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Me van a regañar, but I am in debt. I started off the year with no debt, and then now I have quite some debt, and I want to share that with y'all. I want to do kind of like a financial check-in because a lot has been going on this year. I've been buying properties, I've been spending money, I've been swiping, and maybe in a little bit of debt, actually, not a little bit, but quite some of that. And I want to share that with y'all and talk about like how I got there, what happened, how I'm going to pay it off, and all of that. So I want to just do kind of like again a financial check-in with y'all, and I'm gonna share what I owe, how much I owe, and it's gonna be rough numbers because some of it of this debt has been getting chipped away throughout the year. But I kind of want to share what all went in there, why I got into this debt, what was my mindset, because some of it was like I was just having fun and just wiping, okay? And it happens, but I want to kind of like share what my my mentality was, why I was okay with just letting myself get into debt, why I felt comfortable doing it, and just share that with y'all because I think it's important to see and be transparent, and that way it helps y'all in your own journey or in the future if you find yourself in this situation, because it doesn't matter when you are financially stable, financially free, work optional, however you want, lean fire. There's so many different labels, but but yet I still get myself into some predicaments, and now I'm having to figure it out. And husband and I are like figuring it out and creating our plan on how to knock it out. So, actually, before we get into this episode, don't forget to like and subscribe, share this episode because let me tell you, it's a struggle to grow, especially on YouTube. It's a struggle to grow with the algorithm, being a small creator, and yeah, it really helps if you interact, especially with all this AI-generated content that's on YouTube and out there, not so much on the podcast platform. I don't see an effect there yet, but yeah, just interacting in whatever way helps us grow. And again, you can always sign up for the newsletter, my email list. I always send stuff out, resources. I not only just share money cheese and my real estate stuff, I always try to share other things. Like recently, I collaborated in a smart ass women uh collaboration, and so that's still going on if y'all ended up signing up on that or not through my email list. But also, like for example, Janice from Yo Kiro de Nero is crowdfunding, and I send stuff like that. And my friend Lucy is releasing her book in October, and so just stuff like that. So if you want to be in the know of not just of money cheese men, but just cheese me of the Latina community in general, because we all collaborate, we grow together. So I always want to make sure that I share their stuff as well. So I'll definitely sign up for the email list. But let's get into the episode. Let's first talk about I wouldn't say at the beginning of this year for reference purposes. I want to start my year off. It's kind of technically at the beginning, or I would say the middle of last year to August of this year. I'm gonna count that as the year, right? And the reason for that is because last year I left the military, I got out, and I didn't get a job or nothing like that. So I want to start it off there because that's kind of the starting point of this journey so far. So when I'm talking about the year, just know that I'm talking about from August of last year to basically kind of now. And so I have a few, I think I mentioned it, I forgot where, what episode. If I find it, I'll link it below. But I shared of how the steps that I did to ensure and prepare myself to not have to work. At least at that time, it was just to not work for six months, maybe a year, because I really just needed a I just need to decompress, I needed to just take a breather because military life is rough, it's just a lot that goes into it, and I did enjoy my time there. The last few years were a little bit like up in the air, but that was because I was going through my own issues with infertility and all that stuff, so but it was a fun time that it benefited, like I got lots of benefits from it. My GI Bill and I get a paycheck from them now, which has allowed me to become lean fire basically, on top of my real estate investments that basically pay my mortgage at this point, right? I've accumulated enough cash flow for that, and then my husband he served too, so then he has his paycheck, and then he still works because that's what he wants to do, but he's also work optional, but you know, that gives us a little bit. So I want to kind of set the scene for that. That when I started last year, I paid up off all our debt, like we even paid off his car and all of that, and because we knew we were going to have a reduction of income, right? Because I made over six figures in the military, and so did my husband, and then we both got out, and he at that time I think it was not close, and we were going to down to one income, and this was before the military paycheck, so paid off all our debt, and so we were debt-free. Well, that kind of started a little bit