can’t spend at or shouldn’t spend at, blah, blah, blah, setting even, like, I’m gonna buy a $50 Visa card, like a prepaid Visa, and this is my intentional fun money, where it does not have to make sense to anyone else what I purchase with this money. This is like literally just for fun, impulsive, dopamine-hit spending. And then the shame and blame is gone, because you’ve already set it up. You’ve already set that money aside. It’s out of sight, out of mind.
Mindy Jensen: Let’s talk about your debt payoff. Did you have a specific dollar amount that you were paying off every month, or did you have a specific percentage of your income that you were paying off? Or how did that look?
Marisa Mae: I focused on just my spending money and my fixed expenses. Like, okay, how can I hone in on these 2 areas and get to breaking even first? So what I have coming in is what I have going out. And then start to create wiggle room sustainably, so that step 3, I can actually wiggle, ’cause I’ve created the room. And wiggling is actually funding the goals. I used to try to wiggle before I had the room, and that was just overspending with a fancy name, and just looked better ’cause I was overspending with credit card repayment. So what I was actually doing was focusing just on my spending money and fixed expenses and honing in on those and reducing those. And then at the end of the month, I’d have leftovers. And what I was doing at the time was I’d picked a percentage, and it fluctuated over the whole period. But for simplicity’s sake, let’s say it was 70/30. I would put 70% towards my debt repayment, and 30% towards my other future-based financial goals, because I was clear that while I was just paying off debt, that was not motivating for me. I wanted to do both. So I set up, through my employer, investing—and things that ended up being about 30%. And then everything that I had left over from the money that I was managing and dealing with on a monthly basis, everything else of that would go towards debt repayment, because that 30% was already going towards investing.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, I love that. Okay, that was going to be a question—were you investing while you were paying off your debt? There’s no right answer here, there’s no wrong answer here. Do you pay off your debt first, or do you invest and pay down debt at the same time? If you choose to invest while you’re paying down your debt, of course your debt repayment is going to take longer, but you’re also starting to invest earlier. And there’s that phrase, time in the market is better than timing the market. So it doesn’t matter what the market is at right now. You want to start investing, because, in my opinion—and past performance is not indicative of future gain—the market’s going to go up. It’s also going to go down, but over time it’s going to go up and to the right. So continuing to invest, or starting to invest as soon as possible, is going to give you more time in the market, more time for your money to grow. So I love that you were doing both of those. However, to those watching who are like, “I could never start investing without paying off all my debt”—great, then pay off all your debt first. You have to be able to sleep at night.
Marisa Mae: And a big reason why I chose to was, one, I had employer matching. It was like, okay, I might as well take advantage of this free money.
Scott Trench: Yeah.
Marisa Mae: Yeah. So it’s like, I’m going to max out my employer matching. And a part of it for me as well was building the habit and getting to know and experience myself as somebody who was investing. That was something that, for me personally, I just felt like I wasn’t fully adulting because I was missing out on that. And I had such FOMO that I was like, okay, I’m just going to invest a little bit and focus on debt repayment. And again, that was motivating and had me stay on track, which for me is the ultimate goal.
Mindy Jensen: So you said something that I thought was very interesting. You said, “I hadn’t seen if it was actually realistic,” your repayment method, a few minutes ago. I have frequently equated debt paydown to weight loss. Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do. Stop eating junk food, stop spending so much money on stupid stuff that you can’t afford, and work out. Stick to a budget. So everybody knows what you’re supposed to do, but it’s also completely unrealistic to expect yourself to go from eating out all the time and eating all the good foods, like pizza and hamburgers and chicken nuggets and all the things that taste good, and drinking beer and blah, blah, blah, to going to a life of just salads. And it’s not fun to do that either. So being realistic with yourself, with your motivation, with your ability to stick to something, is going to be key to having it actually work. So let’s talk about this big change. You went from paycheck to paycheck to paying off debt. Are you now debt-free?
