I read a great blog post this week that was a breakdown of how this blogger learned to relate to money and how, year by year, he got better and better at what he was doing.

But one section in particular stood out to me because I felt like it summed up my major financial goal and articulated the main reason I get so passionate about sharing personal finance tips with the arts community, and especially stage managers.

He summed up one year by explaining it was the year that his wife got laid off, but because of their financial situation, instead of just having to jump at the first lousy job she found, she could be choosy.

Folks, I flipping love that I can be choosy. It is probably my biggest financial achievement to date. It is also the source of so much of my stage management success.

Having no debt and a financial cushion allows me to look for jobs I want, not just jobs I need.

It lets me take a lower paying gig where I can learn something cool or work with someone amazing.

It lets me take a longer break between jobs if I’m feeling totally burnt out (more power to those of you who can power through for years at a time without a break – I am not you).

It gives me some freedom to arrange my schedule and either take those longer breaks or negotiate harder if I need a weekend off for a big event like a friend or family member’s wedding.

Is that just me who feels the combination of yay, so much joy for someone you love when they get engaged and also how the heck am I going to make this work in my work schedule?

There is just such a huge sense of peace in being able to be choosy.

And I’m not writing this to humble brag or anything, but because I think the first step in getting to be able to choosy was that I had to decide I wanted to do it. I had to get my mindset all in for this change. And for me, some of the best things that helped me get onboard (other than my own seething rage at the debt that was holding me back at the time), was motivational content from personal finance bloggers.

The awesome thing about this community is how personal it is. There is really no one side fits all way to financial success. There are a lot of good, general ideas that do seem to work for a majority of folks though.

And the other nice thing, is that while all of us have some unique challenges, the odds are good that at least one other person out there had a similar challenge, and they might be blogging about what they did to get past it.

And on the plus side, the vast majority of us do have some advantages and privileges and you know what, I think if you have them, you have a responsibility to use them wisely. It’s not like we got to pick these privileges, you are just born where you are born. I think good bloggers also acknowledge those, so that if you find yourself in a similar situation, you can use some of the same optimizing techniques.

I have some awesome privileges:

• I’m white.
• I grew up solidly middle class during the high school and college years.
• I have a family that loves and supports me.
• I was able to live at home intermittently for 15 years after graduating.
• My parents paid for my undergrad degree.
• I had well off grandparents who kind of spoiled me.
• I have a massive, close extended family social net, if any risk I ever take fails wildly.

I have a few challenges:

• I’m female.
• I’m single (life is just more expensive alone – though I am totally in control of where the money goes, so maybe privileged too?).
• I work in an unstable industry.
• I had a decent amount of debt after grad school.
• I made some expensive living situation decisions right after school.
• My family financial situation has not always been the most stable.
• I am not always clear on what I want out of life.

And within that (super generalized) framework, I’ve managed to make things work.

Here are the goals I put in place to get to choosy (and some of them took years to complete after I set them):

• Pay off the student loans.
• Try to be a month ahead on my bills.
• 3-6 Month Emergency Fund
• Max out my IRA every year.
• Contribute up to the match with my employer any time I have access to a 401(k).
• Start saving for mid-term goals (like a house and a new car) and use those savings accounts as additional safety nets.
• Max out my Health Savings Account.
• Invest in opportunities that help make me a stronger stage manager – books, trainings, certifications, lower paying short term jobs that let me build a new skill, etc.

Personally, I get kind of jealous of the engineering, lawyer, doctor types who hop on the personal finance bandwagon and sort out their way to early retirement in like five years because their incomes are so crazy high.

But then I think, I wouldn’t want to do those jobs anyway. And my slow and steady, turtle like approach to money has left me in a place where I can at least be choosy these days while still working a job I love (most of the time).

And that’s kind of an awesome place to be.

If any of this was motivation enough to make you want to make some changes, check out the rest of the blog. There are plenty of motivational rah-rah posts, a fair number of rants, but also a lot of concrete actionable tips on how to save money and earn more that I’ve been working on for years.