I Nearly ‘Starved’ As An Artist, Then I Changed My Life
When I began my career as a professional actor, there were a lot of things I didn’t mind: subletting my room to people I didn’t know to save money on rent, hauling my life in suitcases across the city, two different trains and a bus to avoid paying for cabs, couch surfing and ridesharing across America to bank as much of my per diem as possible while traveling for work.
I didn’t mind a lot of things, because at the end of the day, I was living my dream — making a living as a professional actor.
I got paid to travel, sing and dance on stages across Asia, South America and the United States. I didn’t make much, (there was one particular tour where I was given a grand sum of $54 per day to cover the cost of food and hotel stays), but it certainly beat paying for those once-in-a-lifetime experiences out of pocket.
As high as the highs were of lugging down the Great Wall of China, hang gliding over a beach in Rio De Janeiro and taking nightly bows to thunderous applause on stage at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, the lows of agonizing over whether to leave my cruise ship gig in the midst of ongoing harassment and tolerating the toxic environment of my restaurant survival job, became increasingly difficult to negotiate.
While I could handle simple trade-offs like public transportation in lieu of taxis, it became harder to accept the trade-off of my personal happiness.
I had never prioritized salary or financial security in my early career pursuits. I was lucky to average around $20,000/year, including supplemental income from my too-many-to-count survival jobs. But the more I found myself negotiating my own happiness in the name of the passion I’d so ruthlessly prioritized, the more I began to realize the enormous value that comes from financial stability, and the more I started craving financial freedom for myself.
Unfortunately, my acting salaries, a whopping $500/week (when I was lucky enough to be working), were never going to get me there — not in New York City, even on the bare-bones budget I’d mastered as a starving artist.
I had to start earning more, but I wanted to do it on my own terms. Babysitting, personal assisting and restaurant gigs weren’t exactly putting me on the fast track to financial stability — so I became a total numbers geek. I tracked every penny spent and earned on spreadsheets, read every bit of personal finance literature I could get my hands on, and started sharing what had become my very personal mission of “breaking broke” online.
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