Before she became the photographer everyone books because they fall in love with her personality, Tra spent 6 years helping families figure out how to afford college. She sat across from parents who didn't understand why their kid couldn't get more aid. They looked to her to answer why the numbers weren’t adding up and why every option felt more impossible than the last. She always tried to come into those meetings with at least three solutions. "Whether they can do it or not, that's on them," she says. "But I always tried to say here are your options."
She was good at reading a financial situation, and mapping out the options is just how her brain works. However, Tra did not apply this to her own personal finances. After purchasing a home in their dream neighborhood with her husband, Tra spent 3 years making mortgage payments without ever opening a statement.
Tra trusted the process. The money left the account, the house stayed theirs, the kids were happy, and that was about as far as the thinking went. Earlier this year a reel showed up in her social feed, with someone running a rough calculation about paying down your principal faster. After that, Tra actually opened the next mortgage statement.
15% of their monthly mortgage was going towards the principal. In 3 years they’d barely made any progress on a $400,000 loan.
"It was just such a shocking moment," she says. "We wanted this house, this neighborhood so bad. And I thought that was manageable." She started making extra principal payments almost immediately.
Monarch was an effort to keep her credit cards straight
Tra has been using Monarch for about 2 years, mostly to keep her airline credit cards straight. She'd picked them up to offset baggage fees for travel. The math on the cards made sense until there were enough of them that she couldn't track which one was due when. Monarch was her attempt to fix that. "Once you're able to see it and see how much it is, you think okay, I need to slow my roll," she says.
Someone on Instagram posted about a woman who spent $300 a month on groceries. Tra thought that sounded impossible. She pulled Monarch's spending data, expecting to see maybe $600, maybe $900. She was spending $1,200 to $1,400 a month.
"It's all the Costco trips!”
She’d been considering talking publicly about the debt for over a year
Separate from her photography account, Tra made an Instagram account for the house in the dream neighborhood. She shared decorating tips and tricks and updates on the process of making their house feel like their home.
Tra brought the public conversation idea up with friends after mulling it over in her head for months. The answer was always the same: just do it, what do you have to lose? So eventually, she did it.
In the first video, she tried to say "$504,995" out loud. She couldn't. She did it four times while recording in the front yard. "I don't know how to say this big ass number," she says. She left the bloopers in.
The response was immediate. People who had never thought about their own credit card interest. The mom from school who pulled her aside for a twenty-minute conversation that started with a wholesale bread store and finished with an understanding that they both wanted to better their personal financial health. Finance conversations with people she'd barely spoken to before.
"I'm finding out so much," she says. "Not that I'm becoming anything of an expert. But finding out and finding people to talk to."
She went home and started doing more calculations.
If they could be comfortable paying $6,000 a month toward the mortgage instead of their current amount, the house could be paid off when her youngest daughter graduates from high school. Her eight-year-old already gets it: "She'll be 18, right, Mom? And you'll be done with the house."
"Can you imagine," Tra says, "instead of paying it off when I'm 71, now I'm going to pay it off when my youngest graduates from high school."
She's working on it, all because of a little honesty on the internet.