of the journey, and we were careful, right, with everything. I didn't get a car, I still don't have a car, which I will talk about that in a little bit later in the episode. But I did have the mentality that I would end up purchasing a car, which would mean a car payment and then debt, of course, right? But I realized I didn't really need a car this past year because my sister ended up moving on to the family compound, right? If y'all don't know, I live on combined 20 acres. We each have 10 acres that we own. My parents own their 10 acres, but they're right next to each other. That's basically a 20-acre compound. And so my sister is with their land, they bought the land together, and then me, my husband and I did this one. So she has a paid-off car, and we all work from home. She's a social media manager. My husband works from home, and then, of course, I do this and do our real estate investing, and then I just go to school, which is additional income that I get too because of my benefits from my post-9-11 GI bill, right? I get money during the time that I am actively enrolled in school, right? So that was one of the benefits. So, of course, I'm using that to my max benefit, and so I'm using that to like additional income to invest. So, with that in mind, because I knew I was doing that, I was like, okay, so we're good technically, we're debt-free, we don't have no debt, we have income coming in. I'm going to go to school and I'll have that, whatever. So, the first debt that we ended up getting was when we moved in. Of course, a few months later, we started shopping for furniture. That's one thing that you have to kind of account for when you are purchasing a house, it's not just a mortgage payment. You want to have money for furniture, decorations, painting, all of that. So I wasn't yet into the decorating phase yet, but I knew we needed a table and I knew we needed a couch, and so we went and we got that. We also had the mattress that now I gave to my sisters because now we just picked up this king size mattress from my parents the other week, and so that was the debt that we had, right? And I think that was like the furniture was like six thousand, and yeah, I think that was total about six a little bit under seven thousand, right? And the thing at that time, I am 100% down with having it finance, especially when it's zero percent financing, it like zero percent financing hates to see me coming. Let me tell you that, because that we will grab it and we do it responsibly too, right? Because it's usually a year, maybe two of zero percent financing. So the first thing we always do is calculate how much those payments are to exactly end at the year mark or the two, whatever the term is, right? So we do those calculations and make sure that we hit that timeline. So we did the zero percent, so then that added a monthly payment of how much was it? Maybe like two hundred dollars, three hundred dollars. Okay, cool, easy. Not a big deal because again, we were debt-free at the time. Well, then my husband's he wanted to buy something else that we did need, and that was the UTV that we use because where I live, our driveway is super long, which means that the trash is at the very end at the street, and like walking the trash or having to take the truck, it's like plus, we drive it around and do random tasks here on the land. Let me tell you, owning land, there's a lot of work constantly. You have to cut down stuff, big trees, branches fall in random places when it rains, like it's just a lot of work. So the UTV was something that we needed. Plus, to be able to get to the back of the property, like you need some thicker tires because yeah, uh, you want to make sure you have that. So he went and got a UTV that was just under $10,000, right? So now we're at like what what did I say? Only $17,000 in debt. That was also zero percent financing for I think the first year or two, it was just the first year, so and with that, we were in the mentality of that we were going to pay it off, right? Like, easy. We don't have no debt, we're going to just put extra money there. Well, this is how easy it can kind of snowball and just get out of control, but again, we didn't panic because we're very in tune with our management. Yes, it might go a little bit out of our budget and all that, but then we usually be like, All right, we need to slow down and pay some stuff off, right? Well, at that time we needed to get gravel to do our parking pad, we needed to add gravel to that long driveway because there was kind of like a low area to where we like when it was raining and earlier this year, like bastante yubia, like so much water that would accumulate in those low spots, and so then you're driving through it, and your car could get stuck. So we had to hurry up and put that, and then we had some clearing that we had to do as well, and we don't have the brush hogs or anything like that, so we had to get our contractor, which luckily he lets us pay sometimes in payments, so he just did a job for us recently. Was it? I think it was the brush hog, and I just sent the payment this morning to just pay it all out, right? And so, but throughout that time, when we first got the first two debt, the UTV and the furniture, we're like, okay, we could easily