Marisa Mae: I was, when I started my business. And managing business finances and investments in my business, and larger sums of money than I’d even made in a month—or sorry, in a year—was a different adventure. And so now I have business debt that happens to be on credit cards, and would still say that as far as the habits and what I built goes, I’m consumer-debt-free.
Mindy Jensen: When you started this debt-free journey, what was the most significant change you had to make?
Marisa Mae: Something that I didn’t expect, which was getting that my self-worth and my net worth had been tied together, and that that doesn’t work. So honestly, the biggest change that I had to make was believing in myself and untangling all of those beliefs that I had about myself and about money, and about my ability to manage money, and what my net worth says about me, or the morality around money—just all of that mindset work that I wasn’t expecting.
Mindy Jensen: That can be a challenge. And it is a huge mindset shift, and I think you really need to be committed to the actual debt payoff process. And sometimes that means crying in a hallway in Las Vegas—where am I gonna sleep?
Marisa Mae: Yeah, I like to say that working on the numbers alone wasn’t enough for me, and working on mindset alone wasn’t enough for me. No matter how positively I was thinking, I still could not manage my finances out of one bank account. And while splitting my accounts was awesome and helpful, if I still believed that I was never gonna be out of debt and was unworthy of having money, I never was going to be. So when I tied those together and actually worked on the self-worth and the net worth at the same time, that’s when things really kicked off and I got momentum.
Mindy Jensen: Okay, so now I have to ask the question, how many different bank accounts do you have?
Marisa Mae: Ooh, okay, so my ideal, beautiful, favorite system is 2 checking accounts. And then, of course, feel free to customize beyond that, but one checking account where you get paid into, and that’s where all of your bills are set up to autopay out of. Then a second account for spending money, and that’s the card you carry with you day to day, out and about. And then, of course, your other accounts for goals—so whether that’s debt repayment, or having little buckets in an Ally Bank account, or Koho if you’re in Canada—
Mindy Jensen: Mm-hmm.
Marisa Mae: —little buckets for goals, or little savings accounts here and there for other things that you’re saving up for, go for it, whatever. But those 2 accounts is key. So then when you get paid—like when I’d get paid—all I would need to do was, okay, what did I get paid? What do I need for my bills for this period? What do I want to put towards my goals? And then the rest I would just send to spending money. And then all I had to do was open up one account and see what I could safely spend without accidentally overspending into what I needed for my bills. And that helped my neurospicy brain so much, being able to see the numbers.
Mindy Jensen: So let’s talk about your neurospicy brain for a minute.
Marisa Mae: Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: How does ADHD and autism, and just neurodivergence in general, factor into all of this?
Marisa Mae: So heavily. I mean, it’s a really interesting question for me because it’s hard to, on some level it’s even hard to determine because it’s all I’ve ever known. It’s not like, how does having a broken arm impact your finances? It’s like my brain is how I perceive and look at everything. So all I can go off of is the experiences I’ve heard from neurotypical people. But impulse spending is a big part of it. That sense of, I think everyone under the sun can resonate with, oh, I saw that thing, I really want it. And there’s a whole other level when it comes to neurodivergence of intrusive, compulsive, need to spend or buy that thing. Or having, like we experience time blindness of not knowing how much time has passed. Same for money blindness in my experience and working with my clients, of if I can’t see visually what’s going on and I don’t actually have a tangible idea of what’s going on, it’s out of sight, out of mind. It might as well be like quicksand, or, yeah, it’s just having a sense of permanence around what’s actually happening. What are my bills this month? So how much do I have for spending? Like, that mental math just does not compute in the moment. Forgetting to return things, forgetting to— if autopay is not your best friend as a neurospicy human, I request you try it, because remembering to pay that bill, remembering that you’re behind on that bill, which account do I need to pay that bill out of, just all of the little executive functioning things that go into managing finances—it’s a lot.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, it can be. And I think that if you have neurodivergence—I’m not neurodivergent, so I’m trying to use the right words.
Marisa Mae: Please correct me if I’m not.
