Here’s How One Entrepreneur Paid Off Over $300,000 In Debt In Just Three Years
Dressed — a rental clothing company based in Charlotte. It started as a side hustle while Maulion was working in HR at a technology company, but she wanted to be able to focus on it full time. She realized her debt was holding her back.
“You can’t just quit your job and do this thing and hope that it works out,” she shared. “You need a game plan and that game plan was like, ‘Let’s pay off our student debt as quickly as possible… if we can do that, well, then I can quit my job.’”
Maulion and her husband proceeded to “hunker down” to pay off the student loan debt first. Maulion graduated in April of 2016, and they managed to pay off the $72,000 by November of that year.
“That was really just hustling,” she shared of the achievement. “I was pretty hardcore Dave Ramsey at the time, but [it was] also just good old-fashioned hustling, [My husband and I] had multiple jobs and we didn’t go out to eat and didn’t take vacations. It’s frustrating at times, but to pay off that amount in less than a year — it was totally worth it.”
As soon as they paid off that debt, Maulion put in her notice at her full-time job and started running Dressed full time.
The couple didn’t stop there. They went on to pay off the $57,000 mortgage on their investment property. And last year, they started aggressively paying off their mortgage on their own house. They are now completely debt free including their mortgage, remarkably paying off over $300,000 in just three years.
Bernadette Joy Maulion, 34, like most people, never thought she would end up in the debt trap. In a short period of time that all changed, though. She accrued $72,000 in debt thanks to student loans for an MBA degree. She and her husband accrued another $57,000 in debt buying up an investment rental property and $180,000 on a home mortgage.
“Between moving to Charlotte [to buy a home], we went from… no debt to over $70,000 of student loan debt and two mortgages,” Maulion told The Money Manual. It was a shock to the system for Maulion and her husband.
Simultaneously Maulion was dipping her toes into entrepreneurship. While completing her MBA program, she had begun developing a business called