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When Jennifer Allan gave birth to her daughter, she was prepared for the hospital bills that she thought would follow.
What she wasn’t prepared for, however, was the 28 days spent in the NICU that sent her “spiraling,” she tells PEOPLE. She developed postpartum depression, and “could not bring herself to work” for what she says felt like a year.
Without paid maternity leave as a full-time realtor, the money that Allan and her husband had saved quickly dissipated. However, Allan was adamant that the couple’s emergency fund remain untouched.
“I was like, ‘I really don’t want to touch this emergency fund, so I’ll just start putting it on credit cards,” Allan recalls thinking at the time. “I’ll pay it off. It’s not a big deal. And then, it’s like, you kick the can down the road.”
It got to the point, Allan says, where she felt the “can” could no longer be kicked down the road. She turned to her husband, explaining the situation to him, laying out her plan: a 30-day challenge (which she posted to TikTok under her account @_jenn.allan) with one money-making or saving prompt a day from ChatGPT.
Jenn Allan
“The first day, I was like, ‘Listen, so in my postpartum depression, I didn’t want to spend all of our emergency fund. So I put a lot of our expenses on credit cards,” she recalls, explaining how she approached her husband. “I’ll be honest, I think he knew, but he was waiting for me to say something. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna get us out. This is my plan.”
Her husband, who is also an avid AI user, began helping her prompt the AI model to come up with the tasks.
“When I finally decided that I was going to not stick my head in the sand and ultimately look at my debt, I didn’t really know where to turn,” she explains. “But I got this idea. I was like, ‘Wait a minute. I go to ChatGPT for everything, so why wouldn’t I just ask, ‘How do I get out of debt?’ type of thing.”
Allan, who pays for ChatGPT+, created project folders and returned, over and over, to the same chat to ask the model for suggestions. She says she wasn’t worried about giving so much information to ChatGPT, as she uses the application “all day, every day.”
“I’m also the type to upload my bank statements and be like, ‘Where can I cut money? What am I spending on? What can I do?'” she laughed. “So for me, no, I wasn’t worried about it.”
“So the first one, ultimately right off the bat, was, ‘I’m in credit card debt. I literally have no idea how much, and I don’t even know where to start,'” she explained. “And so that’s when it said, ‘You should create a debt repayment tracker.’ So then it walked me through how to do that in Google Sheets.”
Allan says she ended up selling the created debt repayment tracker as a digital product as well, because it was ‘so helpful’ to her.
Jenn Allan
Some of ChatGPT’s suggestions were practical, like checking for unclaimed money, which netted her $700 from her LLC, but others were much more bizarre.
During one of the challenge days, the AI suggested that she tattoo her debt amount, $23,000, onto a watermelon and list it on eBay as “Debt Art.”
“In the video, you can see me being like, ‘This is not going to work. I don’t even know why I’m doing this,'” she says with a laugh.
And yet, the stunt ended up going viral on TikTok, racking up nearly 3 million views, and the watermelon even sold for $51 on eBay.
Allan didn’t actually ship the fruit to the buyer, who she says had been following along with her journey on social media, but thought it would be fruitful to put together a tongue-in-cheek gift box with a framed photo of the watermelon, a watermelon-themed dish towel, candy and a certificate of authenticity.
Other ideas, however, proved much more lucrative. On day 28 of the challenge, ChatGPT prompted her to check “every account you’ve ever had in your entire life,” which led Allan’s husband to point to an old brokerage account from a previous job where she could invest 5% of her commission checks in stock. She had checked it before her daughter was born, but had forgotten about it entirely.
Jenn Allan
“There was $10,200 sitting in there,” she says. “If Chat hadn’t told me to look, I probably wouldn’t have remembered for months.”
The video, which now has nearly 227,000 views, also struck a chord with followers in the comments.
“The manifestation worked 😅,” one user wrote, referring to a video that Allan made where ChatGPT suggested that Allan should “manifest 23,000 from the universe like it was magically going to appear.”
Not every day’s task was such a windfall, but even the smaller ones made a difference, like finding cash in her purse, saving $580 during a “grocery challenge,” picking up side gigs like Rover, the dog walking service app, and selling items on Facebook Marketplace.
By the end of her first 30-day challenge, she had shaved down her balance significantly. Getting into TikTok’s creator reward program also helped, according to Allan, who says she put the money from the fund toward her debt as well. She attempted a second challenge, but in the thick of summer, she admits she “burnt out” a little toward the end. Still, she was able to make $1,400 from the second try.
“And ultimately, at the end of the day, looking at your debt every day and changing your mindset about it is really, that is the biggest thing that I’ve been able to pull out of this entire thing,” Allan says of the experience.
