Profile

I am thirty six years old and I’m a freelance digital event producer. I make $50/hour at the main company I work with. I also work part time for a theatre company doing a digital murder mystery/escape room for £15-£20 a show a few evenings a week.

Spending & Saving

I’ve been having a low key level of panic over the fact that my birthday is next month and what even was this year? It’s like the year that wasn’t but somehow time just keeps passing anyway.

This month shot by. The past week was super slow with both jobs but that was on the heels of like 7 weeks straight of double shifts every day at both job with just Memorial Day and Father’s Day weekends off. So since my invoices are delayed by 30 days on the one job and I totally forgot to turn in my other invoice until after payday on the other one, July will be a nice month of income.

I have also been a in a low key level of panic over the future the past few weeks. I’ve had three jobs pretty much fall in my lap and I turned them all down in pursuit of this insane PhD idea.

I think I just currently feel very stuck while I get my applications in order until I know if I got in. The low key panicker in me was like “but what if I don’t get in and I just turned down a bunch of work and I never get offered any work again?” This probably isn’t what will happen but I can’t quite shut that voice up.

I’m also applying to start school in the spring and would really like it if I could stage manage something before disappearing into academia for a few years.

It really is just the stuck feeling that had utterly worn me down. I am so lucky and trying to be so grateful for how the last year has turned out. Everyone I love made it through alive and I’m not homeless or bankrupt. But I am not doing so hot at the gratitude these days and I just want to get on with life.

Well. None of that was a spending or saving update.

Quarterly taxes were this month, which is always exciting. I put away 30% of each 1099 payment I get though, so I just transferred that over from savings.

My health payments were way higher than usual. In an odd twist, there seems to have been some kind of new law about the ACA health insurance premiums and I didn’t have to pay my premium this month? I can’t tell you how nervous that makes me. I looked into it and it seems legit, like my payment is now cut in half and I have a credit for the last few months, if not the whole year.

But I don’t like this. I feel like this is somehow going to come back and bite me at tax time. So I’m aiming to save up some extra money just in case and put it to the side for what is likely to be the great 2021 healthcare credit tax debacle.

I also don’t like it because I am actually using my health insurance for the first time like ever to do several preventative checkups, which still cost a few hundred dollars. But I want them to just cost a few hundred dollars and not thousands of dollars when my health insurance company suddenly tells me I didn’t pay my premium.

All of this just makes getting a PhD in Britain look more and more appealing.

I did my first big post-pandemic thing this month and rejoined the gym. I am currently looking for goggles that don’t bruise my eyes. Do you want to know something really fun about that? They were always tight but this last week back has been like really painful, using the same old goggles. I did some Googling – it’s cause I’m old. Sometime during the pandemic, I got old and older people often have trouble with their goggles bruising their eyes. W.T.F.

Food is also still high. There’s been a lot less takeout, but the meal delivery kits really just replace that cost pretty equally. We spent most of this month eating Dinnerly which I totally do not recommend.

Gifts are a bit high too. People just keep having birthdays and babies. At least it’s a happy way to spend money.

The best spend of the month was on tacos and margaritas with a friend of mine. I’ve wanted to sit and eat tacos and drink margaritas for a year now and it finally happened.

On the plus side, for saving I did manage to max out my IRA this month. It feels nice to finally check something off the list after being stalled for so long.

Hopefully I can knock off one to two more of the goals next months, fingers crossed nothing terrible and costly appears out of nowhere to derail that.

My expenses this month:

• Taxes – $2747.89
• Healthcare – $728.59
• Food – $532.00
• Gifts – $243.53
• Fitness – $135.17
• Car – $89.54
• Toiletries – $89.29
• brokeGIRLrich – $80.00
• Entertainment – $79.96
• Clothes – $57.01
• Miscellaneous – $25.97
• Candles – $25.00
• School – $23.38
• NJ Transit – $18.50

Total Spending in June: $4,786.29 (or $2,038.40 without the taxes)

Hustling

Most of my income this month came from digital producing income. It was also a higher month for stage managing the murder mysteries since we added another show, though I won’t get paid for that for this month until July. I also did some UserTesting, got a few dividend checks, my dad paid me back for some of the dog expenses last month, and brokeGIRLrich made a little money.

• Digital Event Producing – $4242.50
• brokeGIRLrich – $320.40
• Dog Money – $220.00
• Dividends – $107.71
• UserTesting – $90.00

Income This Month: $4,980.61 

Goals

• Max out my Roth IRA. Done
• Max out my HSA. This is on track. I’ve learned to just go a month at a time here, since sometimes my insurance changes over the course of the year due to different jobs.
• Invest $2,000. Halfway there.
• Save up $3,000 for post-pandemic traveling. $1250 saved so far, about $205 of it spent.
• Add $1,000 to the emergency savings account.
• Add $2,000 to the new car savings account.
• Break $300,000 net worth. Updated to break $325,000.
• Do two things to build up my stage management skills. COVID compliance officer certificate and immersive theatre design class.