Profile I am thirty six years old and I’m a freelance digital event producer. I make $50/hour and generally work about 16-20 hours a week, though work was busier than previous months this month. I also work part time for a theatre company doing a digital murder mystery/escape room for £15 a show a few…
About six years ago, I was a super advocate for digit and Dobot. Both of these are apps that connect to your checking account and siphon out small amounts using an algorithm (or you can schedule a set amount) into a saving account. They were incredible and free, but then both services started charging. If…
I was looking up some SEO information on Stage Management – for my non-blogger friends out there, that’s how to optimize for searches and found that one of the most commonly searched phrases is Stage Manager Job Description. And it got me thinking. It’s kind of a hard job to define, isn’t it? If you’re…
It feels right on the heels of a post talking about how awesome I still am with some frugal moves that I reveal the other side of my nature too – I make some weird impulse buys. And I am super susceptible to Facebook/Instagram marketing. Besides the fact that they are on to my candle…
I recently gave a personal finance talk and when I was talking about frugality I pointed out that my favorite thing about frugality is you can take what you like and leave what you don’t – though you do need to do a bit of experimenting to know what is what. There are also a…
A 401(k) is a retirement savings plan that is usually offered by an employer. If you work in education, your employer may offer you a 403(b), which is essentially the same thing. Additionally, if you’re self-employed, you can open a SEP 401(k), though they are a bit more complicated and while the essence of a…
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that the past few weeks. I have spent a lot of this year with a lot of money in a savings account. Not through fear of investment or anything but because I have two pretty big goals I’ve been saving towards for a number of years and…
You might be lucky enough to be financially stable and just realizing you should shift some money into an account for emergencies or start setting aside a few hundred dollars a month for an emergency account. For a lot of folks, getting started with an emergency savings account can be a lot more difficult. It’s…
I’ve been holed up in an AirBnB in the Outerbanks for several weeks now and for the first time since this spring, I’ve been buying groceries just for me. At home, my dad will eat pretty much anything. Food doesn’t last long. I am not the same. I had this grand idea I was going…
I don’t know if any of you are reading She Picks Up Pennies, but it’s another fantastic personal finance blog and recently she wrote a great post on Saver’s Remorse. Let me start with the disclaimer that this is the epitome of a first world problem. It’s a decent problem to have. But it struck…
When I was 27, I hit the quarter life crisis thing pretty hard (which is funny cause I’m not exactly expecting to live to 128). It was also the year my best friend and I jumped out of a plane because I thought, if we die, I don’t have to figure out what I want…
I have a theory that my body inflates to the extent it is allowed to. Hear me out. In the prepandemic times, I would wear my jeans almost every day. I would know pretty quickly if they were starting to feel tight and I could make life adjustments to make sure I didn’t stay on…
It makes sense to me to be a little wary of using credit cards, but they are one of the easiest ways to start building up credit. Before getting a credit card, I think it’s important to get in the right mental state. I don’t know about everyone else, but in my family, no one…
A few weeks ago, I went on a bit of stage management specific tangent about anchoring and priming effects from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. I’m still thinking about this subject, but today I want to reflect a little on how, as performing arts workers, we get anchored in the starving artist…
Profile I am thirty six years old and I’m a freelance digital event producer. I make $50/hour and generally work about 16-20 hours a week. I also work part time for a theatre company doing a digital murder mystery/escape room for £15 a show a few evenings a week. Spending & Saving I’m starting to…
So after several posts just whinging and complaining about life, I spent today working on a personal finance project that was long overdue. I am in my mid-thirties and single. It’s crossed my mind a few times that if anything happened to me, no one would even really know where to look for my money.…
I know we’re all more than a little Zoomed out these days, but a part of me misses that first month or two of quarantine when it seemed like I was constantly chatting with friends in the evening or finding digital things we could all do together. Is that still a thing for some folks?…
At my job as a digital event producer, I sit through a lot of consulting and sales seminars on different topics, but the main one I produce is a workshop on how to improve your remote selling techniques. I’ve listened to the content for that seminar roughly 40+ times in the last four months, and…
It seems like the most common voice you find in personal finance blogging is from middle class white folks, which is exactly what I am. My voice, and a lot of others, come from a place of just not knowing what to do but having the resources to do the things once we figure out…
Being a stage manager puts me in a unique position that a lot of 9-5ers don’t find themselves in often – I am constantly applying for jobs. Because my mind is always partially on the next gig, it’s easy for me to stay on top of things like my resume, website, and LinkedIn account because…
Today’s post is all stage management, friends, sorry, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled personal finance and sometimes moaning about life shortly. So my day job does a lot with apply cognitive behavioral science to selling techniques and a book that gets mentioned a lot at work is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel…
I subscribe to Kiplingers and an article in the last edition was called “Give You Child Some Credit” and it was all about how you could help your kid by adding them as an authorized user to your credit card. If you, or your parents, have excellent credit, this is true. Or if you, like…
A few weeks ago, we talked about how to pick a checking account. Today, let’s look into how to pick a savings account. First of all, why would you want a savings account if you already have a perfectly good checking account? I think there are two main benefits to having a savings account. The…
Ya’ll, I sat for a while trying to figure out what to write about today. I have to be honest with you. I don’t have a lot of motivation these days. The majority of goals I usually have are largely on hold thanks to the pandemic. It’s pretty much survival mode over here. I’d actually…
The other day I was running a few errands and picked up a pizza and was shocked at how cheap it was. Not so much because the pizza was actually so cheap – it was a regular priced pizza – more because I’ve been using so many apps to order so much food over the…