We were lucky to catch up with Michelle Onaka recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Michelle thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Have you ever had an amazing boss, mentor or leader leading you? Can you us a story or anecdote that helps illustrate why this person was such a great leader and the impact they had on you or their team?
The best boss that I have ever had is my current boss!
So let me back up, so you can really understand why this is so impactful. When I was leaving high school, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I just chose a college major because I needed to get a degree when I had scholarships and my parents to help me cover the costs. Then I worked seasonal tourism jobs, where you really aren’t there for the job so much as the chance to live somewhere cool. Then I finally figured out what I wanted to do with my life, and I went to graduate school for it. At the end of grad school, my internship turned into a full time, paid, benefits-eligible job (my first ever)! It was my dream job, where I got to support first-generation college students and students from families with little income. I LOVED the work that I got to do, and I loved being a small part of my students’ success.
Unfortunately however, I didn’t love my work environment. I felt like all I ever wanted was autonomy and trust… my boss to say “you do good work, therefore I will let you manage how and where you do that.” Instead, she micromanaged us. She changed the rules regularly. She forced me back to the office in person during a spike in COVID in my area (and before there was a vaccine for my little kids). One Saturday when I worked an extra 13 hour day she wouldn’t let me flex any of that time. She always kept us guessing, wondering if this year the thing that was fine last year would be allowed or not. Despite how much I loved my job, my boss provided a toxic environment that significantly complicated my otherwise dream job.
So when I finally had to leave that job, I didn’t really know what would come next. I also had never had a great boss so I wasn’t sure it was possible.
Then I happened into my current job. At this job, they trust me to do my job! They let me leave work everyday to go pick up my kindergartener and finish my work day from home… something that is immensely helpful for me. They give me support when I need it, and autonomy to do my job how and where I need to do it. They believe in getting good employees, helping them get into a role that’s genuinely a good fit for them, and supporting them so they can thrive. This stuff shouldn’t be revolutionary, but after my last experience, it truly is.
It frees me to be the employee that I want to be. It transforms a job that I wouldn’t have expected to be a dream job, into a dream job. It is truly life-changing. And I hope that everyone gets to have a work experience and a boss like this.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, Can you introduce yourself to our readers and share a little bit of the backstory to your business? Also, what are you most proud of?
I’m Michelle. I’m a mom of 2, Paraplanner at a local (Oregon) financial planning firm, and founder of Intentional Money Life. Here’s a little about my path to becoming a business owner, as well as what I’m most proud of on this journey.
As a TRIO SSS Academic Counselor (a job that I held from 2014 until 2023), one of our federal mandates was to provide financial literacy education to our students. I really enjoyed this part of my job, and found that for the most part, my college students were hungry for this kind of information.
Separately, I have always been fairly frugal and intentional with my money, yet even as someone who was pretty money conscious, I lacked the financial education that I needed to really put my money to work. When I was 24 I opened a Roth IRA at a local credit union, into a CD paying 0.5% annually. I put in $500, but then of course I didn’t see it growing, and never contributed any more money. It wasn’t until I was more like 32 or 33 that I really took the time to educate myself about investing and how I could use it to reach my long term goals. I had had so many misconceptions about investing, and as a natural saver, I didn’t want to see my money be gambled away (which is what I thought investing was).
As I built my own education around all of the topics related to investing (retirement accounts, taxes, the impact of investment fees, the 4% rule, and so much more), I found that it greatly enhanced the conversations that I could have with my students. The more I understood, the more in depth our conversations became. I finally came to a place where I felt like maybe I wasn’t a financial expert, but that I did have a lot of financial knowledge to teach my students, and that others weren’t lining up at the door to teach them. So I decided that I should. That led me to proposing then creating and teaching a college course for our TRIO SSS students. And during that first term, I saw how impactful the course was. These students were starting to truly understand financial topics, and more importantly, to connect their financial decisions with their goals and values so that they could use this knowledge to create a life that they were excited to live. Which is huge, especially for TRIO SSS students, who are students from families with little access to financial resources and/or first-generation college students.
That experience is what led me to start my business, Intentional Money Life. Because through my TRIO SSS job, I could only reach a limited amount of students (those who were in the TRIO SSS program at my university). But I saw how, despite all the people out there teaching about money, many people were still not being reached by those messages (and truthfully, many of the people out their teaching about money are teaching questionable stuff). So I took the leap and started a business, despite never having taken an interest in entrepreneurship. It’s definitely been a journey, with lots of ups and downs and curves and changes, but it has been a valuable journey.
