Healthy Debt, Honestly Counted: What Debt Management Really Means at MEDA

MEDA’s Financial Capability (FinCap) coaching program provides free, bilingual one-on-one financial coaching to community members in San Francisco’s Mission District and beyond. Coaches work with clients over months or years on debt, credit, savings, and long-term financial goals. These outcomes are tracked as part of MEDA’s DISC (Debt, Income, Savings, Credit) outcomes framework.

Between January 2025 and July 2026, FinCap clients:

• Collectively reduced their debt by $3,216,980.58 (nearly $3.22 million)
• Raised their credit scores by an average of 33 points from the start of their coaching journey
• Reached an average credit score of 701

Important nuance on how we counted

The simplest way to report debt reduction is to compare what a client owed on day one against what they owe today. We started there, but that method distorts the picture in two directions:

• It can create false positives. A client paying only the minimum on a high-interest auto loan shows a shrinking balance while making almost no real progress.
• It erases real progress. Financial coaching often means helping a client take on new debt on purpose. A common practice is helping a client open a secured credit card, which safely acquires a small amount of new debt in order to establish a credit score. The balance goes up before it comes down. The same is true of refinancing into a low-interest auto loan that gets someone to a better-paying job, or using a credit card that gets paid off in full every month.

So we widened the measure to capture debt paid down incrementally, regardless of whether a client’s overall balance ended lower than where it started. What separates healthy debt from unhealthy debt is not the balance. It is the credit score. The 33-point average gain is what confirms the paydown reflected sound financial behavior rather than treading water.

Why 701 is the number that matters

The $3.22M is the attention grabber, but 701 is the number with meaning attached. It sits in the “good” credit range, which is the threshold where fair loan terms, successful rental applications, and waived security deposits become realistic. In San Francisco, where a rental application is decided by a screening report, that threshold is effectively a housing story.

One client’s story

At 23 years old, Andrea faced a barrier common among young adults: navigating an unfamiliar and complex financial system. While working as a temporary outreach specialist, she was unbanked and had no knowledge of how the American credit system worked. Recognizing that financial inclusion is key to long-term stability, Andrea connected with Tatania García-Llanes, one of MEDA’s financial capability coaches, to build her financial foundation from scratch.

Their work began with the basics. During their first one-on-one session, Tatania guided Andrea through opening her very first checking account. Approved in minutes, Andrea was thrilled to finally set up direct deposit for her paychecks. Although she was eager to apply for a credit card right away, her coach helped her map out a more strategic path. Together, they decided to wait three months to establish a consistent banking history with direct deposits before taking the next step.

That patience paid off. At their three-month follow-up session, Andrea applied for a credit card and was approved on the spot with a $1,800 credit limit. Tatania used this milestone as a teaching moment, walking Andrea through credit limits, utilization rates, and best practices for responsible card management.

Within nine months of opening her account, Andrea generated her first FICO score: an impressive 735. For Andrea, that score was far more than just a number: it was a key to real-world stability. Equipped with a strong credit profile, she was able to qualify for a safe, affordable apartment for herself and her parents. Today, Andrea moves forward with renewed confidence in her financial future and actively shares her newfound knowledge with her family, expanding the reach of our financial coaching across generations.

Access, not behavior

Many MEDA clients have paid rent on time for years or decades, in cash, while working jobs that generate no credit history. Credit bureaus read that absence as risk and treat a “thin file” almost identically to a damaged one. The result is people with spotless payment records getting quoted predatory interest rates and failing rental screenings.

These clients were never bad borrowers. They were invisible ones. Coaching made them visible, and the numbers show what happened next.