After graduating undergrad with no debt, Tameka Vasquez was surprised to learn the complexities of taking out student loans while getting her Master of Science at Columbia University in New York. Vasquez explains how, while she is happy working in Marketing now, she realized that she has based a lot of big decisions in her life based on having to pay down her student debt. When she began her education she had wanted to become a journalist, but after doing the math on her monthly payments, she realized that a career in Journalism would not pay the bills. Instead she pivoted and ended up pursuing business, despite her persistent love for storytelling. Mired in debt after graduate school and frustrated by the high interest rates, she decided to refinance all her loans with a private lender, and now pays off around $1000 a month.

As an adjunct professor at a number of local colleges, she sees that this line of pragmatic thinking is not uncommon. She finds it sad how many bright students are being pushed into the same narrow fields like computer science and law because it provides stable money. Vasquez shares how she thinks this linear mindset overlooks the importance of humanities and interdisciplinary thinking when it comes to innovation, creativity and quality of life.

 

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Transcript

Nikki: This is A Matter of Life and Debt, a show about people in the United States and their student debt. Today’s episode, Passion and A Paycheck. I talk with Tamika Vasquez. A strategist, educator and futurist. We discussed the impact of her student loans on our college choices and career direction. What I found most interesting in our conversation was her observation as an educator. She sees society pushing academically gifted students into the same career paths, and she believes this is limiting people’s future.
This is her story.

Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.

Let’s get into it

Tameka: Sounds good.

Nikki: How much debt do you have right now?

Tameka: I have exactly, and I calculated it right before joining here, I have exactly $77,315 remaining in student loans. So I finished grad school in 2015. And that’s pretty much when I started paying school loans for the first time. And I say that because undergrad was a lot of piecemeal, just a little bit of financial aid, a little bit of just getting help wherever I could. And then just a little bit of just cash and sort of funneling all that through. And then just some credit cards just to pay for your books, things like that.

So I didn’t actually leave undergrad with any. Outstanding student loans. I sorta just kind of got through that and went to a public school. It’s one of the biggest benefits of going to a public city school.

So graduate school was my first time actually going through the student loan process. And so I went through Navient. I think that’s usually the go-to source for all things student loans. And when I finished in 2015, I had $86,000 that I would need to pay back. Um, it was interesting though, because what I did not realize, which I guess we should probably pay attention to the fine print and all that stuff, what I didn’t realize was that each semester that I was in school was subject to a different interest rate.

And so what I had by the end of that is $86,000 that I would have to eventually pay back. But one fourth of that, or one eighth of that was subject to a 4.9 interest rate. The other was subject to a 7% interest rate and they just varied so dramatically that by the time I started getting my adult life together, I had to then just combine that debt into a single private loan.

So now I have a private loan that I was able to get a pretty decent interest rate on. I think at the time I had a 4.9% interest rate, and I recently refinanced that loan. Cause you can do that with student debt, which I learned. So I refinance that loan in January of this year and I got a 3.8% interest rate.

So with that interest rate, you’re able to start paying it down, I think a little bit faster, and also not having to worry about fluctuations in the market. It’s a fixed rate. You treat it kind of like a mortgage. So that’s kind of where I’m at now.

Nikki: What informed your decision to go private?

Tameka: Yeah. So funny enough, it was a career decision that then made me realize like, oh my god, I need to get my adult life together.

Right. So I was in the corporate world and I actually decided to take a break from that and go into consulting. And so I wanted to focus on tech startups, and I was doing like marketing strategy work. So I wanted to be able to be as flexible and as nimble as I could to keep up with like all things startup tech. And I would need it to be able to travel back and forth to places like San Francisco or Austin or Dallas- or wherever there was like a budding tech scene.
And so at the time I realized , okay, I can’t- I can’t not know what’s going on with me financially. And what sparked the research to figure out how to one, combine those loans, and then how to get a fixed interest rate, which was done through this private lender called SoFi.

Nikki: How has student loans impacted your life?

Tameka: In retrospect, it has really impacted my life because I think a lot of the decisions that I made were mainly because you have this kind of looming debt. So a lot of those decisions, whether it’s the certain jobs that I took, what financial decisions I made, how I prioritize, where I spent money- in some ways it’s good because it helps you grow up.

