Paula Pant

Paula Pant is an American personal finance journalist, podcaster and course creator, and the founder of the Afford Anything brand, whose tagline is "You can afford anything, but not everything." Her work covers financial independence, investing in index funds, rental real estate and entrepreneurship. In a March 2022 interview on the White Coat Investor podcast she said she was born in Kathmandu, Nepal, came to the United States as a baby, and worked as a newspaper reporter in Colorado from 2005 to 2008. Her official bio says she graduated from the Honors Program at the University of Colorado Boulder, holds a master's in business and economic journalism from Columbia University, and was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economic Journalism there in 2022-23. Her year of birth does not appear in the sources reviewed.

According to her About page, she resigned from her reporting job in April 2008, traveled for two years and then built a freelance writing business that became a content marketing agency, Catalyst Content Marketing, before focusing on Afford Anything. In the 2022 White Coat Investor interview she said she owned seven rental properties.

She hosts the Afford Anything podcast ("Get Smarter With Money"), which her bio credits with more than 30 million downloads, and publishes episodes on the YouTube channel @afford-anything-podcast, which showed 65.8K subscribers when read on September 14, 2026. Her bio also claims 2.5 million annual pageviews and 78,000 email subscribers for AffordAnything.com. These figures come from her own material and have not been independently verified. Her bio states she appeared in and was a consulting producer for the Netflix documentary Get Smart with Money, and lists Plutus Awards for Podcast of the Year (2017) and Lifetime Achievement.

Her paid product is Your First Rental Property (YFRP), an online course on buy-and-hold rental investing: seven modules (analyze, find, finance, renovate, negotiate and buy, build a team, management and tenants) in video, audio and text, a 10-week cohort with a self-paced option, spreadsheets, calculators, negotiation scripts and templates, private forums, monthly live office hours with Pant and calls led by teaching assistants, with lifetime access. Enrollment opens in rounds: when checked on September 14, 2026 the sales page said the Spring 2026 cohort had closed and the next cohort opens in Fall 2026, with a waitlist in the meantime. No price is shown on the current page. A 2019 Side Hustle School episode about the course's development reported beta seats sold at about $500 in 2016 and $750 in 2018; those were beta prices and are not the current price. The sales page claims more than 3,200 students and that 48.18% of students buy one or more rental properties; no independent source confirms either figure.

On reputation: she has been interviewed on independent finance podcasts such as White Coat Investor (2022) and Boldin, and her bio lists quotes in outlets including The New York Times, Forbes and Kiplinger. No person named Paula Pant appears in FINRA BrokerCheck or the SEC Investment Adviser Public Disclosure search (searched September 14, 2026); her course is education, not personalized investment advice. A web search for FTC or state attorney general actions under her name returned none (September 14, 2026). Not confirmed: the current course price, her company's registered legal name, and her year of birth.