240 | The Budgetnista

 

For video highlights from the episode, check out choosefi.com/240.

Tiffany Alice was raised by a financially savvy father who taught her how to save and handle her money, but a few poor choices in her 20s destroyed her finances. Since overcoming her mistakes, she's made it her mission to help others fix their finances. After falling victim to a con man, Tiffany found herself more than $35,000 in credit card debt. Though her pre-school teacher salary wasn't a high income, she was saving aggressively by living simply and transferring her credit card debt to 0% interest cards. During the 2008/2009 recession, she was $300,000 in the hole between credit card, student loan, and mortgage debt when she was laid off from her job. Seeing that she was struggling less with financial hardship because of the lesson's Tiffany had learned from her father, friends began to ask for help with their finances. She liked teaching and turned teaching financial education into a business. Through her business, she can make good money, help people, and still have happiness and time. She feels that she is living her life in complete alignment. Even with a high net worth, she and her husband continue to live frugally and without debt. One of the lessons her mistakes taught her was to get straight to a solution sooner rather than allow shame or ego to delay it. It's important to acknowledge your role in mistakes, take full responsibility, and then get over it. Teaching financial education was the easy part. Tiffany found that her own financial struggles allowed her to relate to people. She doesn't consider herself to be a guru but an educator helping her girlfriends along. Tiffany built her business from one-on-one financial coaching to a following of over half of a million people in her Dreamcatcher community. Volunteering in her community and utilizing her network, in addition to social media helped get her business off the ground. When followers from outside her local area began to request her course, Tiffany scaled the business to reach anyone, no matter where they lived, with her Live Richer Challenge. When it launched, 10,000 people had signed up. To date more, than 900,000 have taken one or more of her Live Richer challenges. Along the way, Tiffany learned about blogging, video editing, affiliates, monetization, and self-publishing. A good teacher has to be constantly learning, listening, and reading, but what made Tiffany a really good teacher comes from being a pre-school teacher, she honestly cares about her students. She's taken her skills in leading and caring about students as a teacher and applied them to her business, making it an amazing place to work where her employees feel looked after and cared for. Tiffany has authored a pre-financial education book, Happy Birthday Mali More, aimed at teaching pre-school age children a lesson about the things that matter most.

RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S CONVERSATION

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