But in other ways, it’s just very limiting. And there is a psychological impact, I believe, when you’re carrying something. When you’re carrying something that you, at one point in your life saw as an investment. And it still is. But the whole reason you went into education was to invest in your future. So how could this investment come back and like, bite me in the ass this way? You know what I mean?

You, you sort of want it to, to pay off. And you believe that it will. And that’s why you go into it. So there’s this kind of mindset in the United States around individualism, right? So, we make individual choices and we have to deal with individual consequences. But I think student loans are actually one of those great equalizers most people have had to deal with, if they pursued higher education at some point in their life. And it’s still interesting that even though it’s this great equalizer, I’ve had comments from friends or people- or if it ever came up in conversation- people may say like, well, you do and have to go and do a second degree. But you didn’t have to go to college.
If you didn’t, if you pursued something that was more skills-based or they make it seem like it’s a choice. And the fact of the matter is, for somebody like me, I come from an immigrant family. Going to college was not a choice. You go to college by default, but more so you’re making an investment into your life.

And so for that investment to not feel like it’s paying off in that regard, I think is a daunting feeling. It does have a psychological impact. It has made me, sort of, second guessed career choices. It has made me prioritize financial pursuit more than I probably would as a person, I’m not motivated by money. But when your student loan is close to a thousand dollars each month, you sort of have to prioritize money.

So, yeah, I- I’d be silly to say that there hasn’t been a noticeable impact. It’s weird too, because I’ve always regarded education as kind of like a public service. It’s like, if people are just more aware of different subject matter and people just had more education, more knowledge, right? The world would be better in many ways, right? Whether it’s just economically better, but also culturally, socially better. And that’s why I find this entire thing confusing because I’m like, I tether between, like, should school be free because it is a public service? It’s a public good?
Or should it cost something because it’s worth something. But, that cost should be something that the average person can pay back within a reasonable amount of time, because just going back to like the breakdown of my loan, and first of all- it’s like so liberating to even say this out loud- it’s like, I’ve never actually said that number before. I’ve never spoken about money in this way, so it’s super liberating. But going back to that figure, that $77K has to be paid back over the course of the next 10 years. Right? So, if I graduated school five years ago, whatever, I should probably be able to pay that back within five years, let’s say. Where you can see the simple cause and effect. I went to school, I got this degree. I was able to navigate into these new opportunities, let’s say just for the sake of this conversation, that should now pay off in a reasonable amount of time. It shouldn’t be that you can- you could carry this debt well into your old age.

There are people that are retiring with student loans. And it’s kind of this, it’s sort of like funny, but not funny, but it’s like something we all joke about. And I just wonder, when as a collective, we would just sit back and be like, yeah, this is not cool. And it’s not normal either for something to take so long to effectively pay off for you.
It just doesn’t make sense. So I think about that too, because there are times where. I think about different pivots or I, at one point I was considering going into academia for instance. And the irony there was like, I would totally love to teach, and I do teach part-time, but I can’t justify teaching, literally giving back to the institutions that gave me what I now have, this knowledge and this pedigree that I have, I can’t even give back to them because I can’t afford to.

That’s crazy.

Nikki: It is. It’s so wild. So I want to know more about your story. Let’s start really early on. What were your hopes and dreams growing up? What did you want to be through? Where you are? Current day?

Tameka: I was born in a country called Guyana, it’s in South America. And I grew up on a small Island called St. Martin in the Dutch Caribbean. So when my family came to the United States, it was mainly because in the Caribbean, you know, we do have colleges and universities and things like that, but they’re not so rampant where like everybody goes and they’re widely available to everybody. So there is still that kind of inequity there. And so a lot of parents really push their kids hard in school, because the hope is you would probably get a scholarship, get to travel abroad, do your education there, come back to your country and kind of very quickly mobilize yourself to like the upper echelon of society because you now have this degree.

So that’s kind of the, the sort of lifestyle and sort of the culture there, especially amongst families that have the means. And my parents, we wanted to get ahead of that. So they pretty much just wanted us to come to the United States at an age where we could fit into the school systems without having so much later in life.

