While many aspiring educators brace themselves for modest earnings, School of Teacher Education alum Steven Keys ’14MAT embraced it. He challenged himself to achieve financial independence and has now turned that experience it into a profitable endeavor — one that has taken him from a teacher’s salary to millionaire status.
For Keys, the recipe was a combination of many different ingredients: discipline, frugal living, tutoring, teaching, and entrepreneurship among them. It’s why he now spreads the wealth of knowledge he’s gained along the way through mentorship in both academics and lifestyle.
What began as pursuing his passion for education evolved into a startup online tutoring service, which made its debut at UCF, to continue the work he loves, all while co-running a lifestyle blog to inspire others to do the same. Here’s how he did it.
Road to Success
Keys received his master’s in science education through a resident teacher partnership program between UCF and Seminole County Public Schools. As part of the program, he worked as a local public school teacher for two years while earning his degree, an experience that he says shaped both his teaching style and entrepreneurial mindset.
He graduated debt-free with both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and intended to keep it that way.
His path to success first began with years of intentional sacrifice. While he was developing his passion for education, Keys and his wife adopted a minimalist lifestyle, cutting unnecessary expenses, learning every strategy available to save money and committing to consistent investing.
Before their entrepreneurial journey even began, Keys and his wife had already reached millionaire status for themselves on their early-career salaries alone. The discipline that requires is something they now try to pass along to others.
“When I first started my career, I was making $38,000 a year,” he says. “My wife and I were determined to be financially successful regardless of our salaries. We developed this life philosophy of frugality and minimalism. Being happy with less and learning to live on less, money-wise. Even on those relatively low salaries that we started with, we managed to save and invest over 60% of our income our very first year having full time jobs because we lived really frugally, shared one used car and lived a small apartment, all that stuff.”
A few years into his teaching career, Keys shifted from the classroom teaching to private tutoring. He found success but ran into a new problem: the demand for tutoring services exceeded one person’s bandwidth.
“I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this to help more students and be able to charge them less.’” — Steven Keys ’14MAT
“As a one-on-one tutor, you only have so much time to sell,” he says. “At one point, I was charging up to $200 an hour. I was turning away students because I had no more time. I thought, ‘There’s got to be a better way to do this to help more students and be able to charge them less.’”
Education Meets Entrepreneurship
Eventually the couple saved and invested enough to be semi-retired before embarking on their next journey: co-founding an online tutoring service. CramBetter is a 24/7 online tutoring service built to help college students through professional support with their courses, with an emphasis on tough introductory courses — especially in STEM disciplines. Launched in 2023 with UCF as one of its pilot campuses, the platform now serves students across the country.
Working with his wife, Lauren, and business partner, Marty Parks, they created a tutoring model that could reach thousands of students at an affordable price. Instead of traditional tutoring sessions, they curated a library of study guides, video lessons and practice exams they designed using their combined tutoring experience.
CramBetter focuses on the courses that Keys says most commonly “weed out” students in pre-health and engineering pathways — like chemistry, physics and calculus — and are often taught in large lecture halls with limited personalized support. It’s also available to students who wait until the last minute to study and cannot see a traditional tutor.
“It’s accessible 24/7, so if they’re at the library at 3 a.m., they essentially have a tutor with them,” he says. “A lot of tutoring requests come at the eleventh hour, when students have an exam the next night. That’s not the way that I recommend people study, but that is the reality for a lot of college students.”
Lifestyle Tutoring
Keys and his wife also co-run a blog and YouTube channel called “Trip Of A Lifestyle,” where they detail their personal philosophies and paths to success while providing free tips to help others achieve financially stable lives, especially through similar nontraditional or unexpected paths.
“Don’t let people tell you not to go into teaching because there’s no money in it,” he says. “There are all sorts of things you can do with a teaching background — not to mention that it’s a worthwhile endeavor because it feels good to teach. I have no regrets about going into teaching, even though I supposedly could have had a more ‘lucrative’ career in some other discipline.”
Through CramBetter and Trip Of A Lifestyle, Keys is now mentoring far beyond the classroom, serving as an example to students and educators that with persistence, planning and creativity, it’s possible to build both financial security and meaningful impact.
He hopes his story can inspire students — especially those studying education — who may worry about career limitations.
“We just try to be positive and inspire others to chase their dreams,” he says. “You don’t need a big inheritance or salary. You don’t need to win the lottery to start a company or do other things you dream of. You just need to be consistent with saving from whatever job you have. If you set your mind to it, you can make it happen.”
