Congratulations to the 2025 FinTalk Awards Winners

Nika Booth - Reelin’ in Her Debt

Nika Booth documents paying down debt on Instagram Reels

Nika Booth’s knack for breaking down complex student-loan forgiveness news has taken her far beyond Instagram. She’s traded DMs with Senator Elizabeth Warren’s digital team, attended White House events – and now, she’s Debt.com’s latest FinTalk Award winner for Best Reels.

Booth’s journey started long before the spotlight.

In 2018, a government shutdown cut off part of her income, and she turned to an unusual form of accountability: strangers on the internet. She launched @debtfreegonnabe, posting every payment and setback. Over time, she paid off $70,000 in credit card, auto, and tax debt. Then she set her sights on the biggest balance.

The turning point came three years later, when the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program temporarily loosened its rules. As a government employee, Booth researched the waiver, translated the fine print into plain language, and showed her followers how to use it.

Her explainer Reels became a trusted resource. By 2023, her own $130,000 in student loans were gone.

“At first, it was just me trying to stay accountable,” Booth tells Debt.com. “Now Senator Elizabeth Warren’s digital office texts me routinely. The deputy of her communications department messaged a couple of weeks ago, ‘Hey Nika, I have a Reel idea.’”

Her “superpower”

In October 2021, the Biden Administration announced significant changes to the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program.

To many, government student-loan forgiveness programs sound like alphabet soup. Headlines captured the big picture – but not the plain-English guidance people needed. Booth dug in and started asking questions.

Her Reels were in-depth yet bite-sized, making complex information easy to understand and share. She wasn’t just reporting on the changes – she was living them as a government employee navigating the program herself.

“I learned about this temporary program and started to share it with my audience. That’s when my next burst of followers came, when I started to get into the student loan space,” Booth says. “People were coming to me instead of going to the news. They would say, ‘I saw this in the news, but I was waiting for you to post about it.’ That’s when I realized I had the superpower of being able to break down complex things for people, to be able to digest it and understand how it applied to them.”

Debtfreegonnabe still going strong

As of publication time, Booth has nearly 99,000 followers on Instagram. Despite being free of student-loan debt herself, she continues advising her followers and offering one-on-one sessions to help them strategize repayment plans.

She says some people can budget their way out of debt – but that wasn’t her story. The name Debtfreegonnabe reflects that journey: ongoing, imperfect, and always evolving.

Helping others eliminate the judgment and mental-health stigmas tied to debt has become central to her mission. Progress comes day by day, she says, and the results aren’t always immediate.

But when she looks back over six years, the growth is undeniable.

“Debtfreegonnabe has taken me places that my full-time job hasn’t – and I love it,” Booth says. “It's not until you start talking about it to someone else that things come into context, and I realize the lives this page has helped change.”

Ashley Lee - The Modest Money Master

Ashley Lee is a respected financial educator – but she’s not a familiar face.

When you name your business “Her Money Mastery,” that doesn’t sound modest. But Ashley Lee isn’t your typical social media educator/influencer. While she has half a million TikTok followers, few know what she looks like. 

That’s because Ashley rarely appears in her posts. Usually, just her hands are visible as they move over a notebook that lists budgets, savings, and debt. Even her website features a portrait of her face partially hidden by a dollar bill she’s holding up.

But if there’s one thing Ashley isn’t modest about, it’s her mission: “The financial confusion, overwhelm, and stress stops now.”

She fulfills that mission not only through her social media advice, but also with her free Money Reset course that’s based on her own struggles with debt. 

Ashley became a single mother at the age of only 19. So it was actually something of an accomplishment that she was only $10,000 in debt at the age of 25. But she decided to pay that off, despite earning only $40,000 a year. Today, she owns a home and teaches others how to defeat debt – no matter their circumstances.

Chelsea Fagan - Live with Money, Not for Money

Chelsea Fagan lives her life on The Financial Diet.

Chelsea Fagan puts her money where her mouth is. And that means putting most of her money on her employees. Chelsea is CEO of The Financial Diet – and three of her nine employees are paid more than she is.

