Thank you for sitting down with us today! Can you tell us a bit about what you do?
I'm a money coach for women. I help to empower women around finances, so that they can make better decisions, think about the future, start investing and build their savings. I work with them to help them get out of debt and improve their mindset around money.
What inspired you to start your side hustle?
I was terrible with my own finances! While I was having some time off from my day job, I realised how bad things were in terms of my debt. I became obsessed with figuring out how I was going to get out of debt and how to sort out my finances.
When I started to apply the same thinking to my patients and my colleagues, I realised that a lot of people have got money problems. There also seems to be a big gap between men and women in terms of our knowledge or confidence and everything to do with our money.
So I started my blog to write about my experiences and how I was getting myself out of debt. It wasn’t until someone said to me that I could be a coach that the penny dropped. So I trained to be just that! And now that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm a money coach, and my blog is the start of everything.
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What has been the most rewarding part of starting this?
For me it's knowing that I'm helping people. Especially when you see that penny drop moment with a client and they go “Oh! I can do it!”. Or when they realise they can change their mindset towards money.
For example, I worked with a lady who didn’t think her current income levels could help her clear her debt. So we brainstormed how she could bring money in and looked at being a virtual assistant. And she's now doing so well! It's amazing to see when that happens. For me, it's about the kind of transformation that I see in the people that I help.
What was your biggest fear when you first decided to take the step to start this?
What if it fails? Because even now I'm still at that point where I'm not quite there yet to go full time, but it's also a bit nerve wracking to do that – what if I can't pay my mortgage? It’s that fear.
Adding to that, you then realise that you need to learn how to manage your business finances as well, and suddenly all this new terminology is thrown at you. As much as I was building something in the personal finance space, business finances are so different. So it was learning how to deal with that.
And if you had three pieces of advice for people looking to start their own side hustle, what would they be?
So the first thing would be why are you doing it. What are you going to use that extra money for? Is it paying off debt? Is it building your emergency fund? Is it starting to invest for your future? Great, you've got the ‘why’ now!
The second thing is don't give up. There have been a lot of times I've wanted to give up but am so glad that I haven’t.
And then the third thing is sometimes you've just got to give yourself a break. You're a beginner, you might have loads of things you need to learn. If it doesn't work at first, don’t just leave it and go off to find something else. Stick with it. It's not going to generate you money overnight. You have to put the work in.
