Tiffany Aliche runs two successful business, her speaking, teaching and writing business, The Budgetnista, and the Live Richer Academy, an online school about financial literacy. Considering her upbringing, it’s not surprising she makes a living talking about money. Financial education was just a way of life for Aliche growing up.
Born and raised in a small, rural village in Nigeria, her father worked as a financial professional. Each week, he would sit Aliche and her four sisters down for “money lessons.”
“He still shares awesome financial lessons with me,” she says.
Those childhood lessons were a life raft for Aliche when she found herself in unexpected financial straits. During the Recession in 2009, at the age of 29, Aliche lost her job as a preschool teacher. She hadn’t seen it coming. “Before that, I thought I had it all financially figured out,” Aliche says. On a tight teacher’s salary of $39,000 a year, she had managed to save $40,000 in two and half years, so at the age of 25, she was able to purchase her first home.
By the age of 31, Aliche was still jobless with a $200,000 mortgage, $50,000 in student loans and $35,000 in credit card debt. She was losing her home to foreclosure, had drained her retirement account and had moved back in with her parents.
“I felt hopeless and fell into a deep funk,” she shares.
However, she hadn’t lost her know-how. “I realized that despite my situation, I knew the financial basics, how to budget and save,” she says. “I learned them from my parents.”
She used her know-how to manage her unemployment money and supplemented it by babysitting, tutoring and other odd jobs. Before long, her friends, also hit by the recession, noticed her progress. “Before long I was coaching them, then friends of friends. Then I started charging, $50, then $75, then $100 a session.”
The idea for The Budgetnista and the Live Richer Academy was born. Realizing she could make more teaching in a classroom setting vs. one-on-one, she reached out to the nonprofits she had volunteered with while unemployed and landed a contract with the United Way teaching finance and budgeting classes.
“If you would have ever told struggling, post pre-school teacher Tiffany that one day I’d run a million-dollar-a-year business, I would never believed it,” Aliche says.
As for entrepreneurs still building their businesses, she counsels: “Falling is not failing. I doubted myself so much when I started my businesses, because I kept making mistakes. Now I understand that mistakes are and were necessary parts of the journey. You truly stumble and bumble toward success. The trick is to realize that mistakes are meant to teach you how to maintain the dreams you seek. The lessons you learn give you the resources you need to live a richer life.”
Related: 4 Things Women Entrepreneurs Need to Know Before Approaching Angel Investors and VCs
https://www.entrepreneur.com/slideshow/308721
