Emma Jackson didn’t have much money growing up — but that didn’t stop her from buying her first home at age 25 and saving enough to pay off the mortgage two years later.
The British blogger told Business Insider that, growing up, she was aware her parents were in financial difficulty after they had bad mortgage advice that left them in debt.
She and her brothers started contributing to the household once they could, which helped her focus on being “really savvy” with money.
“It just completely changed the financial trajectory of where my life should be versus where it is,” she said.
Starting a blog
Jackson, 31, said she started to save a portion of her wages at 17 to eventually afford a home.
After completing a master’s degree in sociology in 2016, she worked part-time for a university student union. Four years later, she began working for the UK’s national health service in a staff engagement role and has been working full-time as an apprenticeship coach at a university since last year.
Jackson started her “Bee Money Savvy” money advice blog in 2017.
She said the idea for the blog came about because her friends would ask her how she made it through to payday working a part-time job without struggling when they were earning twice as much as she was. “I thought, I’ll set that up, write what I’m doing, and my friends can sort of copy me, and they can improve their finances,” she said.
Jackson uses the blog to document all the different ways she’s learned to save and earn extra money on the side, like taking part in paid surveys, organizing cashback credit cards, and entering competitions. She said one of these competitions won her a trip to the Maldives in 2023.
She said she “had no idea you could make money from a website,” but the blog became a side hustle.
It didn’t make any money that first year. Two years later, the website generated £10,216, and in 2024, its revenue was £41,090, which is around $55,380. That year, she won the Money Blogger of the Year award at the British Bank Awards.
Paying off a mortgage in 2 years
She bought her first home, a one-bedroom apartment in her hometown of Sheffield, Yorkshire, in 2019, when she was 25. The property cost £80,000, with a deposit of £36,000 and a £44,000 mortgage, fixed at 2.16% interest for two years.
Jackson said the blog “massively” contributed to the deposit on her first property and paying off the mortgage within two years.
Her part-time employment meant she was only approved for a small mortgage, so she decided to build as big a deposit as she could through her savings and working an extra job in health and safety at her father’s workplace, as well as her part time work with the student body.
She said she didn’t get any money gifted from her family for the deposit, adding, “I don’t feel hard done by for not. I think the mindset my parents gave me has made me work quite hard.”
Jackson overpaid her mortgage in the first two years and then made a bulk payment of £33,000 in 2021 to pay it off. She said the income came from working overtime in her job and her blog while using the money-saving tips she advocated.
A multi-thousand-pound side hustle
Jackson said she started paying the same amount as her monthly repayments for investing in shares and funds, and has since increased it. It took her until that point “to even feel comfortable to start investing,” she said.
Earlier this year, Jackson bought her second property, a two-bedroom apartment in Leeds, a city north of Sheffield, for £162,000, with mortgage repayments of £525 a month, fixed at 4.26%. The deposit was £65,000, and “definitely the majority of that has come from blogging.”
“I don’t expect to pay this one off in two years,” Jackson said, but she intends to soon sell her first property, which she rents out to tenants, expressing that she hasn’t enjoyed the pressures of being a landlord.
Now, Jackson makes about £5,000 a month from her full-time job, her website, and the rent on her first property. Business Insider verified these earnings with documentation.
Her highest monthly income was in April 2024, when she made just over £10,000 after an unusually busy month with a lot of paid promotional posts on her blog.
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