Then:
Jaime Masters (formerly Jaime Tardy) appeared in our April 2011 issue, where she shared how she and her husband had paid off $70,000 of debt in a little over a year by tightening their belts and taking on extra work. Once the debt vanished, she quit her corporate job, started working from home part-time as a business coach and began interviewing millionaires for her website, eventualmillionaire.com. Masters, then 29, set a goal to someday become a millionaire herself.
Now:
Masters’s coaching and speaking business has blossomed, drawing in nearly $500,000 in revenue in 2015, with a target of $600,000 this year. Though she intends to keep expanding the business, which she runs from home, she limits her time on the job to 30 to 40 hours a week so she has time for her two children, Finley, 9, and Jet, 7. A personal assistant cooks and cleans—“Having somebody clear out that brain space for me is so valuable,” says Masters—and three other employees work on marketing, programming and other aspects of the business. “It’s still about life first, then money,” she says. That philosophy carries into her role as a coach helping clients to launch businesses.
In 2014, Masters published The Eventual Millionaire, a guide for entrepreneurs building a start-up, and she credits the book with boosting her speaking career. With a typical rate of $10,000 per speech, she talks to groups about business strategies and the lessons she has gleaned from interviewing more than 300 millionaires (five of whom now serve as her board of mentors). She has speaking gigs lined up in Australia, the Philippines and Thailand during the coming year, along with some closer to home in Austin, Texas, where her family moved from Maine in 2014 (in part to take advantage of the city’s start-up culture). One of her live webinars recently drew 1,400 registrants.
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Her personal net worth took a hit when she was divorced last year and split assets with her former husband, so her progress toward millionaire status has stalled. Now she aims to hit the $1 million mark by 2020. She sticks to a budget and strikes a balance between saving for the future and spending money on what she enjoys—she uses a wellness coach, for example. Aside from a mortgage, she remains debt-free. And she keeps enough cash in her business to help it grow at a healthy pace, but not so quickly that she has to work overtime. “I’m still committed to becoming a millionaire, but I don’t care as much about how I get there or how long it takes. I have no doubt that it will happen,” says Masters.