Though what I offer has changed a lot, I’m currently settling into the idea of offering financial courses, as well as focusing on building up my blog and other free educational materials. I previously offered a more hands-on “program”, that included a lot more support from me. However since August I have left higher education and actually moved into the financial services industry. With that change, I increased my work hours, which leaves me with less time available for the intensive support I was offering with my program. Now, my main course is Level Up Your Finances, which covers some goal setting and prioritizing money, as well as basics of investing, taxes, and retirement planning. I hope to eventually expand and offer more courses, including covering more of the stuff that I taught in my college course.
What I am most proud of along this journey, has been the impact I have been able to have on my students. From my college students to students that I’ve had in my business, it’s amazing to hear about the expanding circle of people who I’ve had the privilege to impact. I have helped students get their first credit cards, open up high yield savings accounts, start emergency funds, and start their first investing accounts. When meeting with one student, I realized that she had made some mistakes when she filed her taxes. After I helped her find a professional to amend them, she received an extra $1,700 back from the government! When working with another student, I found out that her parents had been mislead about how to pay off credit card debt. After I helped to set them straight, their entire family changed the way they handled credit card debt, saving them money each month on interest! I had another student who became the de facto retirement expert among his colleagues after completing my program, and who has gone on to offer (very needed) financial education seminars to the public. And from many of my students, I have heard about the new financial conversations that they’re having with their friends, partners, parents, and children. Many students have shifted the way they think about money to just be a little more strategic with it, using it towards their newly created goals. And that’s big, considering it’s quite common for people to just go through the motions of life and do whatever everyone around you does, without truly figuring out what you want for your own life and how you can use your resources to make that happen.
What’s been the best source of new clients for you?
Facebook groups have actually been a great place to find clients for me. It’s quite tricky though, because these groups are managed by others, and don’t generally take kindly to businesses trying to get clients. [I’ve been banned from a few, even when admins from those groups can’t figure out what I’m doing that’s going against the rules.] So I don’t go into groups looking for clients, as much as I just make sure that I’m an active, engaged, helpful member of the groups. When relevant, I share my blog posts, infographics, and other free things that I’ve made. And sometimes, through conversations in the groups or from people who found my links and followed me on social media, those people have chosen to become clients. Even better, when that happens, sometimes they will tag me on a thread to ask me to weigh in, or to share their experiences working with me. Which of course is the best kind of marketing!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
When I started my business in 2021, I also created my first Instagram and TikTok accounts. I was already a regular user of Facebook, but I had never really used other forms of social media as a consumer, so everything was new to me. At first, I came up with educational things that I wanted to post, and I just started posting. I never paid attention to if I had followers or how many. I didn’t know I was supposed to use hash tags, and I knew nothing about how to get any eyes on my posts. I just posted things that I thought would be helpful. And when the opportunity arose, I shared my posts (or the visuals that I created for them) in the relevant Facebook groups I was in. I suspect many of the first hundreds of followers that I got were from those groups.
A lot of the content that I made in those early days is still content that I regularly share. In fact, the infographic from my very first post is currently pinned on my Instagram profile, because I’ve been told many times how helpful it is. This content has been great, because I wasn’t making it in a specific way to get views or anything like that, I was literally just putting out something that I thought might help someone.
So if you’re new to social media, or just starting to build your brand, I’d encourage you to just dive in. Don’t worry about whether anyone sees your posts or not. Just start posting! And though it can be helpful to learn more about content creation and how to use each specific site, it can also be valuable to just put something out there because it’s something that needs to be said. And not even worry about what happens with it next. I would also encourage you not to just use one singular platform, but to cross-post things. You never know where your content will get traction, and it can be disheartening if you’re only posting in one place, to see it not really being seen. Though now I rarely post to TikTok, my very first video got over 3,000 views, which was pretty cool considering I didn’t know how to use TikTok!
Contact Info:
- Website: intentionalmoneylife.com
- Instagram: @intentionalmoneylife
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IntentionalMoneyLife
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/michelle-onaka/
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@intentionalmoneylife
Image Credits
The photo of my family is by Quinn Strickler