Nicole Espaillat: A money story of debt, yoga, and buying a house.

Nicole Espaillat

has an art history degree, 10 years of experience working in the art world, and is now a full time yoga instructor who is going back to school for accounting. She is learning to do taxes at Sunlight Tax. Nicole generously agreed to share her personal money story: She went from $100,000 in debt and living on food stamps to owning her own home and getting her money under control. Now she is learning accounting, so that she can teach money skills to people like her.

Hannah: So Nicole, tell us the basics.

My pronouns are she/her, I’m based out of Baltimore, MD for the last four years.  I am working on finishing my degree in accounting--that’s my quarantine “baking bread” project. It’s a long haul project, but I went back to school officially during quarantine. I am an area manager for Core Power Yoga - that is my nine to five. I also teach yoga at a couple mom and pop local studios. I also do bookkeeping for an outspoken artist collective in Baltimore: NomuNomu.

I have been doing art since I was eighteen--my first job was in an art museum. It was the only thing I knew--the dysfunctional world of art. I moved to Baltimore after the Trump election. I was searching for a place that is more authentic. I ended up working at Hamiltonian Artists in DC. That’s half an art Foundation and half gallery--they award grants to ten artists for two years for mid-career/emerging artists after they graduate. They teach how to set up an exhibition , how to make a catalog, all the things. 

I met you because we hired you to give a Taxes for Artists talk at Hamiltonian. Of all the things we did for artists there, this was the one I felt was the most impactful. Everything you were saying--it blew my mind that these are the things you need to succeed in the world--and it feels like a byproduct of this system that makes finances and money difficult to grasp--as if it’s actually on purpose, and people are in the dark. I loved how you broke it down for everyone. I kept seeing all these light bulbs going off for people. I sent you an email after your talk and told you that I wanted to do what you do.

I ended up leaving Hamiltonian Artists to be a full time yoga teacher. At that point, I was able to live off of credit. Up until then, i was making money, and I was able to rack up credit card bills but pay them off. I didn’t feel the full burden of it all until I left my job making good money, and went to yoga, making $300/4400 every two weeks as a yoga teacher. I was making a little more than minimum wage, but my take home pay was about $200 a week. 

I had to get on Medicaid and food stamps. I had to live off the system. I have a degree, I was born in this country, I speak English--all these things are to my advantage. I grew up in a first generation household. We were poor, but we had what we needed. This was the first time in my life I was broke.  I didn’t know how I would eat. I would go to the grocery store and get rice and tuna. That was very very hard. 

I eventually got promoted to be the assistant at the yoga studio. My pay checks went from $350 every two weeks to $600 every two weeks. It was a little more, but even so, I couldn’t do anything. I was trapped. I couldn’t pay the interest on my credit cards. I was rock bottom financially. I was in $35,000-$40,000 of credit card debt. That was due to trying to keep up with the Joneses. Yoga teacher training is cost prohibitive--yoga teachers usually come from privilege. You can’t make that little money and pay that teacher training off.

On these credit cards, the interest was high--I had about five rotating cards. I maxed them out until I couldn’t pay them. Each card was $500-600 month in just interest payments. This didn’t include rent or car, etc. I got some help from my mother, but it was like, “you need to get another job.”

I was in a bad place financially. It took a huge toll on my mental health. I was getting up at 4 am, working all day, teaching all day. Yoga teachers make about $20 per class. I was making $10.75/hour, and this was before taxes were taken out. 

It took a huge toll on every part of my life--I couldn’t see my friends, and any bit of money I had went to pay off these credit cards. What finally shifted things was Covid. For the first time in my life I was able to get assistance on my bills because of relief help. I got into a debt management program. Not debt consolidation. This company literally just takes over your payments. I can’t use them/touch them or open new lines of credit. They are like, “you can’t do this on your own, we are going to do it.” They cut it all off. That was step one--getting the credit card under control. This was just before quarantine. The deal was $800/month in credit card payments. They handled distribution, negotiated all the credit down to like 4% from the 20%. My payment was now $800 per month instead of $3000. 

But I still wasn’t making a lot of money. I was picking up side gigs. I was selling my plasma, taking side gigs, getting two hours of sleep per night. 

Hannah: That sounds exhausting.

Quarantine happened. I was able to negotiate no rent payments. My building was not up to code, so my rent was covered. I was able to catch up with stimulus payments and grants. I wrote myself grants - I took that skill I have from my art world training. I got money for that. In March I got laid off from my job. I was able to collect unemployment. For the first time in a couple years, I was making 3-4 times more than I was making before. That saved my life--making more money.

That changed it all. At the end of the day, the only thing that was going to get me out of the hole was making more money.

I negotiated half a car payment. So I had a car payment of $600, credit card payment of $800, rent payment of $1000, and this is just covering transportation, home and debt. It doesn’t cover my student loan, consolidation loan, nothing. I was negative almost $100,000 in my life in October 2019, making $300 per week. And that’s with a college degree. 