And to also open up opportunities where you can, you can effectively see the world without having to wait until you’re 18, 19 years old, trying to find a job or become a productive member of society. So that brought us to the United States, which is one of the countries that a lot of people immigrate to.

I always wanted to be a journalist. That was my life. I loved writing. I loved stories. I would read any non-fiction book I could get my hands on. Specifically non-fiction because my imagination doesn’t stretch that far. So I liked to- I liked non-fiction because I liked stories of people. I like autobiographies and stuff like that, where there’s like knowledge you can take from it. You can learn, you can apply it potentially.

So that was my thing. I was all about becoming a journalist and then actually the decision- it’s so funny that we’re having this conversation because this literally is what happened when I was graduating high school. I got into all these schools and the opportunities were available to go to college in many different places around the country.
And I ended up staying right here in New York, mainly because when I was looking at those student loan packages and I was looking at financial aid packages, my family was poor, but not poor enough to get me the sort of help that I needed. And so I had to make the decision like a super-conscious decision to stay in New York, go to a public college, which I honestly just did not consider. I didn’t consider staying in New York and I didn’t consider going to a public school. I got into all these other schools and I was like, this would be amazing.

I remember it, so clearly now, was solely because of the financial implication that it would have on my life. My parents were just like, yeah, so what are you going to do? We definitely don’t have the money. So what is your plan? And at that point, the decision was made to stay in New York. So my journalism dreams were not crushed yet because I did a school here in New York called Baruch College. Baruch is the business school

Nikki: Oh yeah!

Tameka: Yeah, of the city university. Go Bearcats.

And so they did have a program in journalism, but it was focused on business. And so I actually thought that was cool because I knew nothing about business. I later learned business had such a sort of influence, if you will, on everything. On culture, on society, on politics, on everything. And I thought that from a storytelling perspective was interesting enough to have me still pursue that.

So I ended up studying communications, sociology. And then I landed two jobs. One was at a startup tech company and the startup tech company I actually, I started interning for them later on. It was a paid internship and I had never had a paid internship cause I was doing all these editorial internships at like, magazines and newspapers and TV rooms and none of them paid. And so my very last year, I decided to do this internship at a startup tech company that just needed a student that could write really well and just happened to have that skill set interning with them, which later turned into kind of like more of a full-time opportunity.

And when I was sort of close to graduation, I did get a job, an entry-level journalism job, but the starting salary was $32,000, I believe. It was like something where I was just like, how do I tell my family who immigrated from another side of the world, gave up everything to be here… I couldn’t justify that.

And so my journalism dreams were effectively killed at that point because I decided, let me keep working with the startup mainly because they were just paying more. There was nothing else in the decision-making process. It was purely and utterly, this is paying me more. It’s going to allow me to do a little bit more than I can do off of $32,000.
And that’s pretty much what happened. But that’s kind of the story of me. I was a nerdy kid. I was into books. I was into chess. I was into just all these,, like nerdy things that would not equate to a career. So for me, the core of it was like, do something that you’re good at, and that will always keep you interesting.

And for me, that would have been writing. It would have been storytelling, journalism, effectively. So that in and of itself is, is kind of the core of why you even started this podcast. It’s like, look at the ways that people’s lives will totally turn around. You kind of lose, and I’m not tooting my own horn, but I’m saying you just lose a talent pool of people that would have the passion, would have the grit, would have the perseverance to see a career all the way through. But from a financial perspective, cannot do it. Cannot afford to do it.

Nikki: I would love to learn a little bit more about like, when did you graduate and what has life been after grad school?

Tameka: I went to college in a very interesting time. So I started college in 2007. So if you recall, 2007 was the year that the first iPhone was launched. 2008 was the market crash. And pretty much our generation’s version of The Great Depression. And so that’s like my sophomore year. And a lot of my friends that were inching towards graduation at that point realized like, oh my god, I probably won’t have a job when I graduate.

