• Lisa Johnson, 49, from Bedfordshire, has now signed a deal worth seven figures
• READ MORE: I was a successful entrepreneur making six figures a year - but secretly drank whisky alone every night, was hooked on work and in £60,000 of debt. Here's how I finally broke free from addiction
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With household bills continuing to soar and the cost of living piling on the pressure, many families are feeling the pinch.

Nearly half of all British households are forced to dip into their savings, sell their possessions, or borrow money to cover the basic costs of everyday living, according to a recent study.

Lisa Johnson, 49, from Bedfordshire, knows exactly what it feels like to struggle financially, after finding herself £35,000 in debt following her divorce in 2014 as she struggled to raise her two beloved children alone.

Working as a personal assistant at an IT firm, she earned £28,000 a year. But her salary didn't come anywhere near covering the cost of living – just her childcare bill alone was higher than her yearly income.

But she refused to be a 'drain on the system', and instead of quitting work and taking benefits from the government, she maxed out credit cards. Soon, she was thousands and thousands of pounds in debt.

She'd limit herself to a £40-a-week food shop, say no to meeting up with friends for a coffee and would hardly ever be able to let her hair down after work and go out for drinks.

'Mentally, it really affected me. I felt like I was working for free for a start, because I wasn't getting any money from working.

'But I had to carry on otherwise I would have been a drain on the system, and I didn't want that. Every month I was a bit more in debt. There was a bit more on the credit card.'

Lisa Johnson, 49, from Bedfordshire, knows exactly what it feels like to struggle financially, after finding herself £35,000 in debt following her divorce in 2014 (pictured with her twins)

Stretching every penny, Lisa said she capped her food bill at £40 a week, which was made harder by the fact she had two babies to feed and clothe – one who required specialist baby milk and the other, who developed asthma.

'It's two of everything all the time,' she said. 'One of them was ill and needed a different type of baby milk. And then when they got older, one had asthma, and there were constant doctor's appointments. There was always something that I was needing to try and work out.'

The tipping point wasn't one single moment; having maxed out the maximum amount of credit cards she could get, Lisa was running out of options.

She says: 'There were a few times when I couldn't pay the credit card bill per month, and so I wouldn't be able to get more credit. I could see there would be a time I wouldn't be able to put the food bill on a credit card any more. I knew I had to get out of this somehow.'

Lisa looked at conventional ways to bring in extra money – a second job, shop work – but every option she found simply created a new expense, including extra childcare.

So she decided to build something from her own kitchen table. She'd seen someone else online talking about running a 'side hustle' alongside their main job, and it started an idea.

To kickstart her plan, she started an online business course from her home computer ten years ago.

'I thought, "Well, I'll become a wedding planner, because I'm good at organising, I'm good with people, and I've been married twice, so surely I can do that!"' she said.

Now, Lisa is a successful entrepreneur - and her business, called One To Many, has generated £20million in sales

However, despite securing clients – as well as working full-time – Lisa said the wedding planning business did not fix her finances overnight – in fact, it made things worse financially to begin with because she was learning on the job with no formal business knowledge.

The turning point came when she decided to study the business properly, for free, using her local library.

'I went to the library and got out every business book, every self-development book, and I just read and read and read. That's how I turned it around.'

That reading didn't clear the debt but it allowed Lisa's wedding business to grow to around £60,000 a year – enough to stop her sinking further into the red.

'People started asking me how I'd made the wedding business work,' she says. 'I started telling them all the things I'd read in the books, but in a way that made more sense and was less jargon-based – and it started working.

'Some of them came back and said, "I got my first three clients because of that thing you told me," or "I did that thing you said about budgeting and my business is making a profit."'

Lisa realised she could be on to something. She made the decision to give away her wedding business, which was taking up too much of her time, to someone who otherwise couldn't afford it, and started a free Facebook group – offering business advice.

'I started doing live videos every day, teaching people the mistakes I'd made with my business and the things that had worked – for free,' she says, and the group grew fast, reaching 600 members within the first three months and 1,200 within six.

Millionaire Lisa now takes her family on luxury holidays (seen with partner Sam and children)

'They started saying, "Can you teach us how to do this on social media? Can you do a masterclass on this?" And then they said they were willing to pay for it. I had no idea that this could be a thing!'

Lisa started small, with one-hour masterclasses, priced at around £50, on specific topics such as SEO. Every pound went straight towards clearing the debt.

From there, she built an online business course – Fabulous Foundations. It was priced at £997.

Lisa was shocked when it made £60,000 in a week the first time she ran it.

Realising the same course could be resold, she repeated the launch and made similar sums again. All the while, Lisa built her email list – she had thousands of people on it who wanted to learn her expertise.

Wanting to help people who couldn't afford the full course, she also launched a low-cost recurring membership, priced at £15 a month for people starting a business from scratch.

It reached 169 members and gave Lisa, for the first time, reliable monthly income rather than one-off spikes – earning around £2,000 a month.

'People started asking me, "How have you made money on that course?"' she says. 'So I knew I could now teach others how to do what I'd done.'

The first version of that offer, called Passion for Passive, made around £200,000 in its first year in 2018 – with people paying £2,000.

Crucially, the profit from that one launch – roughly enough to cover what she owed – was what finally cleared the debt completely.

She says: 'I still wasn't frivolous – the first thing I bought myself was new makeup, because I'd had the same makeup for ten years.'

Lisa then started growing an email list, filled with people who wanted to learn from her.

By year three, she made her first million. It wasn't until year two in business that Lisa allowed herself something bigger: a Marc Jacobs handbag, bought on a trip to LA's Rodeo Drive, costing around £300.

'That seemed massively extravagant for me at the time,' she says.

Even then, old habits died hard. Despite having roughly £80,000 spare after clearing the debt, Lisa kept shopping at Tesco rather than Waitrose, and admits she wasted money in those first two or three years simply because she didn't yet understand investing.

'I still had money issues, so I'm thinking it will disappear at any second,' she says. 'I wasted a lot of money in those first two or three years, because I didn't know any type of investing.'

It wasn't until year three, in 2020, when a single online launch of her course made £1million in an hour, that Lisa began treating her finances like a business in their own right.

She says: 'Once that happened, I knew I needed to hire a team, and I needed to invest properly - that's when I got a financial advisor.'

Now a millionaire, Lisa takes her friends and family on holiday, she bought a £2.2million house, buys designer clothes and enjoys travelling on luxury holidays with Sam and the kids.

Looking back, she's clear about what actually changed her circumstances, and it wasn't luck.

'I didn't get the GCSEs that other people got,' she says. 'But I'm a fighter. The kids changed everything - had it just been me, I'd still be in that cycle of debt - that generational poverty I've always been in. But when you don't want the same for them, it's necessity that drives you to do things.'

Now, for Lisa, it's looking at what's next, and this month, TEDx speaker Lisa signed a deal worth seven figures to sell her flagship course, believed to be the first of its kind in the UK.

The buyer is entrepreneur Sophie Foote, 40, from Dorset, who two years ago paid £1,997 to take the course herself, and has used what it taught her to make £100,000, including by moving her property business online.

Lisa said: 'From being bullied out of school to being in debt, I've overcome so many challenges.

'What the sale of this course proves is that it is possible to write your own fortune. I've learned so much about making money and how to get out of debt effectively along the way; hopefully that advice can now help others.'