I grew up in a single parent home, in a neighborhood where money was always tight. I was surrounded by working class people that did their best to make ends meet at jobs that were not fulfilling to them. Those were tough circumstances, but they motivated me to get a good education so that I could change my family’s economic situation.
When I was 18, I wanted to enjoy my last bit of freedom before going off to college. So I got my first credit card . It came with a $500 credit limit and I maxed it out in one day going to restaurants with my friends and buying cute clothes I could wear to class when college started. A month later I got the credit card bill, looked at it, and tossed it in the trash.
I severely underestimated how that would affect me in the next few months.
When college started that fall, my friend and I went to open bank accounts . That’s when reality hit me. My credit score , 495, was so low that the bank refused to open an account for me. I was embarrassed when the branch manager told me this and my friend watched from a distance.
That experience in college completely changed how I thought about credit. I started monitoring my reports and scores every month via a service offered through my bank. I spent the next year disputing negative items, also known as derogatory marks, which led to them being removed from my credit report. This practice helped me raise my credit score by 300 points.
Ultimately, this tough period in my life became inspiration for the side hustle that helped me earn $100,000 in passive income in five months.
Here is how I got started. I led with my personal experience
Last summer, I was looking for a side hustle that could help pay for my son’s daycare expenses. My 9-to-5 job had just informed me that I would be taking a major pay cut, and I needed to boost my income before my maternity leave started. The answer was right in front of me.
I already had a blueprint that had helped me raise my credit score by 300 points. And after I improved my score, I spent the next six years doing credit consultations for friends, family and people in my community, doing that as a side gig in between my college classes.
I knew from that experience that credit was an evergreen and fairly universal topic. And I knew that I was far from alone in struggling with it. So at eight months pregnant, in August of 2021, I decided to take what I had learned and create a digital kit that others could use as a resource to help them manage their credit.
It was important to me to make the product more affordable compared to more traditional credit repair agencies, a baseline which helped me figure out what I felt comfortable charging. I created a system that could run without me
Since I was pregnant when I first decided to launch my digital products, I knew I needed to keep my overhead costs low , and create an operational process that could run without me aka passive income once I gave birth to my baby.
I did some research and decided to use a platform called DPD to host my products for $10 a month. It was the least expensive and to me, and it felt like the platform that would be the easiest to set up, and to use overall.
Video by Courtney Stith
I took that approach when I was creating my products. I wanted them to be as intuitive and budget-friendly as possible. I hoped people would use them to advocate for themselves in what can be a confusing process.
So for my first product, the Ultimate Credit Boost Kit , I created templates that my customers could use as straightforward scripts when contacting credit bureaus to help contest and get negative marks removed from their credit report. I also made sure to include specific language in citing the laws and guidelines that the consumer is protected by. I built on my first product to scale up my business
When their credit began to improve, for many of my customers, their next financial step was exploring buying a home , and they asked if I could create a similar kit to help them through the process.
I saw the demand for it start around September 2021. There was an uptick in my […]
source Millennial mom: My online side hustle helped me earn $100,000 in passive income in 5 months
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