Reintroducing Me! | brokeGIRLrich
This month marks twelve years of blogging on brokeGIRLrich and barring one month of utter burnout during the pandemic and a technical glitch here or there, I've posted at least once a week since July 2013.
And it occurs to me it's been a little while since I introduced myself, so in case you are a reader who stumbled over here in the last few years thinking “who is this weird girl just babbling about money and oversharing her net worth and budgeting?” Well… let me answer that question for you.
My name is Mel and I started this blog when I was 28 years old, as I was finishing off paying just under $30,000 in student loans and credit card debt. I had gotten into reading several other personal finance blogs at the time and found them pretty motivating. I also knew almost nothing about personal finance at the time. There was kind of a popular fad at the time to track your net worth as a method of accountability and I thought, why not? LOL. This is not a number that matters whether or not people know it. And, over time, I've kind of decided I would track it until I hit a million dollars, if I ever hit a million dollars.
There are some like “money tracking” apps that anticipate when you might hit certain savings amount when you enter how much you save regularly and anticipated interest rates and they anticipate I'll be blogging till somewhere between 57 and 65, assuming the world isn't a burning heap of rubble by then. Which is pretty much the standard for someone with a low to average income and a good saving habit.
But back to 2013. I was a little irritated that a significant number of the personal finance tips I was reading on these blogs didn't really apply to me. I had been a stage manager for about seven years at that point. Now, there were plenty that did and I was happy and interested to read about the really diverse lives other bloggers were leading and how that impacted the money coming in and the money going out, but none of them really seemed aligned with my life.
I was sitting right there!
You see, I wrote my first blog post here sitting in my room on my circus train car, the housing provided by the company whose circus I was working for. And, in general, there weren't a lot of voices of arts workers blogging at the time. Nearly every bit of side hustle advice I read was useless and there were plenty of issues with my weird contract/W-2/freelance working background that made some of the investing options people were talking about more challenging.
Also, I don't know if anyone has ever told you this, but pay in the arts isn't always great. And, at the time, I was working something like 50-60 hour weeks for just over $30,000 a year and two weeks vacation. That was coming off of nearly five years working at sea for a cruise line making around the same amount of money but with 3-4 months a year off work.
Over the last twelve years, I have shared, and potentially overshared, a lot about my income to also help highlight that the rumor that working in the arts is always underpaid is not true, but starter jobs are starter jobs and sometimes you just have to start building your resume. Also, at least both of those jobs resulted in me not having to pay rent and they even fed me on ships.
Well, I made my final debt payment in November 2013, left the circus a month later and have managed to avoid debt since then. Though I am well aware there's a lot of privilege and family safety nets that helped me do so.
After leaving the circus, I lived in New York City for a year and worked as part of the production management team at New York City Center, which a big income jump but also a big expense jump to rent a one bedroom up in Inwood. It was also a wild skill jump. I still kind of laugh that my boss ever even hired me. I think he just thought it was cool I worked for a circus when he interviewed me (which, incidentally, that $30,000ish a year gig has been pretty much the #1 talking point on my resume for my entire career since then, even as it drops further and further down from the most recent gig position). I contend that, other than Lincoln Center, NYCC is one of the busiest houses in NYC, and going from pretty much no production management experience to that was… unpleasant. It was a very long year. I also moved to New York because it was a 40 minute train ride to my hometown, where my grandmother was coming to the end of a long battle with cancer and a really long term relationship came to an end when I left the circus.
2014 was not good. Feel free to search the year in the search bar on the side of the blog if you want to learn more about what, 11 years later, is still the worst year of my life.
But, as they say, this too will pass, maybe like a kidney stone, but it will pass. And it did.
To escape the job that was giving me a stress stomach ache every morning, I took the first stage managing job available after it seemed like things had settled back home. It was for a touring children's theatre show, which always seemed to have a bit of a reputation in the arts, but honestly, I loved it. It was a fantastic two years, and, the first year especially the group I was touring with were really special. It was a significant pay cut, but I was able to give up my apartment and move in with my parents, since I was really only there for like a month at Christmas and over the summer.
I was also essentially paid to drive a van all over America and they didn't care what I did with it, so I dragged my captive cast to every off-beat roadside attraction I could find and it was glorious.
In the summers, I worked smaller contract gigs and got to work on an opera for the first time, worked with kids in a summer conservatory setting (not for me, never again, but I did find one of my favorite ASMs ever there and she has done several weird projects with me since), a small musical with fairly chill schedule in Hilton Head, and a large scale immersive production that had potential investors come at one point to consider funding a Broadway run (this clearly did not pan out but was quite exciting). I even worked as production manager on some of these gigs and found when I was not in what I am still sure is the second busiest house in New York, I was actually a proficient production manager. I was gearing up to go out on year three with the children's theatre company when I got offered a non-Equity national tour. Several years earlier I had made a bucket list of things I wanted to stage manage and I found I was largely more curious about different styles of stage managing as opposed to specific shows (though there were a few on there – the only specific show still on the list is that I'd like to call BatBoy: The Musical – which, crazily enough, is happening this fall at New York City Center. And I won't even be in America to see it). A large scale musical was on the list, so I left the children's theatre company and did a bus and truck tour.
That schedule was real rough. That tour was real rough. But the people were great, both the crew and the cast. Coming off of that tour, the children's theatre company also had a wing of like YouTube star shows (yes, weird) and I was scheduled to go out with them on one of those shows and that was the only time in my career so far that a contract just fell through the night before I was supposed to fly out.
So I went home to my parents. And I really added to the side hustles section of this blog. I was the lady standing in a supermarket offering you samples. I substitute taught. I did transcription work. I focused on growing this blog.
And while I was sitting at home, one of my bucket list jobs was hiring and I quickly found myself back paying rent in NYC and working at Sleep No More. This was a rough gig and some of the ways the audience were treated at the show really didn't sit right with me, but I did one contract there, learned a lot and moved on to work as performance director at Big Apple Circus for the following two years. That was probably my highest paying job that also provided housing in a company RV, which was really a nice little home. I was very fond of it.
Towards the end of 2018, my mom got get sick and I left the circus. She passed away shortly after and I spent about six months just existing. Working a few very easy stage management gigs, bouncing back to my dad's house in between and traveling a bit. I had prepared myself for like 6-9 very difficult months helping at home and she died the first week I was there, so… it was a strange time. I did what any reasonable person would do. I figured if I just stayed busy enough, I could outrun that grief, right?
It apparently doesn't really work like that, but it worked medium well for about a year and I think grieving for X years where X is number of years between 2018 and my own death year or grieving for Y years where Y is the years between 2018 and my own death year-1 is still better grief math.
Anyway, the summer of 2019 I wound up working for another circus on tours around the Middle East and United Kingdom before getting my first job in spring 2020 as a lecturer at a university as a visiting instructor of production and stage management. And we all know how 2020 went. I actually was really unsure about pivoting to a full time faculty position and had some misgivings, though I did really enjoy teaching two of my three assigned classes. This job wound up being a blessing in disguise, as all of my friends lost their jobs in March and my contract went through the end of June. I had some time to plan. When they chose not to renew my position (they didn't hire anyone during the duration of the pandemic for it), I was unsurprised and prepared. I had reached out to a friend who was doing a Zoom show early on and volunteered to stage manage for his theatre company to learn how digital productions work.
He talked me into doing two shows for him, which took me from April – August in largely a volunteer position with a tiny stipend, but he came through on his main promise, which was to be an incredibly enthusiastic reference about my technical skills. By October I was hired on part-time with two tech companies. One ran a sort gaming tech platform where people could video chat and play games as avatars that launched that and flopped all within 30 days. It was kind of wild. The other was a corporate training digital producer role that I am still doing now. That gig quickly amped up into full time through the pandemic and is now a little side gig. At the beginning of 2021, I also worked part-time running murder mystery games online with a British theatre company during their American booking time slots.