pay this off, right? Because we don't have debt that all that can go into paying this off early, fast, whatever. Then life likes to life, and so then we had all these extra expenses that didn't put us in a bind or anything, but it definitely set back the plan of paying it off, like right away, right? Because we're like, we'll pay this off, like the furniture and whatever. We really focused, we'll pay it off in a few months, right? All my income can just go, and especially this was after then I got my my check from the military. Then I was like, Oh, okay, easy, we could pay it off. Well, then that happened, and that pretty much was the end of 2025. So then we came into 2026 with that debt of just the furniture and the UTV, and originally we wanted to pay that off, but you know, we had these other expenses for the property, right? Because there's so much that we needed to do, and so we were fine with that. That's okay. Not to mention we had to travel to visit his family, so that's extra expenses because that's some stuff, and then going into the spring time, then we had a few extra expenses because just of all the rain, we had to create the chicken coop, we had to. Oh, we built the porch, so that was another expense, but that was we paid in cash, so that wasn't a debt, but that was another layer of why the original debt didn't get fully paid off. We were still making payments, monthly payments on this debt, but new projects would come up, and then we're like, Well, we were gonna make like an extra payment or two this month, but we want to get this porch done because you know it's hot, we need to sit out there or whatever, and the dogs need an area to relax or whatever, and it was nice around that time too. So, to sit out on the porch. So we needed that plants, dirt, like it's just like extra expenses didn't again put us in the buy, but it really set back the original plan, and so that's how we just kept going. And then that brought us into March. And mind you, during this time, I'm still saving money on the side to invest in properties because 2025 I didn't buy anything because I was stabilizing, we were focused on paying down our debt in preparation of both of us leaving or military career, right? So we did that, and side note, another reason that I ended up like being okay with this debt was that the Navy still owed me money at this time, they still owe me money as of when I'm recording this, but I'm fighting that battle. I don't know if I'm gonna win that battle because they're really trying to kind of nitpick a document. But basically, it's like they're just nitpicking the date that I got my last promotion, right? So there's some money there that they owe me, but I'm having to fight that fight, and so far I think it's looking good, but I think they're really trying to jump through hoops to find a way to not pay me. So we'll see how that goes. But during that time, I had been told that I was getting this money, which is a large chunk of change, so that was another reason why I was okay with the debt because I was like, Well, this money I will knock out a big portion of the U TV and stuff like that, and then easy peasy will pay off the rest, right? So, but mind you, it's been a year later, and I still haven't seen that check. I'm still finding it, and we'll see how that plays out because that would be nice to get that check and just go ahead and pay off some of this debt that I'm gonna talk about that it kept accruing. So then that brought us to March, and again, I had that extra money, but again, I wasn't thinking of like paying off this debt because they try to separate my investments with like the family budget, so that was family money over here for the debt, the stuff that we're doing, and then on the side that was from the rental properties, they just accumulate when I get enough for the next down payment. Then I go and buy another rental property. So I had the money, I ended up buying a property in March, which needed some more rehab, and I used some of my funds with the mentality still of hey, I was gonna I was gonna get this check from the Navy, right? So it's fine, it's fine, right? I'll just use my credit cards for points, blah blah blah. So that property ended up maybe in about 20k, probably a little bit more, but just to get it ready to go and stuff, I did 20k for that, which my husband gave me some of that money to be able to pay off these credit cards and stuff, and some of them I'm still paying them off with the rental income and some additional income. So we have that from that debt as well, because there was a lot of stuff. So that was May, right? And then so stabilizing that property that got me into 20k debt. I was able to like just start chunking away at that debt, and so I still owed, I think I still owed like 12 now or so, but I just sent some money there, so we'll talk about that in a second. And so that was that one again, not panicking. I'm like, okay, we got a plan. I've been told so many times that I was gonna get this paycheck from the Navy, but each time that I got really close and they told me, like, yeah, it's over there, and they just gotta pay it out or whatever, then it got kicked back and said, Where's this paperwork or whatever? Like, I'm so over this, and it's only because it's