bills, bills, bills #15
A week in the life and wallet of a professional NYC theatremaker-turned-Midwest professor
Bills, Bills, Bills is a monthly series of anonymous money diaries from theatre workers curated and edited by Jenna Clark Embrey. The full archive is available here.
editor’s note
This month’s column is my favorite yet, because of the level of detail (read on if you’re a freelancer considering an LLC) and this contributor’s keen observations about their own financial practices. I’ll conclude this editor’s note here, as this contributor also wrote their own introduction, which says it better than I ever could.
This month’s columnist opted to donate their honorarium to The Living Forest, a nonprofit focused on national and community reforestation efforts. (If you’ve ever worked on a new play, you’re probably aware of the carbon footprint of scripts).
I hope that my Money Diary is two things:
A Hopeful Tale
A Cautionary Tale
A hopeful tale, because I hope younger artists will read this and see that yes, it is possible to live a creative artist’s life and have health insurance and go on vacations and buy nice dinners out for yourself and have all the material comforts that years of low paychecks, chasing paychecks, and the general uncertainty of our day-to-day lives often negate. You might have to move a couple times and pivot to new jobs, but it is possible. And not just the material things — I think what I loved about re-reading back through my money diary was seeing all the time that I spent with my family and friends over the course of the week.
A cautionary tale, because while I have a wonderful life and all these things, what you also will see is a product of years and years of NOT saving money and NOT putting anything away for retirement — living paycheck to paycheck even when I didn’t have to because I was so, so certain that I might never have money or a job again so why not spend it while I’m making it?
I am about 15 years behind where I ought to be with any type of retirement fund if I even want to think about retiring before I die. I don’t even think about buying a house (especially not in this market) — I simply don’t have enough savings and to get what I need saved up is just so daunting at this point. I still think I spend way too much money on luxuries and eating out because of years of arrested development in my financial maturity and years of being too busy to build up healthy habits like cooking for myself. I’m working on it — but it’s gonna take a while to get where I need and want to be.
So while I don’t regret a single choice I’ve made and I love my life, I do wish I’d listened to all those people who told me to start saving for retirement in my 20s and to start saving even a little bit of money each month in addition to paying all my bills.
Job/Position: Assistant Professor of [Redacted Specific Theatrical Discipline] at a university. I also do some additional freelance work.
Location: A medium-large city in the Midwest
Age: 40!
Annual Income:
$64,000: This is my teaching salary…though they write my contract for nearly $90,000 because they show the breakdown of what they are spending on all my benefits. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I appreciate seeing all the dollar amounts broken out, on the other hand…why not just pay me $90,000 and then my benefits? But that’s beyond the scope of this diary).
$24,000: This is my income from my LLC — see below for more details there. This is paid as salary, not as contractor income!
$10,000: Part time theatre work paid as salary. (This amount is approximate.)
Total Annual Income: $98,000. This is an average. Last year was a little higher due to a high-yield year for freelance work and not starting my LLC until April.
I run my freelance work through an LLC that has S-Corp taxation status. This means that I pay myself as an employee a regular salary rather than an ad-hoc collection of fees and 1099 work. I *just* started this last year and my one big thought was “why didn’t I do this sooner?” While it is a lot of admin work and means I have to file two completely separate tax returns, it has many net positives:
It means I can open another retirement account and start putting pre-tax money into it. (I have recently hired a financial advisor to help me do this.)
My monthly income is now fixed which makes budgeting and spending a little more regulated — which I very much need for my self-discipline.
It is SO much better for all my employers, because I carry my own work comp and general liability insurance. In fact, I started it because I found myself running into situations where employers told me they couldn’t hire me as a contractor without an LLC anymore (largely due to insurance reasons), and that if I wanted to keep working for them I would need to do it. So, I did.
This year the total income coming into that company is projected to be around $50,000. I want to have a little more cushion in the account before I give myself a raise. Right now, there is about $16,000 in that account.
Debt:
$28,000: Car loan, I am 1 year into a 5-year loan.
No student loan debt. I paid off the last of it in 2021; I had about $50,000 total which was the principle and then had interest on top of that. I had four loans that each had between a 3% - 6% interest rate from graduate school that I paid off steadily over a 10-year period. (I made payments totaling about $650/month every month for that entire time span).
