Diana Chan relates her financial struggles prior to winning 'MasterChef' Australia
Diana Chan admitted having 'no money' before winning the 'MasterChef' Australia season 9 title
Diana Chan, the winner of MasterChef Australia Season 9, confessed a few things about her ‘broke’ life in 2017.
Chan, who is now one of the most talented contestants on the show, sat for a candid chat with Yahoo Lifestyle explaining the challenges of working for her 9 to 5 corporate job as an accountant and how she had to go back to work after shooting for MasterChef Australia for seven long months.
She said, "You're not working so you're not getting paid. I took a sabbatical leave. I think I was 29 then and you're only living off your savings, so you have a lot of bills to pay."
"We finished [filming] at the end of May, and then the announcement was at the end of July. So you have that three-month period where I just needed to earn money.”
Chan then recalled her life took a massive turn after she won the cooking show.
"Everything started coming in and it was really really busy and I really couldn't focus on doing my nine-to-five job. lot of it was media, a lot of it was guest appearances, whether it was a talk, whether it was a cooking demo, creating menus,” she elaborated.
"Because I'm Malaysian, I actually got a lot of inquiries to go back to Malaysia and Singapore to do a lot of gigs there. So it was quite hectic and quite mental the six months after finishing.”
Chan aims to launch her own dumpling range in Asia and expand it all over the continent with a factory already running successfully in Indonesia.