a large sum of money that I am still being the squeaky wheel. I'm gonna squeak, squeak, squeak until I get that money because it's money that's owed to me. It's just I'm fighting a lot of people on my entitlement, so not very fine. But so not stressing out at this time, and so then I was like, okay, well, we'll be fine. We're gonna have the rental properties and pay that. So the goal was those rental properties were going to pay off that 20k in deb, right? All fine and dandy. And my 40th, I decided like, you know what, I'm gonna I'm gonna go a little bit big, take my family to Medina, Mexico, and have some fun out there, spend a week over there for my 40th birthday because like you only turned 41s, right? And so I did, but that was more. That was like I think in total 7,000 because of the flights and all that stuff, which I put on credit cards, and some of it I used points, so I was able to bring that down. But while I was there, I kind of like spent. If y'all saw that my vacation video and my haul and stuff, I kind of went overboard on excursions, on souvenirs, and just food and all that stuff, and I don't regret because I was like, you know what? That's fine because I'm able to pay these things, right? I'm able to pay all this stuff off. And that's what I kept, and that's what got me in trouble because I kept saying, like, I'm fine, like I have plenty of income to be able to pay these things off because I'm I don't have debt, even though I did, but I think in my mind is when I accrued a debt, I also attached an income that was going to pay that off. So, like the 20k in debt for the rental property that I bought in March, I attached the rental income, and that was gonna pay that off. The UTV that we got, my husband's income was going to pay that off. The furniture as well, like husband and my income was going to pay that off. And my vacation, I paid some of it in points, and then I was like, okay, some of like my income, and I'm going to start school in August, so I'm gonna get extra income as well, and that's going to get linked to that debt. So as I grew debt, I had in my mindset of which set of income was going to pay that debt off, right? So, but that's where that kind of just ended up kind of not necessarily biting me in the butt. It's just kind of like I should have slowed down a little bit. I don't regret like none of the things because I use the UTV almost every day. I obviously I use my furniture every day. Vacation made so much memories. I took my mom and my sister, my daughter, my stepson, and my husband, and we just had a blast out there. So, like, all of that was worth it. I don't so I'm okay paying on it. And what I don't like is that I'm paying interest on it, which the idea was not to pay interest, but that's where I failed at right there. But I was like, you know what? Like, that's cool, that's fine. I'm getting my properties turned over to me to where I'm self-managing. That means that's gonna be more income because I'm no longer paying the property manager. That's an extra $600 that was going to a property management company that now is going to come to me, and now that's extra money that I could use to pay off this debt. I'm getting extra funds now, right? So, again, debt, and then there's an income attached to it that's going to pay it off. Well, the thing is that I ended up having another deal fall into my lap. It literally fell in my lap because I was, I mean, I wasn't really looking for another property, right? But I wasn't planning to use that much funds. I was going to try to do a kind of like a flip. Maybe I was gonna keep it depending. So I was looking for a rehab where I would just have to put 10% down, which would have been so much less than what I usually use as a down payment, which I usually do 20%, but I found a hard money lender and I was gonna go that route. And I talk a little bit more in detail about this deal that I did. In my real estate achievement podcast. So I share more about that journey over there. So if you're interested in more of the details of everything, then definitely go check out the real estate podcast that I have. But basically, I had a rental property, a deal fall into my lap. I had a seller that sold me another rental property a year prior and was like, hey, I got two more properties. Do you want one of them? And I sent my realtor out. Great cash flow potential and all that stuff. And I said, sure. So I did. Went for it and had to raise some money. Uh again, I talk about how I raised that money in another episode on the real estate cheese mess side. Try to link it down below. And let me tell you, it was a kind of chaotic journey for that. But that put me a little bit behind. Not because I got myself in more debt. Well, no, I did because of I needed to pay the appraisals and stuff like that. And I hadn't gotten the money from the rental properties yet. So I put that on my credit card, and I needed $700 for an appraisal and another $500 for what do we call it? The property inspection. And then so that kind of got put on the credit card as well, but that's already done with. In that same month, which was actually last month, we were doing a refinance for my current house because we needed to get out of this 8% interest that we had of a construction slash