If you’re an early career stage manager thinking of making the move to NYC, there are a few important financial decisions to make before taking the leap. Some questions to consider: Are your student loans paid off? What is your max rent budget? Have you budgeted for additional expenses? Do you have enough savings to…
Profile I am thirty-two years old and I am a Stage Manager at Sleep No More in New York City. My contract just extended through January. I make $115/show and work 7-8 shows a week. Saving & Spending So on the plus side, life does not feel like I’m on a runaway roller coaster anymore.…
With the Tony’s coming up, you might want to check out some of the shows on the Great White Way, but the prices might be giving you some pause. My best friend and I waited about three years to see The Book of Mormon and still would up paying nearly $200 a seat for back…
It’s not uncommon to hear about the cost of Hamilton tickets in the news these days. Leading up to Lin–Manuel Miranda’s last performance, tickets were showing up on StubHub for $20,000 a piece and the cheapest tickets available on that site was $1,350. Now that the original cast has departed, ticket prices should drop to…
Yesterday as I was walking 20 blocks to Penn Station after work, I had some time to think. You see, I wasn’t on a tight schedule after work, it was a nice day and I figured, why spend $2.50 if I don’t have to on the subway back? My travel stipend for this job just…
Today we’re wrapping up our interview with Patrick Judd, actor, producer, and founder of XYXee theatre company. In Episode 2: Art and Entrepreneurship, Patrick shared his experience of starting his own theatre company and all the business challenges and financial realities that come with it. In Episode 1: What Do You Do With a BA…
Ok, so some of you out there might not consider free opera a win. Personally, I had no stance on opera at all, which is a little weird given my whole career path. I do remember a sort of masochistic 20 year old Mel hearing that opera was the hardest thing to stage manage and…
Usually when I write about life in NYC, I regale you all with one of my Fail tales. This past week though, I actually scored an NYC win that I thought I’d share with any locals or folks headed here in the summer. Free kayaking! Erin over at Broke Millennial has this great list of…
Until I moved to NYC, bodega was just a word I learned and promptly forgot in my high school Spanish class. Now, it’s kind of my life line. You can get pretty much anything at the corner store – milk, eggs, alcohol, full meals, toilet paper, duct tape, even lottery tickets if you’re feeling lucky.…
Moving to NYC has made me super budget conscious. Fortunately, I work a lot and don’t have many friends in the city. Being on my own most of the time makes it easy to stick to my budget, and hanging out with my hometown friends on the weekends in NJ is so much cheaper than…
After all that jetsetting through my twenties, I recently transitioned to a pretty normal job. Now I work as a Production Manager for an Off-Broadway theater. It’s sort of a step away from Stage Management, but uses a lot of the same skills. If, for some crazy reason, this was a path you were thinking…
You may have noticed that more than once I’ve talked about losing my Metrocard (here, oh, and here). Lots of times when you talk about a fail, you don’t get the most sympathetic audience, but based on the responses I got regarding losing my Metrocard, I’m not the only who has frantically searched all of…
I think in the personal finance blogger realm, we like to dole out advice and tips about all our awesome saving, investing, frugal, thrifty, money wins. But sometimes we fail. And this is one of those stories. One of my resolutions this year was to get my own apartment in NYC. It had been…
Does anyone else watch Happy Endings? This is the Year of Mel. You can read about how it’s going to happen over at Fit is the New Poor. The thing about New Year’s is that I don’t really trust it. It’s one of those times when I get all maudlin about what I haven’t accomplished…