Personal Finances. Taxes. Budgeting. Debt. Investing. Saving.
Are you in a cold sweat yet?
Like nearly every single human on this planet – I’ve had a very up and down journey with money.
While I never dreamed I’d have any desire to write about money, I felt it was important to write about this today because it impacts every area of our lives - including creativity.
Before I share more, I want to make one big caveat: I am an artist by night and a salesperson by day. I am not a money expert. If you are looking for the 10 steps to financial freedom, you probably won’t find them here. However, I will recommend some of my favorite personal finance experts at the end. The only actual advice I will give is this: similar to how dozens of very different nutrition plans can all help different people lose weight, the best financial advice is often simply the one that empowers you to take action.
With a compelling vision and a powerful “why” behind what you want - there is always more than one way to get something done.
Today, I want to share my personal experience - how learning about a very different way of looking at money has inspired me and my husband (both artists with “day jobs”) to finally get out of commercial debt for good and think more creatively about how we design a life on our own terms.
Years ago, when it was time to file taxes, I would black out. Everything looked fuzzy and daunting. My freelancer taxes between 2014-2018 were a nightmare. The thought of having a 401k was nothing more than a distant dream. I used credit cards to pay bills. My main motto with money was essentially: “try not to think about money and hope it improves by accident.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that I believed I needed to be “broke” to be a real artist. I thought working a 9-6 was being a sell-out... the equivalent of giving up.
When I decided in 2017 that I was going to slow down on money-making gigs in order to create my own album, it took a gargantuan amount of effort. By 2018, I was working two regular part-time jobs for a few months, successfully funded a Kickstarter campaign for my first album (essentially a third job while it’s running) and performed, gigged and did anything necessary during this time.
And then, I hit a wall.
As it turns out, having anxiety and depression and also attempting a schedule where you get very little rest is a recipe for disaster. I just remember thinking, “this lifestyle is going to kill me”. It nearly did.
That same summer after my album had been completed, and for separate reasons, I had a severe mental health crisis coupled with exhaustion that landed me in a hospital for several days. While my lifestyle hadn’t caused it, it also wasn’t helping to prevent something like this from happening again. I knew I needed to get more realistic about the type of lifestyle that would help me thrive. I realized very quickly that I needed stability in my life - at least in some form. So, I finally started working a full-time, stable job with health benefits and a 401k.
I had “sold out” out, or so I thought.
As it turned out, working a 40-hour work week practically felt like a vacation compared to what I had done previously. The downside and trade-off was that I spent less time overall working on music, performing, and tending to my creative work. The upside of this experience was that I began to realize – you don’t have to kill yourself to earn.
The skill of earning money, investing, saving, etc is just that – a skill. Like all skills, you can grow it, work on it, and develop it over time.
With my newly found calm around having at least a baseline of regular, predictable income, I decided to finally take the time to educate myself around personal finance.
Since 2019, I’ve been gradually working on my relationship with money – primarily studying my favorite book Smart Couples Finish Rich by author David Bach and revisiting principles behind Dave Ramsey’s work around debt. I also read and studied Jen Sincero’s You Are A Badass at Making Money - which ended up radically transforming my psychology around earning. Her particular book is incredibly helpful if you are an artist, musician, performer of any kind, because the author is an artist who healed her relationship with money. She directly addresses the issues that nearly all performers have around earning. It’s a game changer.
After that incredible book, I began to learn about FI/RE movement - “Financial Independence, Retire Early”. Though the name indicates it’s some sort of cult movement, it’s simply an aggressive savings plan that enables people to retire in their 40s or early 50s.
While true FI/RE plans typically require a low overhead and/or high income to make them work, other interesting concepts have sprung up from the same idea. Financial plans like “slow FI” and “coast FI” are both more reasonable plans built for people who simply want to gradually scale their efforts back to enjoy life more over the course of their careers. These plans can lead people to do more enjoyable work that pays less, work part-time, create more, take mini-retirements, start a part-time business… or just have more choices available to live life outside of the box of “9-5, retire, die” that is sold to us at age 18.
The only problem with this FI/RE plan, was the idea of delaying my creative dreams and goals in order to “retire” in my 40s or 50s made absolute zero sense to me. However, the concepts behind it are powerful and they forced me to think more creatively about life, work and money.
My husband and I decided to pull the key points from the FI/RE movement that can be applied to building a more suitable creative-inclusive lifestyle. Here are the key principles we are starting with:
Emphasis on clearing debt to lower monthly overhead
Budgeting for creative endeavors
Budgeting around our values
Investing to support our long-term financial health, to provide peace and flexibility in the short term
Learning to design life on our own terms
While I have always struggled with thinking about paying off debt, I finally got on board because we have crystal clear reasons to do so as a couple. We have just completed an early payoff for our car, and are halfway through paying off our entire credit card debt. After we are done with that, our next plan is to begin putting money aside for each of our creative endeavors as well as saving months of expenses in advance so that my husband has more optionality around his work hours later this year. I plan on recording an EP this year, and he plans on going into production for a short film. There’s a lot happening but this is the first time we’ve given our creativity the respect it deserves and crafted our budget around it carefully.
Our plan isn’t for everyone. Most people our age who earn similar incomes are buying a new car, upgrading their apartment, eating out constantly, and/or leaving their debt to the “appropriate” amount. The reason we aren’t doing this is because we don’t value it. If you truly value having a new car for your long commute, go for it. If eating out saves you time and sanity, go for it. We just don’t value new cars very much and I prefer to cook - so we’ll be sticking with a reliable Honda for now and a weekly grocery budget. We will be taking vacations, investing in creative projects and taking time off to work on those projects. Everyone has to budget and find the tradeoffs that suit their life goals and vision.
I am sharing our plan because I hope it inspires you to think creatively about your own situation and financial plans. I hope it encourages you to stop taking yourself out of the game of financial health simply because you don’t feel you earn enough, have the “right job” or have student loan debt. I want everyone to feel that they have agency over their lives, however small. Years ago I felt trapped and hopeless in my “gigging artist” mentality, but looking back I can see so many different things I could’ve done. I had more power than I thought.
My wish for you is to find whatever power you have over your own life and begin to take the first small steps towards re-designing your life on your own terms.
I’ll be right here taking small steps with you.
Book recommendations for further reading:
Smart Couples Finish Rich and Smart Women Finish Rich - David Bach
You Are a Badass at Making Money - Jen Sincero
Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence - Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez