People of EarnIn: Chris Knight

Even though Chris has had his fair share of tough times, he realized that those times made him cherish the good times. Now, Chris is looking forward to better days with his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. Here’s his story:

“I've been all over the place to be honest with you. I’ve been married three times now, although I've been with my current wife for just over 16 years, been married for 10. I’ve had lots of ups and downs. Divorce is very hard to go through and that caused a lot of financial turmoil. I've lost everything numerous times and I had to rebuild from scratch. I've had times where I made hardly any money in a year, 2008 being a great example. It was rough to go through that. But now I'm the plant manager of a $34 million facility.

We've got a nice home. We’ve really rebuilt and I've done that a couple of times in my life. It's very difficult but it's doable. It gives you a very good outlook on life, on people's situations, on understanding the good times and the bad times. I'm a firm believer that you can't really enjoy the good times if you've never really had the bad ones to go with it. It's hard to go through at the time, but it really builds who you are.

Things are going well, even with the issues the whole world is up against with COVID and everything going on, myself being in food production hasn't slowed down. If anything, we're even going harder than we have. I've kept every employee employed and we've even brought in more staff throughout this last year, which is really exciting on my end to be able to help support our community and keep people employed.

In the long term, I've been steadily trying to increase what I invest into my 401k so I have a better retirement plan. The wife and I started our savings account and we’re building that up so that we have our vacation fund. When I put money in savings, I try not to touch it. So if I need a little extra money to pay a bill, that's where EarnIn comes in.”

It’s always uplifting to hear the stories of our community members. Hearing real people share what they’ve been through and what they want in life is beautiful. If you’d like to chat with us and talk about your story, send us an email at stories@earnin.com!