Teacher Hustles to Pay Off $100,000 in Student Loans

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

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Hey, what's up, friends and listeners? Welcome to Side Hustle School. If you out there are in debt and having a hard time making ends meet, or otherwise would just like to have a better standard of living, there's an answer here. You need to make more money. You can't just save more.

No amount of skipping coffee is going to help, regardless of what you hear from the personal finance expert of the day. You really need to find a way to make more money. That's our number one goal with the program, to show you all these different ways that people are doing that. With a skillset they already have in their own way, it's going to take some hard work for sure, but there is a path, there is an answer. So in today's story, it illustrates it really, really well.

A teacher graduates with a lot of student loan debt, like I know a lot of our listeners have, and becomes determined to do anything she can to pay it off. In fact, she makes this her mission. By starting a side hustle and living frugally, she's able to put her entire salary toward those loan payments. So in three years, she's paid off $100,000 worth, and is now gaining more control over her life. Just to restate, a teacher is able to pay off $100,000 in student loans in three years.

And this wouldn't be possible without that extra source of income. Again, no amount of saving can do it. You have to find a way to make more money. So don't miss the forest for the trees. You need another source of income.

So I'm going to tell you about how she made this happen for herself, and perhaps it inspires something in you. All right, stay tuned. That story is coming right up. [Music]

Like many millennials, Diana Farman graduated college with a lot of student debt. After entering the workforce and scoring a job as a teacher, she wasn't making enough money to live on her own and pay the minimum monthly amount of $2,000 on those loans.

She had to move back in with her parents so she could afford it. She knew she needed to find some way to make more money, work her way out of the hole of debt she was in, and go back to living independently. But she wasn't sure what to do. So Diana started thinking about what she liked to do and what she was good at. The obvious answer was she truly loved to work with kids.

Her first ever job was as a babysitter. And over the summers while she was still in school, she worked as a camp counselor and a nanny. She decided she would start babysitting again and also offer tutoring to help kids improve their reading skills. It was a simple idea, but as a teacher, these two side hustles were a natural fit. Diana knew that if she was going to spend extra hours a week hustling after working her regular job, it needed to be something that she liked.

Because she already had a reputation in her community for working with kids, it was easy to find her first few clients. But as time went on, she wanted to increase that client base. Instead of creating flyers to post around her neighborhood, like she used to do when she was a young girl, this time she turned to Facebook instead. Her dad was a handyman and had found some of his clients from local Facebook groups full of adults from the area. One of the groups was specifically dedicated to parents, so Diana knew if she could get in, it would be the perfect place to be discovered.

Luckily, one of her family friends was the admin for the group, and he added her to the recommendations portion of the page. When Diana made her first post offering her services, she found that many of her current clients were already in the group. They liked and commented on her post about how amazing she was at babysitting and tutoring. This caused her to get a lot more attention from other parents. Most of them were friends of each other, or at least knew each other, so if one person in the group trusted someone, the others were likely to follow suit.

This gave her another idea. She asked some of her old clients if they would make individual posts on the page recommending her services. When they did, Diana got even more business. Parents were comfortable leaving their children with her the very first time they met. The only problem was that this was all time intensive.

After gaining so many clients, Diana started doing a ton of work. While this was good to help her pay off the debt, it ended up not being sustainable. At one point, she was so exhausted she had to take a few days off from teaching. After that experience, she decided to operate on a schedule to ensure that she wouldn't work herself sick. She would tutor Monday through Thursday and babysit only on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, with little to no overlap per day between the two projects.

After ramping up, she made a combined total of at least $1,200 a month. By earning this extra money and by being very frugal, Diana has been able to live completely off her side hustle income and dedicate the entirety of her day job income from teaching to her loans. And in three years, she paid off more than $100,000. She says the key to her success has been to go for it. When she first started working her two hustles, she would make an extra debt payment every week with the money she made to ensure that she wouldn't spend it on anything else.

Once she started making enough money to live on, she made debt payments every month on the 15th and 30th, which was when she got paid for teaching. She set boundaries for herself and stuck to them rather than spending money here and there on things she didn't truly need. Also, while she worked through her debt, she started a blog called Diana on a Dime. Originally, it started out as a place to hold herself accountable, but it soon began to attract an audience. She now uses it to help others who are in the same situation as her.

And she's also just launched her first coaching program. Diana plans to continue to hustle until the rest of her debt is fully paid off. However, she's hoping to move to doing less babysitting and tutoring to working more with her blog. She knows there are only so many hours in a week that she can spend with kids, but that her website income can grow without a specific connection to time. Next month, she'll move out of her parents' house and be able to live independently once more.

Since she's paid off so much of her debt already, her minimum monthly payment has been lowered, which has allowed her the freedom to be able to afford her rent. Back when she first graduated, Diana had no idea how she'd be able to pay off such a daunting debt. But now, thanks to her hustle and hard work, she has an even bigger vision for the future. [Music]

Awesome, big congratulations to Diana. I love these stories of people just working really hard, being resourceful, doing whatever they can to get themselves out of a difficult situation, which being in debt is a difficult situation.

So good for her. I also love, in addition to the hustle and the hard work, being willing to do so much babysitting, tutoring, et cetera, week after week, month after month, I also really respect her desire to transition to something that is not so time intensive. And she's realizing that I can only be in one place at one time. Plus, I already have the day job. I'm already working with kids a lot.

I can't imagine that she wants to work with kids 80 to 100 hours a week in the long term, at least. So really smart for her to think about starting that blog, to share her journey of paying off the debt. She's got the proven, verifiable story. I think that's a big thing that sets people apart in that field. Often people are like, "Let me share my journey," but there's not really a lot of progress, so there's not those ultimate results that she now clearly has.

So for me, when I talk to people about side hustles, I'm always trying to encourage them to do something that's not just a part-time job. So I think Diana recognizes that and is working, again, toward building a better future for herself. So if you take that kind of hard work ethic and that willingness to hustle, and then applying it to perhaps working a bit smarter or at least evolving as you go, always asking yourself, "What is the next iteration? How can I do this better? How can I work not just harder, but work smarter?" Then I think her future is bright.

And I also believe that you, listeners, you too have a bright future. It's all about working hard, hustling, but also asking yourself, "What is the best thing I can do? What's the number one thing I can do right now to take even a small step to get me closer to that future that I wanna create for myself?" So that I am more independent, I have more autonomy, I can do what's important to me. That's what I'm trying to teach you about every day in some small way on the program. Today's show notes are at sidehustleschool.com/874, episode 874.

I would offer my babysitting services to you, but I don't think you want that. You should probably hire somebody like Diana, someone more reliable. But you can connect with me on LinkedIn if you have not done so already. If you search my name, Chris Guillebeau, you should see it. That's C-H-R-I-S-G-U-I-L-L-E-P-E-A-U.

Would love to link up there on LinkedIn and of course wherever else you are online as well. All right, thanks so much. I'll be back tomorrow. Much more is on the way. You have been listening to Side Hustle School.

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From the Onward Project.