On October 11, a video titled “Don’t Get Caught in the Credit Card Loan Trap! Valuable Advice From a Former Idol Who Changed Careers, Featuring Roh Ji Sun” was uploaded to the YouTube channel Min Sae Rom’s Open Studio.
During the conversation, Roh Ji Sun explained that she continued promoting as a member of fromis_9 until she was 28 but struggled financially because she could not rely on her family for support. “I was active in the group until I was 28. I couldn’t keep asking my parents or older brother for help, but I still needed money to survive, so I started looking into loans,” she recalled. However, financial institutions reportedly classified her as unemployed and without income, making it impossible for her to obtain a conventional loan.
Faced with mounting living expenses, she eventually turned to a credit card loan. “I was desperate because I needed to survive. Then I discovered that I could get a card loan,” she explained. “I was in such a hurry that I didn’t even think about checking the interest rate. They said I could borrow 3 million won, and I thought that would be enough to cover my expenses for three or four months, so I went ahead with it.”
Unfortunately, the decision led to an increasingly difficult financial situation. “The debt really started growing like a snowball,” Roh Ji Sun admitted. She explained that after taking out her first loan, her available borrowing limit increased, tempting her to borrow additional money to repay the original 3 million won. “I borrowed more to pay off what I had already borrowed, and the debt just kept getting bigger and bigger,” she said.
Fortunately, Roh Ji Sun revealed that she has now successfully cleared all her debts. “I managed to pay everything off about a year after leaving the group. It wasn’t an amount in the hundreds of millions of won,” she shared. She also recalled receiving financial assistance from her older brother, who was preparing for marriage at the time. “The hardest part was paying back the money I borrowed from my brother, clearing the credit card loans, and rebuilding my credit score,” she explained.