So it really does a lot to your mindset when you’re living in an era where technology is now sort of becoming the way of life. You’re texting your friends and you don’t have to pay for that text message because now there’s like unlimited packages available. Or you’re lost somewhere and now you can use maps on your phone. Like it it’s crazy cause we’re not even old, but it sounds like we’re old because so much has happened in a short period of time.
But that’s what was happening at the time. It was a combination of this kind of uprising of technology and technological trends at the same time as a huge market crash that to this day, the effects are still felt. So I think coming out of school- again, you can only say these things in retrospect, because all I know is that I was very nervous and I was very observant of the time that we were in.

And I just wanted to make sure that I would make enough money. It just happens to be that I had a job already that allowed me to use a skill set in a certain way. And that took me into the world of marketing, which is actually what I do to this day. I still do marketing strategy in the tech industry. So to this day, that career has sustained me. But that’s, that’s kind of what was happening at the time.

I mean, we inaugurated our first black President in the United States. So from a cultural perspective, like the world was starting to just like, feel different. And you don’t have the words for it. You don’t have the language for it. But that was the reality at the time, just me being in college. What took me to graduate school was honestly nothing more than just knowing that eventually I probably should get a master’s degree.

It wasn’t really a long thought-out process. I didn’t think about the subject matter in that much detail, if I’m being totally honest. And I hope my academic director doesn’t listen to this cause she’s amazing. But it wasn’t like this love for this topic or- it was purely just , I think at some point I’m going to want to go to grad school. Or I should probably go to grad school and get it out the way.

My mom has a master’s degree. And she’s the only one on both sides of my family that kind of achieved that level. And so I kind of just wanted to make her proud and I wanted to really follow her footsteps in that regard. So for me, again, education is very core to our family and I thought, at some point you’re going to want to do a master’s. Why not do it a couple of years after graduation so you’re not too lost in the corporate world.

And so that’s what I did. It, I still believe, was one of the best decisions I made. I loved school. I loved grad school. I didn’t love undergrad so much, but I loved grad school mainly because of the opportunities that it affords you to pursue a path of research, for instance, or to connect with people who have this wealth of knowledge, who are in various facets of society, whether it’s the public sector, in the corporate world, in academia.

You really just get a very different exposure to the world in grad school than you do in undergrad. So that journey I thought was definitely worth it. I got to go to a pretty decent school. I went to Columbia. But again, that was actually my first intro into having to take out loans. Having to figure out how to juggle school with- I was still working. I was living on my own. I didn’t have roommates to split pills with, but it was my first foray into a lot of things that I really think that particular year was like the year I probably became somewhat of an adult.

Nikki: I’ve heard that from so many people is like, as soon as they had to make those decisions around money or learning about their loans is like, when they felt like they became an adult. So you ended up working at that same company through grad school. Were you paying for school while you were in school or you just took out loans?

Tameka: I just took out loans. Cause most of your payment is going to things like books. I worked for a few different companies, so by the time I had gotten there, I was working for a pretty large company by that point. And I had a small team and things like that. So it was a lot of juggling and just learning how to deal with people, learning how to deal with school, learning how to manage finances.

I 100% lived paycheck to paycheck, like deductions from future paychecks during that time of my life. And I definitely do not want to repeat that ever again. But yeah. It was just like, it’s the coming of age story in the context of America, in the context of a very capitalist society. It’s your coming of age story.
When do you learn about your threshold to handle money, financial decisions and planning? Which is not something I even, like, do really. I don’t plan. I don’t even think more than three months ahead of time at any point in life.

Nikki: We’re not taught how to budget in high school or college, or anything like that. They don’t teach us about how to do taxes. They don’t teach us how to do things that are fundamental to working in society. Math in our curriculum is super old, antiquated and doesn’t help people. And so it’s so confusing. Like why did we don’t teach people things that are important ?

Tameka: Yeah. I mean, not to be like all revolutionary here, but like, truly, if you had an educated population, then what would be those cash cows?

How do you create a sort of predictability when you have people becoming smarter, more adept. And it’s sad, but if people knew how to do these things, then- the fact that you pay to get your taxes done is stupid. Right? But you have no choice. I still pay to this day to get my taxes done, and I know a pretty decent amount about how to do taxes and things like that. And I still pay for somebody else to do it.

So if you felt equipped and you felt like you had the knowledge that you needed to navigate these various sectors of society, then these banks, these institutions, they wouldn’t really have much to work off of.