I was talking to my mom like, “how do you get ahead in this country?” The only way I could do it was help. I got help from the government. It caught me back up.

I know that Covid was really hard for a lot of people. But for me that had nothing to my name, getting stimulus, unemployment, and having the companies I owed money to slightly sympathetic to my situation--I was able to slowly slowly catch up. Meanwhile we’re going through this social revolution,  the end of a crazy presidency, George Floyd, those conversations, and in the fitness world, there were conversations about equity issues there. I was able to go back to work for double the pay I had been making. They basically matched unemployment. [Because of conversations about equitable pay in the yoga/fitness industry].

This was a big pay bump--a liveable wage. Now I was getting $1000 per paycheck, up from $300 the year previous. All this debt, the debt management program, I get financial relief--it helped me breathe again. 

 And we have a good friend of the family, who has no kids or grandkids. I call her my fairy godmother. She decided she wanted to buy me a house. She gave me $100,000 to buy a house. I wasn’t allowed to use it to pay off debt, or anything else. I live in Baltimore, where that can buy you a place. I put in an offer on a small lovely condo.

When it rains it pours. With a lot of luck--I was lucky that in my field there was a revolution about pay and compensation.. At the end of last year, I got promoted to be the manager of it all--my company and the region. I now make a bigger salary than I had in DC. I was also able to get grants for going back to school. A lot of things fell into place. After a lot of hard work and suffering, and only with a huge support system.

Hannah: So where are you today?

In October 2015, I had $100,000 in debt. Today, I have $45/50,000 in debt plus the asset of a home. Now that I know what I know, I wish I didn’t have to go through those things. This is why I love Sunlight Tax. So much of what we know about money is programmed subconsciously. Now I can pick up bookkeeping work. That has also helped. My mental health is better. I can feed me and my dog--I can now go to the grocery store and buy what I need.

Hannah: So what do you tell your friends now?

I tell people don’t get into credit card debt. You can maybe make the minimum payment, but when you have a whole college degree of debt on your credit card, you are going to screw yourself over. You are not going to catch up.

I am so over financial institutions. I tell everyone get a credit union at least. I love that they pick up the phone. They have the best interest rates. It’s like a co-op - you have say and control in what they put their money into. That helps a lot.

Living above your means is so tempting, especially when you’re young, and you want to do the same thing your investment banker friends do. It doesn’t help either that I’m from Miami. Everyone there is in so much debt. The average income there is $35,000. They have a fancy car, designer shoes, go out to fancy meals, buy $600 vodka at the club. 

It’s insane how much I had to struggle just to get to this point right here. Still with debt. But hopefully in about a year, that will be gone.

It was all help. I finally got help. You can have universal income, you can have free healthcare. The government just chooses not to.

Any extra money I get goes to my credit cards. Then my student loans.

“Buy in bulk” doesn’t help when you don’t have the money to buy even one roll of toilet paper. It costs you so much money to be poor. A bank can tell you you can’t get a house because you can’t afford the $800 mortgage payment, but they turn around and expect you to pay $1600 in rent. They just don’t value people - if they did, this behavior doesn’t make sense.

Just to exist in the world, there is a cost to live. Just to live in a house. Doing taxes, you see how many deductions and exemptions and credits you can get from owning a house - but only if you can get from this point. No 28 year old is just buying a house.. Especially with a 20% down payment.

I’m frustrated with the way the world is. It has been so hard for me, I can’t even imagine how hard it is for people who don’t speak English, or have all these benefits.

I can’t believe how hard it is to apply for benefits. I nearly gave up because it felt impossible. I had to get signatures from 10 landlords. It was a very demoralizing/dehumanizing experience. You have to tell everyone around you that you’re applying for food stamps. It’s really hard. And I live in an easy state - Florida, I have friends who can’t even get the unemployment they are owed. For people who have never had it hard, they just don’t get it. If I had kids - I don’t even know what I would do.

I want more people like me to be in the art world. This is layered. I love the art world, but it is so exclusive. A person of means, a person who can afford to have internships and make their way in that art history art pipeline. I want to be one of the voices to say “no, these other people should also be valued.” The things that add joy and value to your life aren't investment banking. I want people who bring humanity back into the world to be valued and compensated just as much as a money-maker (stock broker, hedge fund manager, etc). I want people in these roles--health and fitness, art--to have money knowledge so they can keep doing these things in the world, so they don’t have to leave. To give them the tools that rich white people use who have money to pay people to tell them what to do. I want to do that for people who don't have the background or the pedigree. I want to tell my friend, “don’t put that education on a credit card.” Teaching people how things snowball, and you have to live within your means. Right now, I don’t even need a budget - I pay my bills, then what is left over is what I have. But one day, I want to save more. The financial help I read in magazines doesn’t help you if you don’t have money to begin with. 

There is a huge amount of the population that lives like that--a dog chasing its own tail. But how do you get more money? How do you get it in your hands, and then what do you do with it? And how is it taxed?

I feel like I can speak to those people who are like me.