Arts degrees have a little stigma to them. I mean, I wrote a whole post years ago about why a theatre degree isn’t useless.

Today, I’m going to tell you about how a theatre degree (or music) actually gives you an incredible savings edge.

Some of the best jobs that totally cover room and board are jobs for people in the arts.

The biggest reason I am where I am financially is because over the last 10 years, I’ve paid rent for two and one quarter of them.

One year of rent was when I went back to school for a year. Another year of rent was to work in New York City and the quarter year of rent was also to work in a job in New York City.

The year I was in school was a wash. I was living in England and racking up debt left and right to pay tuition and live – but that’s another story.

The first year in New York, I had landed my highest paying job I’d ever had (at the time) making $53,560 a year. This was $20,000 more than I’d made in the jobs before it.

But I also suddenly had an apartment to pay for, utilities to cover, food to buy and commuting costs. Goodbye approximately $21,000.

Fast forward a few years and I was working on a big show in NYC again, making $115/show for usually 7 shows a week. With the same expenses totaling about $1400 a month.

Essentially, whenever I live in NYC, two weeks of work go to rent and utilities, one week of work goes to MTA and food, one week of work might manage to get saved – if nothing goes wrong that month or I don’t try to go out much over the month.

Now, a 25%ish saving and investing rate isn’t terrible. It’s actually pretty darn good. But 25% of a small salary still isn’t that much money.

80-90% of even a small salary going into savings, investment or paying down debt though is.

And that was the percentage I averaged for the other seven and three quarters of the last decade.

And it was because of the opportunities my stigmatized theater degree offered me.

I can never rave enough about how much I saved while working on ships and all the amazing adventures I got to have there.

My average bar bill was $40 a week – to be essentially a raging alcoholic (not that I would ever encourage anyone go that route).

I could escort tours all around the world for free. I saw the most amazing things without spending a penny…. and a lot of really stupid things that I never regretted because they were free too, so whatever. Even if I did pay to go out on a tour with all of the crew, it was usually at a crazy discounted rate.

I was around a bunch of other similarly aged folks also drowning in student loans and credit card debt or trying to save for a big goal, so even if we did go out on the town, we usually did it pretty cheaply. If we had a fancy night on the ship, we’d go to the incredible 5 star restaurant onboard for $20 each – and that was really a splurging evening.

From there I went on tour and lived on a train, I did have to buy groceries there, but I was still able to funnel most of what I made to paying off student loans.

Even out on tour, I lived in hotels and got a per diem for food each week. It was pretty easy to scrounge a lot of free food between the hotels and the theaters, so living entirely off the per diem and banking my entire paycheck was super simple.

In between gigs, I’d go visit my folks for a few weeks (which, yes, is definitely a huge privilege factor in my ability to not pay rent too), couch surf among friends or go on actual vacations.

Jobs like the above are actually really common in the arts, and while I’m not saying $25,000-$30,000 is a great salary by any means, if your housing is being covered, you can actually still save a lot.

An added perk to starting out your career like this means that as your salary increases, you’re so used to saving a big percentage that suddenly you’re able to make much higher contributions to your goals without feeling any lifestyle squeeze.

Does anyone else work in a career path that offers a lot of jobs that cover similar living expenses?