Love is Blind's Nancy Rodriguez on her 3-step strategy to build wealth

A Dallas native, Rodriguez bought a certified pre-owned “mom-car”—a Kia Sorento with about 20,000 miles on it—to move across the country for grad school in San Francisco. But after a series of recalls just months after her purchase, she traded in her model for a brand-new, $30,000 version, just in a different color.

“It put me 30 steps back when it came to really understanding finances,” Rodriguez, 33, said.

The purchase eventually contributed to a total debt load of $100,000; by the time she graduated with her masters in speech, language, and hearing sciences, she racked up $70,000 in student loans. But within two years of graduating, she says had paid it all off—thanks to a lot of work side hustling, living frugally, and building passive income. It put her in a financial place that she could “truly just be proud of,” Rodriguez tells Fortune.

Since then, she’s purchased 11 investment properties across Dallas, Fort Worth, and Chicago, and shifted her focus to a new, lucrative revenue stream: Reality TV stardom. The Love Is Blind Season 3 star sat down with Fortune in June to explain how she supercharged her financial health to build wealth in three steps, from paying off six figures of debt in two years to making over six figures in less than a year.

The hustle and the pinch: Paying off six-figures of debt

With so much debt hanging over her head, Rodriguez was juggling multiple jobs as a full-time speech and language pathologist with part-time positions as a speech therapist at a home health care company and a data analyst for management consulting company Technomic. Tired of the 60-hour workweek, she turned to personal finance guru Dave Ramsey for advice on how to stay afloat. 

“When Dave Ramsey says rice and beans, it was a rice and beans lifestyle when it came to paying my debt off,” she recalled. “I remember having to literally have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner a bowl of homemade beans.”

Rodriguez also credits Robert Kiyosaki’s bestselling novel Rich Dad Poor Dad for helping elevate her financial knowledge and convincing her to turn her focus to real estate investing. 

“Knowing that I had $100,000 to my name was probably one of the scariest things,” she said. “I think it was really understanding that I needed to be uncomfortable for a temporary moment so that I can have long term gratification, which was getting to the point of being debt free.”

All the while, Rodriguez served as an egg donor, a process she started in graduate school for some extra cash. She completed her eighth and last donation cycle shortly before wiping out her debt, springboarding her real estate investment career.

Squatters, fires, and hoarders: Creating passive income through real estate

Purchasing her first home in June of 2016 “was not easy,” Rodriguez said, and took over six months and 20 offer submissions before she nailed down a deal. 

With help from the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America (NACA) program for first-time homebuyers, Rodriguez said was able to finance an “old-timey” $250,000 duplex in Dallas with original floors and yellow walls. 

“It was the eyesore of the new neighborhood,” Rodriguez said, who felt it was an immediate no. But faced with the dilemma of buying her “dream home” or the yellow-walled cottage, Rodriguez opted for the latter, committing to “house hacking” the duplex so she could rent one side and use her tenants’ payments to pay her mortgage.  

“It was understanding that mentality of letting go of that temporary satisfaction and being temporarily uncomfortable so that I could have that long term gratification,” Rodriguez said. 

After some cosmetic upgrades and a fresh coat of paint, Rodriguez turned her new property into an income-producing asset, renting one side to a tenant and living in the other. She said it motivated her to generate more passive income, since she was able to use her tenants’ rent to buy a second duplex in less than a year. 

The home, paid in cash, proved to be another fixer-upper, and came slightly charred due to a past fire. It was also already inhabited—by squatters, who she said she made a deal with. She allowed them to live on the property while they helped prepare the home for demolition and renovation and paid them for their work. “They just needed a chance to get their life back on their feet,” she said. 

In total, Rodriguez has expanded her real estate portfolio over the past eight years to 11 properties, five of which she’s sold. Rodriguez offers her six remaining properties as short-term Airbnb rentals, telling her Instagram followers that her profit margins hover around $2,000 to $4,000 per month per property. 

Her best-income producing property is a four-bedroom, three-bath home with a pool. Purchased in cash, she said the home now nets her a cool $80,000 per year after taxes and costs. 

From Pods to Podcasting: Finding a new revenue stream

Becoming a reality TV star has only fueled Rodriguez’s blossoming career as an investor. Nicknamed the “real estate mogul” by fellow cast member Raven Ross, Rodriguez said she used her newfound fame to “put on my business woman hat” and explore more business opportunities.

Three months before Season 3 of Love is Blind hit Netflix, Rodriguez began planning her career as a social media creator, organizing her favorite brands into an Excel spreadsheet and connecting with previous seasons’ cast members for their advice on how to start securing deals. 

Rodriguez said that after her season’s debut, her Instagram following exploded from 800 family and friends to over 500,000. She’s also since grown her TikTok following to over 200,000. Her portfolio of brand deals now includes BetterHelp, Smirnoff, Latino dating app Chispa, and more, with some campaigns reaching up to $30,000.

“Over the last six months or so, I’ve made over six figures,” Rodriguez said, with “about $150,000 or more around that area when it comes to brand deals.”

She views her influencer career as another “opportunity to create more cash flow,” and has used her earnings to purchase another home and make renovations. “All that money has gone straight to my real estate,” Rodriguez said. “I haven’t even seen that money.”

Rodriguez now shares finance tips with fans on Instagram, and recently launched an online clothing subscription service called Pretty Posh Box. 

“What I’m really grateful for after Love Is Blind is that it truly has allowed me to create a platform to allow for education in the real estate world,” Rodriguez said. “I just think that the world of real estate investing is not as scary as it looks.”