EP10 Money Stories: How Tristan Pursued His Art Dreams and Paid off $80k of Student Debt

The Jesse Mecham Show

YNAB

Kids & Family, Education

4.7 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2021

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In today's Money Story, Jesse chats with a YNAB employee, the gifted artist and animator Tristan Henry-Wilson, whose work YNAB users may have seen on the YNAB website and the YNAB Youtube channel, among others. Tristan may be an exceptionally talented artist, but he didn't come into his art career easily. After receiving some unexpected financial aid, he attended Ringling College of Art and Design and earned a degree in illustration.

Tristan had a difficult time landing paying gigs in the art world, and began working a long series of odd jobs to pay rent, eat food, and, most importantly, make payments on his $80k of student loads, which a family friend had co-signed for him. After years of grinding, building his portfolio, learning how to interview, and networking into better jobs, Tristan found salaried work in New York City, and was finally able to throw serious money at his debt. At this point, the balance had grown to about $150k, but he was undeterred. With each pay increase, Tristan put more money into the debt, eventually paying it off in full after about 15 years.

Tristan's determination and perseverance was largely responsible for his success, but he also credits YNAB for helping him get smart about managing his money and finding security and peace in his financial situation.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello, wine average. My name is Jesse Meakum. This is podcast number 518 for Wine
0:17.3	Ab, where we teach you four rules to help you stop and paycheck to paycheck, get out
0:20.3	of debt and save more money. Today on a money story episode of this podcast, we welcome
0:25.7	someone I'm very excited to interview and whose story I think you will find very inspiring.
0:30.6	This is Tristan Henry Wilson, one of the reasons I'm so happy to interview Tristan today is
0:34.5	not only because he is an incredibly motivating budgeter, but he actually works here at Wine
0:39.2	Ab as our motion designer. For those of you who watch our YouTube channel and social media,
0:44.2	you've probably seen Tristan's incredible work. He is an exceptionally talented artist.
0:50.6	Turns out he's also talented about getting out of debt. Today he gives us a very open,
0:55.6	very honest account of how he paid off $80,000 of student loan debt. He doesn't hold back
1:00.0	on the real and raw details of how that debt impacted him and every decision he made
1:05.6	along that payoff journey. We also talk about the ajo moments where things started to
1:10.0	piece together and he saw a light at the end of that long student loan tunnel. Now please
1:16.8	welcome to the Wine Ab podcast, Tristan Henry Wilson.
1:21.3	Alright Tristan, no stranger to Wine Ab because you work for Wine Ab. Welcome to the Wine Ab
1:28.5	podcast. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be home. Yes, especially to be here where
1:34.4	I always am. Yeah. Your voice may be recognized by some because you've done some voice-over
1:39.3	work for us with some videos, right? Yeah, we like to keep things scrappy here whenever
1:45.4	possible and I've had the privilege of jumping in and talking whenever I've had the opportunity
1:52.5	to say stuff. Yeah, so you, I'll let's go with this now. So what is your job here at Wine Ab
1:59.5	before we let you kind of properly introduce yourself? The easiest way to understand what I do is just
2:04.3	I'm an animator. The industry term would be like motion designer but if you walk up to me on the
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from YNAB, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of YNAB and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.