Chris Lovell went from being more than $100,000 in debt to a six-figure net worth by “house hacking,” doing side hustles and moving into a higher paying career.
The mother of two started her journey from negative to positive six figures when she was pregnant with her first child. She was a teacher in Los Angeles, and while she had a master’s degree, earned only about $30,000 a year. Her husband, Steve, was a police officer, and they were managing a side business that cost more than it was making, she told MarketWatch.
Lovell’s $100,000-plus of non-mortgage debt included student loans, credit card debt, personal loans and a car lease, and she was stressed about basic necessities like groceries.
“At that point I knew that I needed to make a change,” she said, “because it was no longer about me, it was about me and this new person who had no choice to come into this situation.”
She found free resources on YouTube, social media and podcasts and in books that helped her make a plan. Step one was to make more money, and she said one of her early side gigs was teaching English to students in China online late into the night.
The couple lived in a duplex in South Los Angeles that they’d bought several years earlier for $380,000 with a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan and a 3.5 percent down payment. They had already renovated it, doing much of the work themselves. They used equity from that property to buy a second duplex, and moving there gave them three units to rent out instead of one.
Lovell started a financial education platform, the Money Mom, offering money advice geared to parents. She said she has since renamed her brand Careers by Chris to shift her focus toward helping women achieve salary growth. She earns five figures a year with it, mostly from brand partnerships, and works on it after the kids, who are now 5 and 1, go to sleep.
She quadrupled her salary by leaving teaching for human resources, getting two salary bumps and a cost of living increase along the way. She works for the county of Los Angeles.
Today, she and her husband earn about $2,500 net per month from the two duplexes that they own and self-manage in Los Angeles. And they flipped a property, which generated a five-figure profit for Lovell.
As Lovell’s net worth grew to $300,000, independent of her husband — they keep their finances separate, because “it works in our house” — her money worries have lessened. Her net worth includes her share of the real estate equity, plus retirement accounts, a brokerage account and a business savings account, and she still carries more than $60,000 of student debt. But she has no plans to leave her full-time job. “I enjoy the stability of my job, as a mother,” she said.
Her husband, who stopped working full-time for a year to pursue entrepreneurship, recently returned to policing.
As for why she hustles so hard, Lovell explained that it’s all for their kids.
“I want to make sure they need and want for nothing,” she said.
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