I did not have undergrad loans to repay, as I attended on a combination of academic and merit-based scholarships along with student loans that were in my parents’ names and my parents paid them back. Fun fact: I did not know that they were doing this until after I had graduated — and I’m so glad I didn’t. I don’t think I would have lived as frugally and worked as hard during college had I known this. And I acknowledge that this is a privilege that is not afforded to everyone.
Savings:
$16,000 total in savings account. A large part of this is due to a random annuity payout from an account my grandfather had, who passed away in 2021. The beneficiaries were his children, but the way things were written if the children were deceased, then the payout went to their children. Since my dad is also deceased, my sister and I got an even split which worked out to approximately $17,000 for each of us. I used it to pay down a credit card balance. Also, I would rather have my dad alive than this money, but that too is also beyond the scope of this money diary.
$11,000 in one retirement account (through my teaching position)
$6,000 in another retirement account (through my union)
Checking:
$3,890.10
Monthly Expenses:
Rent: $1,200 for a 1.5 bedroom apartment that I live in alone. It has a little sunroom that serves as a writing room/office space for me. I love this apartment…I describe it as the apartment I would have always wanted to live in when I lived in NYC but could never afford! My rent includes water, sewage, trash removal, and a garage space, which is like gold!
Electric: $150 (Because we are in summer and I am running the AC; in the winter this amount flips with the gas)
Gas: $35 (See above…these amounts flip when we get into colder months and I run the heat)
Cable: $161 (This is for internet, cable TV, and phone service — which I never use and should cancel)
Cell Phone: $100 (I am on a family plan with my sister, brother-in-law, and mom. This amount is my portion + a portion of my mom’s which we all help pay for.)
Car Payment: $481
Subscriptions: $29.91 total (Hulu = $14.99, Peacock = $4.99, Spotify = $9.99) At the time of the money diary I still had Netflix but I made good on my word in the diary and canceled it!
Gas for Car: $200 (This is approximate, based on a tank a week at about $50/tank)
Total Monthly Expenses: $2,356.91
Annual Expenses:
I pay as much as I can annually and semi-annually because it reduces the amount that I have to think about each month. I think I got into this habit in graduate school when I was living off student loans that came in quarterly chunks — I would even pay my rent in advance during those times!
Car Insurance: $1,560. This is for TWO cars. I kept my old car when I bought my new car last year because 1) the trade-in value was so low that I think the dealer would have made me pay them to take it and 2) in the era of supply chain and labor shortages, and with my entire family and boyfriend living here, it felt worth it to keep a “spare car” in the event that anyone’s car had to go into the shop for an extended period of time. The insurance on my old car is $360/year and on my new car it is $1200/year. I pay these semi-annually.
Renter’s Insurance: $180
Dropbox Account: $100
Lifelock Membership: $120
MalwareBytes Anti-Virus Software: $50
Personal Website Domain Fee: $50
Personal Tax Prep & Accounting Fees: $500 (based on 2022 return)
HBO Max subscription: $150
Personal Property Tax: $800. This is an estimate as I haven’t paid this yet for my new car. I live in a state that assesses a property tax on all vehicles, including cars, boats, planes, motorcycles, RVs, etc. My old car was only about $50…they base it on the assessed value of the vehicle.
Recreation: $3,500. This is approximate. I play a team sport that has an annual dues of $2000 + travel and lodging expenses when we go to meets. I pay my dues up front for the year and don’t carefully track my expenses throughout the season. I probably should.
Charitable Contributions: $1500 on average. I make regular annual donations to three organizations.
Total Annual Expenses: $8,510
My Annual LLC Expenses:
Payroll Fees: $624. (I pay $52/month to a payroll company to do it all for me)
Workcomp Insurance: $500
General Liability Insurance: $650
Tax Prep (approximate): $600
Website Fees: $50
Total Yearly LLC Expenses:$2,424
Monday
My day will start with an appointment at 8:15am for a diagnostic mammogram. I know, what a great way to start the week!
I wake up at 6:30am so I can have an hour to have coffee and let the brain fog dissipate before I need to leave my apartment at 7:30am — the hospital is about 30 minutes away and it will be rush hour. This is a follow-up appointment from my annual screening mammogram a couple weeks ago. The doctor saw something that they weren’t quite sure about, so they wanted me to come back just in case. (I will give you the spoiler now so you’re not stressed reading this — everything is fine.) But, since that was my first mammogram (welcome to your 40s!) and they have no benchmark for comparison, they wanted me to come back to make sure that everything was fine. I have been anxious and nervous about this — even though the doctors and nurses told me not to be — so my boyfriend is coming with me for support.
