On today's episode, Cody and Justin are joined by Monica from MonicaLouie.com. She tells us her inspiring story of tackling debt and putting family first.

Monica and her husband both came together after college with some debt and Monica wasn't a saver naturally. Her husband brought those characteristics to the household and she took to them quickly and soon started leading their debt pay down efforts. While on her way to becoming a mother of two, she decided she wanted to be able to spend as much time as possible with her children and step away from the workforce.

Unfortunately, even though they had made great strides on their spending, one income just wasn't enough. So Monica started a blog and experimenting with Facebook ads. She then started her own Facebook ad consulting business in 2016 with her as the single employee. Today she employs 13 and is on the fast track to being debt free.

But you don't want just an overview, go take a listen to today's episode and let us hear what you think.
Episode Summary

Grew up with a single mother where money was often a struggle and she knew she wanted a different life
She took the traditional college route but struggled some after graduating
Then she found herself in credit card debt
A couple of years later she had a good job, got out of debt and vowed to never get in debt again.
When she met her husband, he was frugal and she became conscious of saving for the first time
They were on a good steady path and then she had her first child and her priorities shifted
She decided she wanted to be a stay at home mom so they started saving really hard
Then she was pregnant with her second child and stepped away from her job
A couple of months into this, they noticed their savings starting to decrease a looked for something to help out
On top of this, they had over $300k in debt including their mortgage
Within two years they had paid down $120k in debt
Her husband had reservations about sharing finances because she was more of a spender and he was a saver so she made it a point to build that trust by being financially responsible
The idea of her blog came from people asking questions about how she burned down so much debt
With this first blog, she started discovering Facebook ads and noticed she had a knack for it
Then her fellow blogging friends started asking for help with Facebook ads
In 2016 she ended up selling her blog and becoming a full-time Facebook ads coach
Facebook ads are great for just broadening your reach as well as funneling people towards paid content or even a transition funnel to get a customer to free content which will then get them to paid content
Therefore often it’s best to save your Facebook ad promotions for posts with affiliate links
We also discuss the ever-changing landscape of Facebook ads with new features and algorithm tweaks
Her business has already grown from her being the single employee to a team of 13
They’re still paying down debt with the goal of being debt free by age 40
With her job being location independent, even if she’s working they can live a lifestyle very similar to one many expect when they are financially independent
The business hasn’t been making a ton of money right away because she’s been growing the company but is now transitioning to focus on the profit
We also discuss the example she gets to set for her kids as they see her make income from home doing something she really enjoys
Then we get into some more technical aspects of how to do Facebook ads
Some of the tips she recommends is testing against different groups and optimizing the ads by constantly testing and tweaking
Facebook can also help you find a look-a-like audience which is where you feed Facebook some information about the audience you already have and it finds more people like you
She recommends static images when you are looking for someone to click on a blog post