Profile

I am thirty one years old and I am the Production Stage Manager/Production Manager for The Marriage of Figaro! I will receive a $3,500 stipend at the end of my contract and a $300 travel stipend (hopefully that check should turn up by the first week of July).

Saving & Spending

After finishing up Clifford on May 3^rd, I headed back to my parent’s casa and have been commuting into New York City from New Jersey since then. I have a 7 week contract with an opera company there.

Commuting has actually been my biggest regular expense this month, but I’ll get $300 of it back when I’m paid at the end of this show. Also, I realized right after buying a 10 pack of tickets to Penn Station that it’s $9 a day cheaper to take the train to Newark NJ and then hop on the PATH, so I switched to doing that and have 9 tickets to Penn Station left to use at any date in the future.

Nearly half of my food expenses came from eating out the last few days of tour. I spent the month doing a Whole 30 cleanse and expected that to be pretty expensive, but I was free to pilfer the fruits and veggies at my parents house and only really had to buy some cooking substitutes, so it wasn’t that costly. Even if I’d been buying everything myself all month, it still would’ve been a lower food spend since that crazy cleanse made eating out a real pain in the butt – it was just easier to always bring my own food.

I also got hit with a NJ driving surcharge because that ticket I got in April pushed me up over 6 points on my license and so I’ll get a $175 fine from the state for the next 3 years. That’s awesome.

And my favorite expense of the month was the subscription I have to Kiplinger’s that was first purchased with airline miles has somehow auto-renewed on a credit card I don’t use often and I missed paying it. So I got hit with a non-payment fine and that is my first missed credit card payment ever. Ugh.

As for irregular expenses, I bought everything for that Hawaiian vacation at the end of June/beginning of July and that cost a pretty penny, but I’m pretty excited that I managed to knock off $1039.84 of that with credit card rewards and my best friend and I haven’t totally reconciled how much we owe each other, so I’m still going to wind up with a $300-500 check from her.

I finally used my healthcare company and went to an urgent care for a sinus infection. It was a flat $35 co-payment and after the receptionist went “what the heck is this?” and I said “they said you guys are providers” and she called them, there were no issues with using my Medical Sharing Ministry. It was just like regular insurance.

My spending breakdown this month:

• Gym – $10.70
• Food – $245.35
• Stage Management Expenses – $47.95 (to be reimbursed in July)
• Healthcare – $221.07
• Gifts – $52.83
• Car – $384.56
• Commuting – $404.75
• Entertainment – $156.45
• Hawaii – $3285.29
• Credit Card Rewards – (-$1039.84)
• Miscellaneous – $8.44

Total Spending in March – $3,777.55

Clearly not at the $500 mark, even disregarding Hawaii and the things like commuting and stage management that will be (mostly) reimbursed in July, but maybe next month will go a little better. At least my net worth hit wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it might be. There’s still a solid hope of hitting $75,000 by the end of the year!

Hustling

My income this month was made up of Clifford paychecks, brokeGIRLrich, and UserTesting.

• Stage Managing – $768.42
• brokeGIRLrich – $593.81
• Red Bull Settlement – $4.50
• Dividends – $21.15
• eBay – $6.74

Income This Month: $1,394.62

Most Popular Post of the Month: 114 Side Hustles: Ways to Make More Money

My Favorite Post to Write This Month: What’s In Your Financial Toolbox?

Elsewhere on the Web:  For Arts Majors, How to Get Ahead Money Under 30

Entirely Unrelated to Personal Finance

So maybe it’s not entirely unrelated to personal finance, because I noticed (and plan to write about) a ton of parallels, but I rocked the Whole 30 this month, which is like a healthy eating cleanse, and it was pretty effective. I have no idea what I weighed before, but I went in 4 notches on my belt, have a lot more energy and my stomach is a lot less upset than it usually is, all of which is pretty cool. I’m not gonna lie though, I was super excited to go eat a donut on day 31.

Goals

1. Contribute $1,000 to my Emergency Savings Account– Done.
2. Max out my Roth IRA– Done. DONE. Does a little dance, done, done, done.
3. Contribute $3,000 to my Down Payment Fund– Still at $2,650 to go.
4. Contribute $2,000 to my New Car Fund– Still at $950 to go.
5. Have a $1,000 Best Friend’s Wedding Fund– Done. Now I’m starting to deplete it.
6. Buy $1,000 of stock– Nothing on this front yet.
7. Develop 2 new resume skills– Nothing here yet either, though the goal is to achieve these is August.
8. Track all the time I spent on my computer outside of work for 1 week and then go without a computer for a week and see how I use that time– the plan is to do this one in August too.
9. Go on a vacation with a friend– woohoo! This time NEXT MONTH I will be in Oahu.
10. Look for a big show to stage manage– Done.
11. Run a 5k– I’ve been training all month to do this again this summer, but whether or not I’ll be able to find someone to run with me is kind of in the air.

How was your May?