# Carmen Schaefer, AFC® — Senior Financial Educator | MeridianWallet > Carmen Schaefer is an Accredited Financial Counselor with 8 years in nonprofit credit counseling, focused on payday lending alternatives and military finance. Источник: https://nimblepayday.com/authors/carmen-schaefer/ --- # Carmen Schaefer, AFC® Senior Financial Educator at MeridianWallet. Accredited Financial Counselor with 8 years of nonprofit credit counseling experience — translating small-dollar lending and its alternatives into plain English. CS **Carmen Schaefer, AFC®** · AFCPE-accredited **On this page** Biography Credentials Areas of expertise Articles reviewed Conflicts of interest Contact ## 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: - [Payday Loans Online — Compare 23+ State-Licensed Lenders (2026)](/payday-loans/) - [15 Payday Loan Alternatives Ranked by Cost](/other-options/) - [What is a Payday Loan? Plain-English Explainer](/guides-center/what-is-a-payday-loan/) - [Payday Loans in Texas: Laws, Rates, Limits & Alternatives](/state-guides/texas/) ## 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. #### About our authors Every MeridianWallet page is bylined by a credentialed author and signed off by a separate reviewer. [See all 6 authors](/authors/) --- #### Editorial standards [Read our editorial policy →](/editorial-policy/) [Fact-checking process →](/fact-checking-policy/) [Corrections log →](/corrections/)