So it’s in their best interest that we’re spending more time in school learning about igneous rocks and parallelograms than we are about how to file taxes and how to apply for loans.

There’s all this research too on just what- not to be all morbid, but like what mental health then does for the consumer industries, right? Like if you are- ironically, if you feel laden with debt and you’re just like really depressed about the fact that you just have all these financial woes, you spend more money. You just spend more money! You start doing things that are going to make you feel, in that moment, happier. Whether it’s a new pair of shoes or a trip you can’t afford, or multiple dinners out per week. You just spend more money when you’re sad or when you’re, when you feel a little bit more miserable. So it’s all kind of interconnected and it just feeds the same system.

Nikki: That makes… So you just like blew my mind a little. I feel like I knew that already. When you don’t have any money, you actually go into this cycle of scarcity. So you go into cycles and because of scarcity, you end up making worse decisions. I’m really curious about what the United States would look like if we prioritized things, as being human beings. And-

Tameka: What are you talking about?

Nikki: Like what, what the world of the United States- the world of the United States- yeah, that’s right. We are the world of the United States! Um, I wonder what it would look like if mental health, health, all these things were prioritized. We definitely wouldn’t be making as much money, but GDP does not necessarily measure the health of a society. It doesn’t necessarily measure the actual richness of a person’s life. Bobby Kennedy actually said that. Yeah. So, so hopefully we can in our lifetime. Pivot to that pivot to, to a point where, I mean, I don’t see it happening, but I’m trying to stay hopeful. I feel like younger generations, our generation, we care about people. We do deeply care about people. We care about the environment. I mean, I’m not saying everybody does, but I do feel it’s possible.

Tameka: I think about this probably too much, but I do find it fascinating that we struggle to envision a new future. And I’m exactly like you. I’m hopeful, but I’m exactly like that. But I find it strange that we don’t know how to envision something new. Our lack of imagination is what bothers me, I think. Because we see every generation is crazy to the previous generation, right? Like every single generation has done something or a set of things that were fundamentally crazy to the previous generation.

And so there is a raised consciousness amongst the younger people, millennials, gen Z. There is a raised consciousness of consumerism for instance. And trying to be a little bit more minimalist. Trying to be a little bit more mindful of the things that we eat, the places that we go, time we spend online. There is kind of this undercurrent of wanting something different and better.

And I do believe at the core that people are thought of- like, there is a humanistic approach, I believe, within these generations that soon, in many ways, could become just the norm. It could become our default if we allow it to. But I find it sad that simultaneously a lot of us struggle to really envision a future that’s fundamentally different.
Why would it be so farfetched to envision a space where we can have regulation around interest rates, for instance on student loans. Or why is it so crazy to envision a world where people may not even have to go to college necessarily because formalized education would be available in different spaces.

I mean, we kind of already have that. But to the extent that this, that you still have to check that box to be perceived as qualified for something is, is unfortunate. So like, why can’t we envision something different? Because it really, I think a lot of things start with like one person or a group of like-minded people just being like, hey, did anybody else ever notice this makes no sense? How about we do something else?

And then that’s something else eventually in time becomes potentially the status quo. So I don’t see why we are so quick to give that out. We can’t give up that sense of imagination and really creating a future that looks better for more people.

Nikki: I hope we get there so badly.

Tameka: Same.

Nikki: I love that. So before I get into the fourth question, is there anything that you want to sort of like to add that I didn’t ask any questions about?

Tameka: I do have some thoughts as far as like my perspective as an educator too. Because, I just, I’m really sad when students are choosing to kind of follow the same career paths because they see that as- we pretty much have like our quote unquote, best and brightest students all pursuing the same stuff. Because in their mind, if I’m smart and if I’m good at studying and I get good grades, I should be able to go out into the corporate world and make good money. And so they’re all kind of funneling themselves into the exact same careers. And it’s kind of bothering me from an education perspective.

So yeah, it’s definitely something I care a lot about. I think that what we do as a collective is we end up pushing our. Best and brightest students are quote unquote smartest, academically gifted students into the same few career paths. And so if you meet the average kid that was good at school, it doesn’t mean they’re smarter than everybody else, but they were just good at school.