Mindy Jensen: Yeah, you got it. But if you have neurodivergence, this is not anything to be ashamed of. This is a fact, and you need to embrace this fact and work within—
Marisa Mae: Yeah.
Mindy Jensen: The limitations that it places on you, or the—
Marisa Mae: Is that the difference?
Mindy Jensen: The difference is because, yeah, if you’re gonna forget to pay a bill, that is also a fact. You’re gonna forget to pay a bill, and that’s gonna affect your credit score. Primarily we have an American audience—do they have credit scores in—oh, yeah.
Marisa Mae: Okay, we even use two of the same credit bureaus.
Mindy Jensen: Yay. Okay, so that’s gonna affect your credit score in a negative way.
Scott Trench: Why?
Mindy Jensen: If you know you’re neurodivergent and you don’t want to have a negatively affected credit score, and you have bills that come up all the time, go to your bank, go to your bank’s website, figure out how autopay works. Just sit down every day, sit down and do one bill until they’re all on autopay so you don’t have to think about this. That isn’t placing restrictions on yourself—that’s actually freeing, because I’m sure that when you remember that you forgot that bill, it’s like, oh crud, what is that gonna do to my credit score? How much do I owe in late fees? It gives you more anxiety. Take that away and put it on autopay. I love that. Marisa, what advice would you give someone looking to pursue financial independence?
Marisa Mae: My suggestion would be to find someone who’s done what you are out to do and hone in and try what they’re up to. Like, find that book that really resonates and read it twice, read it cover to cover, read it twice, implement what they suggest, and see if that floats your goat—and yes, I said goat. But give it a shot. Hone in on something and run with it, because something that I hear time and time again from people getting started is that experience of, I know I’m trying to build a puzzle, but I’m pulling puzzle pieces from all these different places, and I don’t even know what the puzzle looks like that I’m trying to build. So whether it’s Mindy, whether it’s me, whether it’s whoever, whether it’s Ramit Sethi, finding that person that you resonate with, their story and what they’ve done, and just hone in on that for a little bit and try it to see if it works for you. And if it doesn’t, try something else. But I think we have a habit of hopping from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing, and waiting for something to just kind of magically work or fix the problem, versus actually diving in on something and doing the work to have it work.
Mindy Jensen: Doing the work is a very important part of that statement that you just made. So I’m just gonna underline it twice, because doing the work is the most important thing. And if you have a blogger that you have stumbled across and you all of a sudden decide, hmm, I don’t really like what they’re saying, there’s another blogger. I talk to people all the time—podcasters, YouTubers, bloggers—and they’re like, ooh, is this space filled? Is it oversaturated? Nope. There’s a voice for everyone. Or maybe there’s not. Maybe there’s a need for—not maybe, there is a need for—someone who understands the neurodivergent mind. I don’t, because I’m not neurodivergent, so I can’t speak to the experiences that a neurodivergent content creator can. My voice isn’t gonna resonate with everybody, and that’s okay. I just want the content out there in the form that someone can understand it. So I love that there are so many voices out there saying similar, sometimes very different things, and find the person that speaks your language and listen to them. I love that so much. Marisa, this was so much fun. Thank you for your time today. It is always good to talk to you. Where can people find you online?
Marisa Mae: Yeah, so on basically any platform you can find me at Financial Badassery. It’s usually financial.badassery, or my website is the same. And just to throw out there, I actually happen to work with mostly American clients right now, so if you’re in the States, don’t let that stop you from reaching out as well.
Mindy Jensen: Oh, I love that. Yeah, I didn’t realize that you worked with American clients too. That’s fantastic. Yeah, definitely check her out—she is everywhere. I Googled Financial Badassery and found a ton of links. They all link to her.
Marisa Mae: That’s me. And tons of free resources as well in there.
Mindy Jensen: Up the wazoo. Resources everywhere. Up the wazoo. That’s awesome. All right, if you like this video, please click the thumbs up and don’t forget to subscribe to this channel for more inspiring FIRE stories like Marisa’s. This is Mindy Jensen signing off.