I also decided to apply to grad school again because the arts were still looking rough and I wasn't sure how things would be when the pandemic ended. In August, I also took on the role of company and stage manager for another circus, with production meetings starting then and a tour planned for October-January, assuming the world didn't re-crumble. I was able to take a leave from the digital producing and left the murder mysteries to go to do the circus in October, which promptly closed because some funding didn't come through roughly a week later. It was kind of crazy. Fortunately things were so busy with the digital producing, they slotted me right back in, which was largely a miracle and I subbed regularly when they needed an extra stage manager on the murder mysteries.
I got into three PhD programs, all in the UK, with a proposal to examine the production staff experience of managing audiences in immersive theatre. I picked the University of Greenwich because my supervisor is an O.G. immersive theatre maker and academic and London seemed like the right place to be to study immersive theatre. And I have been here, self-funding this strange, pandemic-driven choice, since 2022. I'm spending this summer writing up my thesis and traveling (possibly too much). While I was over there, I worked as a TA and adjunct, an occasional research assistant, and spent about 18 months on the front-of-house team for a different Punchdrunk show on weekends. I also continue to do some digital producing and occasionally sub in on the murder mysteries. I have also gone back to the US for the occasional stage management gig, but that's more events than theatre at this point because I can only commit to small amounts of time and the pay has to be enough to warrant the plane ticket.
The real star. My dog brother.
I almost just wrote, so that's me in a nutshell, but really, that's my career in a nutshell. It's where the money comes from. I'm also a daughter, sister, friend and girlfriend. And a dog sister (and dog aunt, as of recently!).
My money extra tends to go towards travel as much as it can. Travel back to the States to see my family and friends. Or travel anywhere around the world on as much vacation as I can afford.
I lucked out in my twenties and dated two guys in a row who were much better about personal finance than me. The first really pressured me to open an IRA, which was bizarre but I'm thankful. I have largely been maxing it out every year since I was 25. The other was incredibly frugal and focused on early retirement, which is not the route I went but it was certainly a fairly frugal several years with him, which probably helped me pay off those student loans in 2.5 years.
These days I try to max out my IRA and a Health Savings Account (HSA) as part of my retirement planning. I also have a self-employed 401k, which is a little more difficult to sort out, but when I have larger income years I usually contribute to that as well. And I have a regular brokerage account, which includes some inherited stocks (my grandfather worked at Exxon for a long time and would buy me and my brother a stock or two for each birthday and Christmas, which I thought was the worst as a kid and I am so grateful for now), and, once in a while, I do invest there.
I'm focused on trying to get my emergency savings up to a full year's income, which I've been trying to do unsuccessfully since 2013 but slow and steady will get there eventually.
And, while I don't think I recommend it, I have managed to cash flow funding a PhD between some savings and my income during this thing, which has provided me with some crazy freedom compared to my funded classmates but, if I were doing it again, with a better understanding now of how funding works, it's likely I would go that path instead. But I'm the first in my family to even go to college, so it is what it is. I'll post an update in like 10 years whether this was all worth it or not.
I have also been kind of lucky through this blog to get a chance to be on some podcasts and create some webinars, as well as do the occasional guest lecture on personal finance for artists at some universities and really enjoy sharing about financial literacy, especially with other arts workers. Because it's a little more complicated sometimes than it is for others, but it's still easy enough to learn which options are most readily available to us to plan for our futures.
And lately I'm not entirely sure who I am professionally, which is maybe not so strange coming out of a global pandemic and on the tail-end of a doctorate. I don't think full time academia is for me, not yet anyway, but I really have no idea what the next few years will look like. Exciting times, but first, I have to finish writing this thesis.