And you ask them, what are you getting into? It’s usually a mix of more and more engineering these days. Every now and then you’ll hear academia, potentially going into public office. But that’s pretty much it, but you kind of drill it down. So I always think about that cause I’m like, if you take all these, all this brain power and just the things that are required to finish school, like your ability to be disciplined and see things through all of that stuff, you take the people that are so equipped to do that, and you put them all into these very few career paths that that’s not serving us much good in the long term.

And so the trend that I’m seeing with a lot of students is because they’re accumulating massive amounts of debt, they want to ensure that the jobs that they’re going to be getting upon graduation are going to pay them a decent amount of money. And so that kind of funnels them all into this very linear thinking. Because it’s not even really about the jobs. It’s just more so like how they understand a career path. I think the understanding of career paths have become significantly more limited because students are taking on more and more debt. And because there’s really no regulation on like tuition and how much it can cost at any given school.

So I see so much potential in them and like, there’s just a passion. They’re interested in things they’re creative. They’re just like curious. Like I see myself in them a lot. But more importantly than just being able to relate to them, I’m seeing that on a societal level, we’re not going to get the outcomes we want. If we’re pushing gifted and talented students into these very linear career paths.

Like I, I can’t tell you, I teach marketing and I cannot tell you how many times I’ve had somebody enter my marketing class and their assumption is that they’re not going to make any money if they were to pursue marketing. The only mindset that might shift is if they have like a specific track of marketing that they know has money in it. So for instance, advertising, and if they could work their way up into being a partner at an ad agency. They all have this certain, not all, but a lot of them have this very linear way of thinking.

And so my job as an educator, at least I believe so for myself, Is beyond just teaching you the subject matter at this point. We gotta take it beyond the subject matter. Now we have to get into how do you take an understanding of this subject matter and be able to apply it in different ways so that you can just open up your options of career paths overall. Because we can’t have this pattern of like everybody now flocking over to computer science and nobody wanting to look into philosophy. Or into sociology or any of the social sciences. We can’t, everybody funneling their energy over to tech and finance and very little into the social sciences that actually breed some of our best ideas. And those ideas benefit the business world. They benefit the public sector. We can’t have that.
And it makes sense a bit frustrated when I see that, because it’s just this linear thinking that’s created when people have to make decisions based on financial outcome. Or at least the perception of financial outcome, instead of like, let me do something that let’s say I’m interested in. Or let me do something that I’m actually really good at. Those should be the leading factors as opposed to let me do something that I know is going to pretty much guarantee a secure financial life.

And I’m not even being idealistic, right? Like I’m not trying to sell this fantasy of like, do what you love. That’s not even my message. It’s like, I’m purely just trying to get people to think and by people, I mean, primarily students and people who talk to me about this, I’m trying to get them to think about just their journey a little bit more intentionally instead of just thinking of like, what’s the job? Because you’re thinking ‘what’s the job’ is it going to make you think of ‘what’s the degree?’ And that life of checking boxes is not sustainable on a societal level.

The domino effect that has, when you have, I don’t have numbers around this, but all these students graduating high school now that are bum-rushing these computer science programs, these law programs, these finance programs. Why? Because they’ve had at this point, a couple of generations of people at the middle-class level be able to go to college. And so they have some precedents to see who was able to do what. But what they don’t have is the sort of context at that age, to be able to say, you know what, I can pursue philosophy, but I can do that in different sectors of society.

I can apply this knowledge and I can apply this skill set into different types of career paths. That’s kind of my message here is like, that’s my mission is to get us out of that linear thinking and out of that ‘check the boxes mindset’ because it’s not going to get us the outcomes on a, like on a scalable level that we need.

We need more creative thinkers and we need people that are interested in people in humanism. We need all of that stuff. We don’t need 10 more lawyers. Like we don’t, and I’m talking like need- of course there’s opportunity, but we don’t need all of our brain power in the same four to five fields, you know, across the country.

Nikki: What advice would you give to your younger self? Knowing what you’ve known now?

Tameka: There are so many things. I mean, my younger self could be as early as yesterday because I’m always kind of reflecting and thinking back to stuff. I think my advice would be, there is an element of second guessing yourself when you’re not totally sure about what you’re saying for yourself.