My out-of-pocket cost for the appointment is $336.54. Insurance covers yearly screening mammograms after you turn 40, but not the full cost of diagnostic mammograms, which is what this is considered. I have a $750 deductible, so I am paying what insurance didn’t cover against my deductible. (The person checking me in tells me that there is legislation in the hopper to also fully cover diagnostic mammograms.) For reference, the full cost of this appointment was $1059. Insurance covered $722.46. I could get even more granular with the breakdown but we are only on day one of this diary.
The appointment is fine. They do the diagnostic, and an ultrasound just to be sure, and the doctor and radiologist together determine that what they are seeing is just how my tissue is, but they want me to come back in six months instead of a year. (That will be more out of pocket.) What matters is that I am fine. And that I came in for both the screening and the follow up.
I didn’t realize how much fear and anxiety I had been carrying around about this appointment until I go back to the waiting room and start crying and hug my boyfriend, and then my appetite returns with a vengeance. He has to go to work, but I decide to take myself out to a big breakfast. I inhale bacon, a veggie omelet, toast and coffee at one of my favorite brunch spots. ($28.84)
After that I stop by my dentist’s office to settle a confusing bill — for some reason I got a bill directly from them for my last cleaning, even though I have dental insurance that covers cleanings at 100%. They tell me that it was an oversight and they just didn’t actually bill insurance for some reason. Ignore the bill, and they will bill my insurance.
Then I run one more errand to pick up drycleaning and drop off a few items to be cleaned. I pay for both all at once — picking up four dresses and dropping off three ($77).
I head home to shower and get ready for the rest of my day. I make a smoothie, slice up an apple, and throw a Babybel cheese and two cans of LaCroix into a bag and then I head to my office. Classes ended last week and this is finals week, which means portfolio reviews! We have student portfolio reviews from 12:30-5. I spend the afternoon listening to student presentations and looking at their work from the semester and then offering feedback and critiques. We hold an open house in the evening for all the seniors and students to showcase their work for people from across the university and around the city, so I play host at that and chat with lots of colleagues, friends, students, and acquaintances. Somewhere in that 7-hour span of time I have eaten my cheese and my smoothie but never made it to my apple slices.
I have a friend from NYC who is in town to do a show with a local company. He comes to the showcase to chat with my students and then we grab dinner. Before we leave I check my email and see that my monthly car payment went through ($481.93). Two margaritas and a shrimp burrito later ($31.03), I head home, change and wash my face, then shove all the clean laundry I meant to fold earlier (but didn’t) off my bed. I curl up in bed with my book (Lucinda Williams’ memoir!) and fall asleep.
Total Spent: $954.82
Tuesday
I wake up with a dull ache in my skull and I am once again reminded that two margaritas at age 40 are very different from two margaritas at age 25. (Or even age 35, for that matter.) I get up and make coffee and journal and read for a bit before I tackle the chores I didn’t do yesterday: fold and put laundry away, unload the dishwasher, hang up my dry cleaning. I take a shower and get ready before I sit down at my laptop to check my email. I see that my website renewal fee for my LLC has gone through ($50.16 total, which is debited directly out of my company account). I teach a summer theatre program for an organization in town that I need to do some work for (I started the program two years ago so it’s exciting that it is continuing!) so I spend an hour drafting a budget proposal and putting together a welcome letter, schedule, and flier. After that I shower and get ready, and then make myself breakfast with the leftover potatoes from yesterday’s breakfast, some pasta sauce from a Saturday night dinner, and two eggs. After I eat, I clean up, make a smoothie, and put that, yesterday’s apples, a Babybel cheese and two cans of LaCroix into a bag.
I get to my office at about 11am and check my email there. (I have really, really been trying not to check my school email from home — I took it off my phone a few months ago and it was best decision ever.) The big thing that appears is my contract for the 23-24 school year! Yay. Years and years of freelancing and working in theatre leave me wary of ever assuming anything until there is a contract in hand. I open it, read through it, sign it, and send it back. I deal with a few other emails from students and colleagues, and then close everything down to have a meeting with a graduating senior in which I dole out lots of great life and career advice.