Chelsea says it’s a greedy move. 

“First of all, I'm very outspoken about our views around things like labor, and how employees should be compensated,” she says. “So I would certainly be at risk of cancellation if I wasn't living by my values – and if I was exploiting my own employees. So definitely, part of that is self-preservation.”

But there’s also a financial reason.

“We're a seven-figure business, but I pay myself about 100,000 or so a year – meaning that there's very low pressure to maintain really big executive salaries.”

How Chelsea runs her company is also how The Financial Diet advises its millions of newsletter subscribers, podcast listeners, article readers, YouTube watchers, and everyone checking them out on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

“When you think about food diets, the only thing that is actually sustainable is something truly healthy that you can do forever,” she says. “The crash diet, the super-restrictive diet, they generally don't work. And the same is true of money. The only thing that's going to work is something that you can keep doing long term.”

A bigger audience from a smaller demographic

Chelsea also focuses almost exclusively on women.

“A lot of what we'll talk about is things like consumer culture – because, quite frankly, women are constantly targeted with nonsense to spend their money on,” she says. “And listen, men are targeted with nonsense, too. I was joking the other day that guys are relentlessly marketed about crypto and sports gambling.”

As she’s learned over the years, “There are people always looking to separate you from your money in very stupid ways.”

Since that’s especially true for women, Chelsea says, “I think in terms of cultivating the audience, one thing that is very  important is that our team has always been entirely women.”

By focusing on women, The Financial Diet has flourished. And Chelsea is humbled by it all: “They trust us, they listen to us, they take our advice.”

A different message than others offer

Unlike other financial educators who shy away from controversy, Chelsea is open about her politics: “Our content is very different because it's a lot more focused on socioeconomic and political commentary.”

The Financial Diet also offers some fairly sophisticated advice, because Chelsea says of her audience. “They're educated. You know, these are working women, so they're not as much looking for the 101 stuff.”

So what are they looking for? “Navigating the world through a financially healthy lens. And community.”

Chelsea has built that community, and it continues to grow.

Paula Pant - You Can Afford Anything – But Not Everything

Paula Pant easily teaches what she learned the hard way.

Paula Pant calls herself a “writer and instigator.” But she’s best known as a podcaster and motivator. Her Afford Anything podcast has been downloaded more than 24 million times, and The New York Times has called it one of “7 Podcasts Your Wallet Will Love.”

Yet she started out as a newspaper reporter in Colorado earning $21,000 a year. It took three years and a backpacking journey across two continents before she figured out her mission: “show you how to master your money.”

As she told the Plutus Awards – which bestowed her with its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 – she didn’t leave the newsroom because she hated the job. She just hated the rigid schedule…

I loved the newsroom, loved my colleagues, admired and respected my boss. But I hated being someone else’s employee. I hated needing permission to take a half-day off work. It felt like the grown-up equivalent of asking for a hall pass.

Bold move, big decision

While she was still a reporter, Paula decided to scrimp and save everything she could. As she explains it,  I saved money. Like a maniac. I hustled during the evenings and weekends, writing freelance articles, and saved every dime. I landed a few promotions with commensurate pay raises, and tucked this into a savings account. I earned extra money on the side, and put it straight into savings – $50 here, $100 there. Slowly, hundreds turned into thousands.”

Then she did something she probably wouldn’t recommend today. With a total of $25,000 in the bank, she quit her job and bought a one-way ticket to Egypt. She spent the next two years backpacking across Asia and into Australia. When she got home in 2010, she had no money and no job. 

She created a company called Catalyst Content Marketing, and while she was doing that, she started a personal website dedicated to personal finance. At first, it was just about the lessons she was learning herself. Soon, it morphed and grew.

Launching Afford Anything

Paula launched her website and podcast with one basic concept: “You can afford anything – but not everything.” Her advice is practical, and it’s about making tough decisions. As she puts it, “How can we align our daily behaviors and habits with the lifestyle we value most?”

She discusses these decisions on her podcast with financial experts and with her community of 75,000-plus newsletter subscribers. The results are why Paula Pant won a Debt.com FinTalk Award this year.