Let me rephrase this. So like, I would talk to people. This happens to this day, it used to happen when I was a kid. It happened when I was in college. It happens to this day. I’m talking to people and in the midst of that conversation, as you’re navigating all these topics, it becomes so obvious to somebody else what you’re passionate about, or like what you are interested in or what you are very knowledgeable about.

Right? And I think about how many times. I might’ve not been able to pinpoint that for myself. And I think my advice to my younger self would be to really share more and get yourself seen and out there more. Not for the sake of likes. Not for the sake of sort of popularity. But purely for the sake of having an active feedback loop.

Because I think if I had that, like truly, if I was like noticing that if I was capturing that, I think a lot of my path would have sort of decided itself. It would have sort of- opportunities would have come a little bit more naturally to me.

Cause how many times does it happen where we see something and then we second guess our ability to do something? Or, we see something and we’re like, ah, I don’t know if they’ll really get it, and it doesn’t really fit or whatever? And I think it was so important to me to have people tell me ‘you’re smart.’ Or to have people tell me ‘you clearly like this.’ Or to have somebody recommend a book, or whatever.

And I think my advice to my younger self would definitely be to stop being so reserved, so likely to second guess myself and just put yourself out there so people can see you and they can give you the, maybe the reassurance that you need. Or maybe the ideas that you need, or the expertise that you need.

I think I would have saved myself a lot of time if I had done that, because I was just really shy. I was annoyingly shy. And a lot of people didn’t really believe that because when you get me into a topic, I would just like rant. I would rant and like reference things. But it was just because I was a nerd. So I wasn’t thinking about the perfect response or any of that stuff. I was just being myself, but in a very closed one-on-one setting. That’s the only time you would ever really see that come to life. And I just wish that I was less, uh, reserved. But I think it came from a space of second- guessing myself.

Nikki: So what advice would you just give to others about sort of like debt or any. Sort of thing from all the knowledge that you’ve gained.

Tameka: Right. So do everything I didn’t do. And then don’t do the things I did do. I would, I don’t know. I mean, I would say like, definitely understand things from a systems level.

It’s one thing to understand how do I do my taxes? Or like, how do I apply for a credit card? It’s one thing to have that knowledge and you totally need that knowledge. But like, for me, it’s been way more impactful on my life to understand how these things work systematically. Because once you understand that, you sort of can find ways of cheating the system, right?

I actually would have never known refinancing was a thing until I sort of just learned how it works from the perspective of it just being a loan, right? Like it’s not a student loan, it’s a loan. So if you look into loans, there’s always ways to negotiate it. There’s always ways where it’s subject to the fluctuations of the market, blah, blah, blah.

So some people, this is going to seem like total common sense, but you have to understand for, for me and for a lot of people, we don’t know that. And so just kind of becoming a little bit more well-versed in how things work.
And I think this goes across everything. Like if you had asked me, what’s my advice in general, I would say learn how things work. Understand how things are set up. Understand how things are set up from a systems perspective. Right?

Like, what are the things that fuel the industries that we’re in? What are the things that fuel everything we talked about in this conversation? What are the things that fuel the trap that we may feel. And if you understand that you can sort of work your way around that.

And I think just also just not being afraid of it, because quite frankly, you just got to dive into this stuff half the time and just take on things. If there’s anything I’ve learned is things don’t have the permanence that we treat things with. So you just need to be able to dive in. Take on the things that you feel are relevant to you and the things you want to achieve in life. But do so in a way where you understand how the systems work so that the systems don’t beat you down.

Nikki: That is amazing advice. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciated this conversation. It was really lovely.
Tameka: I loved it. I love this topic and I love that you’re doing this

Nikki:  Matter of Life and Debt is produced by me Nikki Nolan.  

Special thanks to Efe Akmen for creating the music and mastering the audio. 

Additional support and thanks to Sarah Thibault  who writes the information and transcripts about each episode. 

This podcast would not have been possible without them. 

Visit our website for more information matteroflifeanddebt.com, where you can listen, read transcripts, get additional context of the subjects you just heard about, and subscribe- absolutely for free. That website again, matteroflifeanddebt.com. Thanks again for listening.

 

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