I decide to walk to Starbucks and get a coffee to steel myself for the five hours of portfolio reviews ahead of me. A couple weeks ago I deleted my credit card from my Starbucks app and then deleted the app from my phone. The ease of mobile order ahead was getting out of control and I was spending way too much money every week on Starbucks and relying on it to sustain me, as well as starting to feel really guilty about the amount of waste I was generating. So my new rule is that if I want Starbucks I have to walk into the store, with my reusable cup, and pay in cash only. I get a venti vanilla sweet cream cold brew and a new set of reusable straws for my cup + leave a small tip ($15.31).
I sit in another round of portfolio reviews from 1-5:30pm, listening to students discuss their semester’s work, offering feedback and critiques, and listening to the feedback and critiques my colleagues are giving. I directed one of the shows this semester, so it is really great to hear the artists, technicians, and craftspeople with whom I didn’t interact a whole lot talk about their work and their process to pattern, drape, and build the costumes, source and retool props, construct and paint the set, etc. When the portfolio reviews are done, I organize my notes and then make sure the students are mostly through load out of all their stuff before I leave my office at 6pm. I drive out to my boyfriend’s house (about a 45-minute drive one-way), where he is grilling brats and brussel sprouts for dinner.
Total Spent: $50.16 from LLC account and $15.31 from personal account
Wednesday
I wake up at 8am, which is late for me, and also means I slept almost 12 hours because we went to bed at 9:30pm. I’d like to think this is just one-off decadence, but what it actually means is that my body is just demanding repayment on the sleep debt I’ve been accruing all semester. This semester I taught four classes. I took on additional administrative duties to cover a colleague’s sabbatical, which amounted to a one-credit overload ($800 for the semester). I also directed one of the departmental shows (a 3-credit overload at $2,500 for the semester). And on top of that, I mentor and serve as an academic advisor for 12 students. No small task. No wonder that I slept so long when given the opportunity.
I spend an hour drinking coffee and journaling and reading; I’ve tried to get myself out of the habit of checking my email first thing and at the end of last year deleted all social media apps from my phone. It’s made a huge difference in my quality of life and general productivity. I shower, eat a bagel and cream cheese, and then around 9:30am I head back to the city and my office to take care of a bunch of end of semester stuff. While there I check my bank account and see that the last few pending charges on my credit card have cleared and the balance is $102.91. Last week I bit the bullet and paid down an annoying $5,000 balance I’d been carrying around on my credit card — I transferred money from my savings account and just paid it. It was the news story telling me that the interest rates were going up again that caused me to do it.
Around 12:30, I eat the leftover brat and brussel sprouts from last night and then pack up and leave. I stop at one of my favorite local stores to get a friend who’s about to have a baby a gift ($26.21). I head home, change the burned out lightbulbs in our building’s foyer, and then decide to take a walk. I walk the 2.5-mile loop around the park near my apartment, and then make it an even three miles by walking to the dry cleaner to pick up the dresses I dropped off on Monday. When I get home I do my mini-weight lifting routine. (I hate lifting weights. I’m doing it because I’m told muscle mass decreases exponentially faster after you turn 40, plus with a family history of osteoporosis, I want to do anything I can to build strong bones.)
I sit down to finish the budget I started yesterday and make the flier that the organization needs to send out. It’s not great — I’m not a graphic designer — but it’s done. I know the budget is too high, but I’d rather send what I know it will cost and negotiate from there, rather than start too low and get myself in trouble.
My sister texts me that they (she, my nephew, and my mom) are on their way — earlier in the day, we last-minute decided to meet up tonight for dinner at the beer garden near my apartment. I start wrapping up my task, send off my flier and my budget, and then change clothes to head out the door and meet them. We order pizza and a round of drinks and she buys (we tend to alternate who pays for dinner these days), and then I buy the second round of drinks ($20). My boyfriend also joins us after he gets off work. It’s a beautiful night and my nephew has so many new words and it’s fun to hang out with everyone all at once. I also give my sister a check for my half of the weekend vacation we took together a few weeks ago. We managed to find a weekend we both had free, and that her husband was clear from obligations so he could be sole caretaker for the baby, and we escaped for a girl’s weekend. I owe her $858 which is my half of the hotel room, the rental car, and the meals that she picked up the bill for while we were there.
My sister wants to get ice cream so we decide to walk to the ice cream place down the block. My mom treats us all even though we tell her she doesn’t need to. My boyfriend and I walk back to my apartment.
