Teachers With Money: First In Class

Danny Kofke spent 18 years in the classroom — first grade, kindergarten, and severe-profound special education — and did something the salary supposedly doesn’t allow: he raised a family of four on about $42,000 a year, helped support his wife's (also an educator) dream to stay home for eight years while their kids were young, paid off his debt, built a real emergency fund, and grew a retirem...

Rochelle Wilson was a sixth-grade ELA teacher who saw a problem she couldn’t look away from. When a student she was mentoring through a painful season needed someone in her corner, Rochelle showed up — and one lunch period turned into fifteen girls, then thirty, then sixty, then a full mentoring program. That program became Intelligent and Ambitious Minds — her “I AM” mentoring — and the calling k...

Jenn Jamali spent years in tech — at companies like Indeed and Spotify — negotiating other people’s salaries for a living. Then, at eight weeks pregnant, she was laid off. Instead of scrambling, she leaned into a plan she’d already started building: during the pandemic she got obsessed with money, bought her first investment property, and turned all of it into First Jenn Money, where she now coach...

Bryson Tarbet is a former PreK–6 music teacher and the founder of ThatMusicTeacher.com and Tarbet Education Network, where he builds content-specific professional development for music and arts specialists. He's also one of the earliest supporters of Teachers With Money — someone who helped Christa workshop the mission months before this show was live. This is a conversation between two forme...

Kennedi Crosby is a secondary math teacher with six years in the classroom, and a journey most teachers don't get to live. She has taught in New Orleans, Washington D.C., Kuwait, and now China. Somewhere along the way, she also became a financial strategist working specifically with teachers: walking them through the kind of financial education most of us never got. This episode moves through...

If you're a teacher carrying credit card debt right now — the kind that sits in your chest at 2am — this episode is for you. Rose Mendonca is a 26-year educator, school counselor, and the founder of Teacher Talks Money, a financial education platform built for teachers by a teacher. She climbed out of credit card debt on a teacher's salary, paid off her mortgage years ahead of schedule,...

If you're a teacher and you're tired — bone-deep, paycheck-to-paycheck tired — this episode opens with the sentence you need to hear: it's not your fault. The math hasn't been mathing for a long time. The system that's supposed to support the people who shape every future generation has been quietly underpaying you for decades. And then it pivots. Christa names what most t...

Courtney Johnson is a career content creator, personal brand strategist, and the author of Career Cheat Codes. She's also Christa's personal brand mentor, business coach, and the person who helped her build the thing you're listening to right now. In this conversation: why teachers should work louder (not harder), and the smallest possible step toward building a personal brand. Plus...

Davy Yap is a full-time middle school teacher in California. She's also on track to retire at 45 as a millionaire on a teacher's paycheck. As a teacher who got specific about money and made moves most teachers haven't been told they're allowed to make. In this conversation, Davy walks through the actual plan: the high yield savings accounts that pay you 3-4% instead of 0.02%, t...

Christa waited ten years to open her Teachers Pay Teachers store. Ten years of “I’ll do it this summer” and “the market is probably too saturated.” Sound familiar? In this episode, she dismantles the three biggest lies keeping teachers from starting — and replaces them with frameworks you can actually use. Plus: the Olipop vs. Coca-Cola strategy for finding your niche, the Liquid Death approach to...

A Teachers Pay Teachers product went viral on TikTok. The money hit. And instead of celebrating — I felt guilty. Like, stomach-drop, something-is-wrong guilty. In the very first episode of First in Class, host Christa Jones unpacks the money guilt that kicked off her entire journey — where it came from, why teachers are especially wired for it, and what it actually means when making money feels wr...

“Teachers don’t do it for the money.” You’ve heard it a thousand times. You’ve probably said it yourself. But what if that sentence isn’t a compliment... it’s a contract? In this episode, Christa names the martyr script that runs quietly through teacher culture — the one that says caring and financial struggle are the same thing. She breaks down what it actually costs you, and then hands you the p...

Teachers don't do it for the money — but maybe we should start. First in Class is the podcast for teachers who are tired of being told pay is the trade-off for purpose.  Host Christa Jones (former classroom teacher, founder of the Teachers With Money movement) brings the conversations the teachers' lounge only half-finishes: the side hustles, the salary scripts, the boundaries, the money...