Jasmine McCall, 30, had a rude awaking after discovering her precarious credit situation. While heading to college at the age of 18, she had a bad credit score on her record which made it difficult for her to open a bank account.
“So I got my first credit card. It came with a $500 credit limit and I maxed it out in one day going to restaurants with my friends and buying cute clothes I could wear to class when college started. A month later I got the credit card bill, looked at it, and tossed it in the trash,” she told Grow.
“I severely underestimated how that would affect me in the next few months. When college started that fall, my friend and I went to open bank accounts. That’s when reality hit me. My credit score, 495, was so low that the bank refused to open an account for me. I was embarrassed when the branch manager told me this and my friend watched from a distance.”
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McCall’s experience changed how she thought about credit cards and began monitoring her reports and scores every month via a service offered through her bank. In subsequent months, she took time to dispute negative items, also known as derogatory remarks, which led to them being removed from her credit report.
According to McCall, this practice helped her raise her credit score by 300 points, and eventually, this gave birth to her side hustle that helped her earn a massive passive income in five months. This impressed her colleagues and friends who were in a similar situation and wanted her to help them.
“For the first couple of years, I would just coach my friends on how to fix their credit scores,” she said. “Last summer, I was looking for a side hustle that could help pay for my son’s daycare expenses. My 9-to-5 job had just informed me that I would be taking a major pay cut, and I needed to boost my income before my maternity leave started. The answer was right in front of me.”
Realizing that there was high demand for her services, she decided to create a digital kit that others could use as a resource to help them manage their credit. She created the kit in August 2021 while eight months pregnant. Fortunately, the platform could run without her.
“I created templates that my customers could use as straightforward scripts when contacting credit bureaus to help contest and get negative marks removed from their credit report,” she said.
When their credit score began to improve, the next financial step for many of her customers was to purchase a house and they turned to McCall to create a similar kit to help them through the process.
“I saw the demand for it start around September 2021. There was an uptick in my YouTube and social media comments about how to approach such a competitive housing market. My husband and I had just purchased our home in June 2021, and we had successfully bid on a home that had 60 other offers,” she said.
Building on her experience, she created a home buying kit. She then used the YouTube channel she created in January 2021 to grow her community, explaining her digital products to her customers while earning passive income from ads.
“August of 2021 was the first time I made money from YouTube via ad revenue, a payout of $3,199, and those earnings have increased over time, up to $6,800 in one month,” she said.
According to her, she made $25,000 in digital products over the final four months of last year, bringing in $100,000.
McCall was raised alone by her mother along with her five other siblings. She grew up in poverty and so she was no stranger to economic hardship. She was surrounded by working class people who struggled to feed their families.
However, McCall was motivated by the struggles of her mother and her neighborhood to get a good education so that she could change her family’s economic situation. Today, she is a mompreneur, a finance expert and a YouTuber.
She spends most of her time creating content showing Millennials and Gen-Z how to build credit, pay off student loans, and create passive income. Also, she is the creator of Digital Credit Recipe, an online academy that walks users through credit building and shortcuts to boost their credit score.