It’s nights like this that remind me why I’m glad I left NYC and why I don’t really miss a six-days-a-week theatre schedule — impromptu dinners at beer gardens with my family and my boyfriend, no agenda, no email to check, no one expecting me to show up to a rehearsal. It took a long time in my life and career to get to the point where I could not only have this but enjoy it without feeling guilty or like I *should* be doing something else. I still struggle with this!
Total Spent: $1,007.12 (I told my sister to cash the check right away, please)
Thursday
I wake up around 6:30am and spend some time reading and journaling. I decide to do some meal prep for the next three days because I will be busy with end of semester stuff. I roast some leftover cauliflower and broccoli and slice up a couple sweet potatoes and throw those in the oven as well, and set half a dozen eggs to boil. While all of that is cooking, I check my email and make a few adjustments to my budget and my flier based on some responses that came in last night and then resend. In my other personal email address, I see two things pop up — one, the notification the autopay went through for my Peacock subscription ($4.99). I resisted adding another subscription service but then Poker Face came out and I just had to watch it! I also see a notification that a credit card statement is ready for a credit card I know I haven’t used. When I log into my bank account to check it, I see that what has happened is that the website renewal I thought was coming out of my business account is actually still tied to this credit card. So while I’m logged into my bank account I pay that one. ($50.16 — and I will reimburse myself later from my business account, but I need to write myself an invoice to keep all the books straight.)
For the next couple hours, I alternate checking on my roasting vegetables and getting work done on these two summer projects. I also do my bi-monthly log-in to Facebook and am greeted with the very sad news that a theatre director I worked with several times passed away. I scroll through his wall to read all the tributes and memories that people are posting and spend some time composing and leaving my own. News like this is the one reason I haven’t fully deleted my Facebook account yet. It’s sad and I text a couple of friends who I know would have likely seen the news as well.
I take a shower and get ready, and then pack up lunches with some of the vegetables, string cheeses, the blackberries I didn’t eat yesterday, boiled eggs, and make smoothies for myself and my boyfriend — he will head into his office and I to mine for one of our last faculty meetings this semester. I eat my smoothie while we discuss how portfolio reviews went, finalize production assignments for the fall semester, and discuss any grading issues. It is a hefty 2-hour meeting but we get done what we need to get done. When the meeting is done I submit final grades and notes to my department chair and send out the production assignments to the full-time faculty for one last look before I will send everything to the students tomorrow. I have a few other loose ends and cleaning and organizing that I can tackle, and I eat the rest of my lunch while I do that.
Around 2:30, one of my colleagues and I decide to go get a snack and a drink down the street before we have to go to one of the many ceremonies around graduation time. We walk down to one of our favorite restaurants and decompress a bit over wine and a seared tuna appetizer and split the check ($43.05) before heading back to go to the ceremony. After the ceremony, I pack up my office and head home. I stop at the local deli market to pick up some frozen corn and a couple bags of tortilla chips which I will need for the dinner I want to make ($12.74). I pay in cash since this place is one of many small business I frequent who has started adding an additional charge for using a credit or debit card.
At home I start dinner: I am making myself a vegetarian quinoa enchilada casserole which also makes great leftovers. I read while it bakes, and then when it is ready I decide to catch up on Succession, one of the shows that my BF and I are not watching together.
Total Spent: $110.94
Friday
I wake up around 6:30am and check email. I deal with a few school things first. I have generally tried to get myself out of the habit of checking email immediately upon waking but sometimes even best intentions fall through. I am also eager to wrap everything up for school so I can set my auto-response for the summer when we are not officially on contract.
I take a brisk walk around the park and then do a little bit of my weight lifting exercises, then I take a shower and get ready to head to my office. I put two hard boiled eggs and some of last night’s casserole and some of the sweet potatoes into a bag and head to my office for one last faculty meeting. We need to talk about some departmental long-term things having to do with vision and philosophies of teaching, so I’ve asked my colleagues to block out three hours for this meeting. I wanted to do it while we were all still on contract as opposed to trying to assemble us in the summer when we all tend to go our separate ways onto various projects and traveling.
The meeting goes well; we accomplish what we need to accomplish and make more work for me — now I have to get this all down into organized thoughts on paper at some point. I take an hour to do the last few little things I need to do before I can officially be done for the summer: email the students with the fall schedule, calendar, and production assignments. Email the fall directors connecting them to their creative teams. Clean up a few files. I also empty out the water bottles in my office and leave the caps off, wipe down my desk and other surfaces…and around 1:15 I am DONE and my inbox is at ZERO so I pack up to leave!