turned into conventional loan, had such a high interest rate, and we wanted to put it into a VA loan, but that cost us some money, and we needed some termite treatment just because we have a lot of agricultural termites around here. So the lender was like, I want you to do termite treatment, right? Then we needed another survey because the original survey was just the raw land, so we needed to have to do another survey that actually showed the house and stuff on here, and then we also needed another appraisal for that, which that one was nice because we found out that we got quite some equity on this property, so that's nice. But we needed to pay the termite and the survey out of pockets, so that was like a $1200 and I think another like $600 or something like that, plus appraisal is another $700 or something like that. So all that again added to the credit card because we were expanded like from just doing all these payments, right? And so we ended up getting all of that debt I closed on my new rental property, and so that's done. So far, don't have any things that I need to do besides just like getting it, it's already pretty much moving ready, but that's pretty much it. So I already have a tenant in there, so that's good. So let's talk about it. Kind of like to recap, we have the furniture debt, we have the UTV debt, we have the debt from the rental property that I fixed up between March and April. Then we went on vacation, so that was another $7,000, and then we had various things out here that we had to pay, and that didn't become a debt, but you know, it prevented us from paying off our current debt, and so we have that, but again, I've been like kind of like we've been chipping away at all of it. So right now, I think we still have well, before this month, we had I still had at the MX, I had like 7,000, and then another 7,000 in my other two accounts, so that's 14, and then I think my husband had the UTV, we still owed 8,000, and then the furniture we still owed 3,000, right? And then I think my husband had said that he still had like 2,000 in his personal cards, so an estimated $27,000 in debt that we ended up having in total. So I want to get into like what our plan is, and some of it has already been executed this morning because I got my paychecks, and then he did so. Want to go a little bit into kind of like our income in total. We get about 15,000 monthly income that comes from my husband's job, and then from my school, I included the management income that comes from my rentals. It's not including the extra just because again, I usually just keep it on the side to just kind of accumulate, then reinvest into another rental property. But I am trying to pay myself a property management fee at least, so I can start paying myself. So I'm saying like $800 a month, so that's that, and then my school plus like our other paychecks that we get from the military. So you can see why we have a combined income of $15K, so that's good, and so now we just gotta start chipping away. So because this is mostly my debt, you know, I sent some money already to my Amex, and then my husband's putting some into that, and then because we refinance, where we don't have a mortgage payment this month. I also don't have a mortgage payment for the property that I just closed on, so I have that rental income that is going to be there, but I'm gonna use that as a cushion to start building up my emergency funds as well for that, and then from my school and my own paycheck, then I'm paying off my other personal credit cards that I said that I still had about $7,000. So that I already sent $3,000 to it. Oh, side note we had another thousand left for some of the the work that we had our contractor do of clearing out stuff over here. So I still owed him a thousand dollars, sent that to him. So now we're good for him. Don't owe him anything. And then so now my debt for my personal credit cards is going to come down to $3,000 that I owe still there, and then for my Amex, I'm still going to owe I think another $3,000. So because I think we're paying like $4,000 this month on that, so then that's gonna bring us down to $6,000 between my Amex and my personal cards, which is that again, that's from like vacation, that's from my rental property rehab, and then on his side, because he had to pay some stuff out of pocket for my rehab as well. Again, he has that $2,000 there. So he says he's going to pay some of that, he's gonna chip away on that. I forget how much he said he's going to put on there. I would assume like another three, four thousand dollars there, so that's already ten. I think he's gonna put another four thousand. So that brings us to ten. So we pay off this month about ten thousand dollars of our debt, and we what did I say? We were at twenty-seven. So now we are at 17k that we still would have. Did I do that math correctly? Let me go back because yeah, because the UTV is what's kind of like bringing our stuff up there, so yeah, but I also have some other funds. I haven't done the bookkeeping for my rental properties, so whatever is left over is probably another like 2, 3K, and then that's gonna get go into paying off some of the credit cards too. So I expect to come down to maybe 14k, maybe 13k that we are left after October to pay