Biography

Carmen Schaefer is the Senior Financial Educator at MeridianWallet, where she leads the development of educational content for working-class households navigating short-term cash gaps. She holds the Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) designation from the AFCPE and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017.

After graduating, Carmen joined a community-action agency in Durham as a financial coach, where she ran intake assessments for households facing eviction, utility shutoff, and payday loan rollover cycles. In 2018 she completed her NFCC certification and moved into a senior counselor role, supervising a team of three coaches and developing the curriculum used by the agency's monthly financial-literacy workshops.

From 2019 through 2023 Carmen was Lead Counselor at FairFinance Florida, a Tampa-based 501(c)(3) credit-counseling nonprofit. There she facilitated more than 1,400 one-on-one counseling sessions, built a debt-management plan template later adopted by three sister agencies, and delivered military-financial-readiness briefings on bases in Florida and Georgia under contract with Military OneSource.

She joined MeridianWallet in 2023 to scale the educational mission to a national audience: the same plain-language explainers, the same alternatives-first framing, served at the moment a household searches for "payday loans near me." Carmen authors the money pages and reviews state-specific cost content for accuracy and tone.

Credentials

Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®)
AFCPE Accredited Financial Counselor (AFC®) · Active since 2018
NFCC Certified Credit Counselor
National Foundation for Credit Counseling · Certified 2018
BA Economics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill · 2017
Years of experience
8 years in nonprofit credit counseling and financial education

Areas of expertise

  • Payday lending — cost structure, rollover mechanics, state regulatory variation
  • Debt management plans (DMPs) — eligibility, creditor concessions, plan design
  • Small-dollar alternatives — PALs, employer EWA, nonprofit hardship grants
  • Military finance — Military Lending Act, relief-society programs, deployment budgeting
  • Household budgeting — low- and moderate-income cash-flow planning

Articles reviewed by Carmen

Carmen authored or reviewed the following pages on MeridianWallet:

Conflict of interest disclosure

Disclosure. Author owns no securities in companies covered. Compensated by MeridianWallet salary; no per-loan referral incentives. No outside consulting relationships with lenders, lead generators, or debt-relief firms. Pro-bono volunteer with the local NFCC-affiliated agency in her area.

Contact

For editorial questions, corrections, or interview requests, contact editor@nimblepayday.com.