Profile

I am thirty seven years old and I’m a freelance stage manager and digital event producer. I make $55/hour at the digital production company I work with. I also work a variety of small side hustles. I am also a full time student working on a PhD in Drama.

Spending & Saving

So, I’ve been in London for a month now.

It has been fairly weird as my part time job with the digital production is online and a lot of my school workshops are still online. So sometimes I feel like I just traded one bedroom for another.

But I overall feel a lot better about life and a lot less stuck.

School is going well. I’ve heard from a number of other grad students that I’m currently in the very motivated and optimistic phase of this whole journey and I should enjoy it until the shininess fades, so I am trying to.

After my first week here, I was really lucky and a friend who was working on a show happened to be in town, so I got to catch up with her and sightsee with a buddy one day.

A few days after that, I got Covid. Which seemed about right because the precautions here are not the same as the U.S. at all. I was lucky and it was mild, but I did wind up spending about 10 days isolating until I finally got some negative rapid tests.

Again though with so much of my life online, that didn’t hugely effect things.

The AirBnB I’m staying in is a shared flat, so I am looking forward to moving into my own apartment later this month. The hunt for a place actually went really smoothly and I am super relieved to be settled for at least the next year. I move into it in the middle of this month. The AirBnB did wind up being in a really nice spot for all the places I have to go regularly – kind of a center of the triangle, but the land lady leaves a lot to be desires and is never reachable. Also there were lovely things like the heat doesn’t work in my room and one of the windows has no blinds.

So yes, definitely looking forward to my own place. Because I don’t work full time, I had two options – I could either use the school as a guarantor and pay them a fee each month or pay out the full lease. I went with the later option, so there will be a pretty nice dip in my net worth next month, but it is what it is.

As far as expenses this month – quarter one taxes were due so that’s always a good time, though it all comes from a dedicated savings account where I squirrel away 30% of every paycheck.

My food amounts are kind of high but considering the amount of take out and just grabbing something from the grocery store on the way home I did – I am not surprised. I also feel a little like a raccoon caught in the fridge when I spent a long time in the kitchen in the flat share and another roommate walks in. It’s a very weird vibe and doesn’t exactly make me want to cook.

I have a category of move to London which was some flight costs and taxis to and from the airport. Similarly, there is an Apartment category of stuff I’ve bought once I arrived.

Health expenses were a bit high from ordering a bunch of Covid tests to other drugstore needs during the whole process.

Entertainment is also a little high mostly from the one day out with my friend around London. I tried to squeeze in some free activities too, but if someone only has 24 hours in London, I’m not going to be like “no, we can’t go in the London Eye and in Westminster Abbey” or whatever else big things they wanted to see are.

I also have a line for York that I’m pretty excited about because I am going to see the York Mystery Plays in June. They are a cycle of medieval plays and I wanted to see them so badly last time I lived here and I missed them. They are only performed every 2-4 years.

Other exciting money related things I did this month was try to follow up on my tax return that I mailed in only to learn the IRS never received it. I reprinted it and remailed it but didn’t have my 2 W-2 pay stubs, so I don’t know whether or not it’s going to be accepted. Who knows when I will ever see that tax refund at this point.

I also used a lot of my credit card rewards to cover my rent payment this month.

Here is the expense breakdown for the month:

• Taxes – $5652.60
• Rent – $949.41
• Food – $553.09
• Move to London – $331.80
• Health – $253.05
• Apartment – $223.07
• Entertainment – $200.42
• York Trip – $173.92
• Transportation – $113.35
• Phone – $50.29
• Car – $46.50
• Blog – $37.00
• School – $20.56
• Gifts – $9.90
• Gym – $8.28
• Clothes – $5.03

Total Spending in April: $8,628.27 (or $2,975.67 without taxes)

Hustling

This month’s income comes from several different sources.

• Digital Event Producing – $3,382.50
• brokeGIRLrich – $1,371.76
• Credit Card Rewards – $1,093.00

Income This Month: $5,847.26 

Goals 

I think this is a pretty good assessment of what I might be able to achieve this year. If I luck out and the blog has a really good year or something, I will aim to make a contribution to my SEP 401k too.

• Max out my Roth IRA.
• Max out my HSA. $1,000 contributed. 
• Save up $15,000 to pay my tuition for 2022-23 in August without dipping into the school savings account ($9,000 if I manage the scholarship goal). $3,100 saved so far. 
• Obtain £5,000 in funding scholarships.
• Save up $2,000 for traveling.
• Balance work and school without losing my mind. So far, so good.