off, and so gonna continue doing that and use just all of my income to pay off our debt, and so by the end of the year we should be debt-free again, as far as consumable debt, right? Because I still have a lot of debt, like I'm almost like at a million of mortgage loans that I owe. So, but again, I have rental income community, so yeah, so that's where I'm at currently. So I'll try to do another one at the end of the year, kind of like financial check-in to see where I'm at with this debt, because I have to travel in November to go to visit family. Then you got the holidays, but we usually don't go crazy with the holidays, but this year is going to be my first Christmas year, like technically last year was, but we ended up going to his family's to spend Christmas, and this year I want to, you know, spend Christmas here, so I might buy some decorations and stuff like that. But the goal is that by the end of the year I should be done paying off all the debts, so I start off next year with the clean slate again because I also have some things that I need to get done. I need to buy a car now because my sister, even though she works from home, now we're kind of having a little bit of scheduling issues because I go to school, but she needs to go do her own things and she wants to go explore it and do her own thing. And I also want my own car because I gotta do stuff. I'm going out into San Antonio so much more than I originally thought, and so again, I don't want to use up her car, and I need a car too, but I'm going to have to get a car loan more than likely. I'm gonna try to take advantage because right now they got some deals of like really low financing. So if I could swing that, but the car payment's gonna be pretty high. So the goal is that I need to get another rental property because my rental properties right now can pay the mortgage, so I need some additional ones to pay the car note and insurance. So that's how I've been doing it. When people ask me like how to get started in real estate and what strategy, whatever, I was like, stop worrying about. I think too many people get lost in the big picture. Oh, I need $10,000 worth in cash cash flow to be able to become financial free, and then that gets overwhelming because then you start going to try to find a deal that gets you like the maximum, and then you realize, hey, you know what, that's not a good deal because I want this high cash flow, so that way I don't have to get as many properties or whatever, and that stops a lot of people because they get overwhelmed with that. And so I would say just pick a bill and then go, kind of like how I've been talking about with my debt. Like, if I accrue a debt, I have to have an income to go pay that off, right? And so, same thing with rental properties, pick a bill, like your electric bill, which is one of the higher ones, right? Let's say my electric bill is like $400, like it's expensive. So, knowing that it's like okay, $400 a month of electric, and that's in the summer, right? So, I need to find a property that's going to give me around $400 in cash flow, and now I go buy that property, and then now I have cash flow that's going to pay off that bill. Now, obviously, we have to put money into it and invest, but when we're thinking about like becoming financially free in the future, that's how you start navigating that okay, let me get this property to pay this bill, and so that in five, ten years, I've accumulated enough properties for each expense that I have, and now I don't have to work, right? And so that's how I want people to think about like real estate investing. Stop trying to go for a property that's gonna give you like $900 in cash flow, or I need to do this, or why, because then it gets overwhelming. And so, anyways, that's my little tangent with that side note with real estate. And I've gone too long. But what are your thoughts? Are you surprised that I'm that much into debt when we talk about real estate and all that stuff, and I'm financially free, but I have all this debt and all that stuff. So, what are your thoughts? Let me know down below. And other than that, don't forget to look in the show notes for resources and anything that I talked about in this episode. And I do have a free template for budgeting to track your expenses and net worth and stuff like that, that I'll link down below as well. I keep forgetting that I have that, and sometimes people are looking for a template, and this is the one I created and that I made, and it also comes along with related videos that can help guide you through your money management and money growth journey, like debt management. We talked about debt here, and I had Christ avocado here, Justin, and he was here, and he talked about debt, and he's a good resource as well as other people. So I have all of those a mini-free course for y'all, along with that template. So I'll link that down below, but I'll let y'all go because I rented a lot. But this was kind of like a working financial chick, and that's why I kind of like was all over the place. But let me know if y'all like this. I'll try to do another one at the end of the year, kind of closing out the year, and see how much that I got paid off because the goal is zero. But I will see you in the next one. Bye.