I head to the nail salon for a mani-pedi. $70 + $15 tip so $85 and 90 minutes later I am heading home. I know. It is an expensive luxury. But I have always loved getting my nails done. My job mostly entails being in service to other people — in service to my students, to everyone involved in the production process, to taking care of everyone else. Manicures are one time where I can literally be in someone else’s hands instead of them being in mine and I cannot touch my phone or my email for an hour. So, it is always a worthwhile investment for me.
My boyfriend is meeting me at my apartment and we decide to drive to a nearby park with a lot of nice walking trails and spend some time there for a bit. They have a restaurant at the park and it’s not too crowded so after a couple hours of walking we get some dinner ($81.03, he pays). We don’t get too granular about who pays for what when; we just kind of alternate when we go out and we alternate who’s eating at whose house when we eat in and it just kind of generally seems to work out.
On the way home we stop at the grocery store so I can pick up some groceries for the weekend and a few things I’ve run out of ($112.69). At home I check my email again and respond to a couple of things about an upcoming project this summer as well as send a brief email to my accountant asking if we can meet in the next couple weeks — after the first year of dealing with an LLC and this year’s taxes I want to talk to her about ways to execute more efficient business practices so that I can spend more time actually working, rather than time doing all the administrative tasks of running a business (which is what incorporating yourself means, when it comes down to it — you are officially running the business of you).
I have to wake up at 5:30 the next day to be at school for commencement ceremonies so we go to bed early.
Total Spent: $197.16
Saturday
I wake up and start getting ready. We have two different ceremonies we have to be at today and my colleagues and I decided rather than go out in between (like we did last year) we will bring our own food and have a little DIY picnic lunch. I make sandwiches for myself and one of my colleagues, throw in a bunch of fruit from my grocery run last night and some chips and crackers along with the last of the boiled eggs for me to eat for breakfast, get ready and am out the door by 7. Thankfully the ceremonies are both in the theatre, which is the same building as my office, so I have a convenient hideout. I eat my eggs and put on my makeup and one colleague comes by to borrow my travel steamer to steam out her regalia. Once all that is done we walk over to where we are meant to assemble with the rest of the faculty and spend an hour basically standing around waiting for them to line us up for the procession.
The first ceremony is fine, the speaker is great, and it’s over in just over an hour. My colleagues and I are able to avoid the lobby crowds because we know the building and the back ways to our offices and so we collect our lunch materials and sit inside for our “picnic” since the weather is threatening and muggy.
The second ceremony is the smaller one specific to our college and where the students will actually walk across the stage to get their diplomas. That ceremony is also lovely except that we have to sit onstage so we are very, very visible for the entire thing. But the speaker is great and it's exciting to watch this group of students walk. They are the group I would say had the bulk of their college experience interrupted and thrown off by Covid. They entered the program in Fall 2019 and were thrust into the Zoom world just six months later. Basically the entirety of their second year was spent on Zoom and doing virtual theatre and very little things in person. Their third year was better and back in person, but the constant threat of Covid loomed, variants often thrust us back into Zoom for two weeks, and in general it was full of anxiety and uncertainty and fear. Finally in their fourth year they were able to meet in full classrooms without masks, do in-person theatre with a full audience, and live something of the “normal college student life.” While I hope they learned something along the way about making theatre, I am most proud that they have simply made it here.
After the ceremony I duck out as quickly as possible to beat the looming storm. I am again going out to my boyfriend’s house. I have to stop halfway because the rain suddenly gets too bad, but it passes in about 20 minutes and I’m on my way. Once there, the sun is shining and it’s like no bad weather ever happened. We spend the evening sitting outside, reading, playing cornhole (the classic midwestern lawn game), and grilling salmon I had in my freezer and vegetables that we needed to use before they went bad.
We watch almost to the end of Wednesday. I kind of want to finish this series and then cancel my Netflix account. After following everything happening with the strike, Netflix seems to be the worst offender and longest holdout in being able to reach a fair deal for our writers. I need to ponder what to do here. It’s a similar ethical dilemma I went through last year that led me to canceling my Amazon Prime account. (And I haven’t looked back since! I am at almost 8 months.) But this is not a question to decide an answer to now. I go to bed around 9pm again because I am exhausted.
Total Spent: $0
Sunday
The first day after the semester always feels to me much like the same feeling I have the morning after a closing night. A little bit of brain fog, a little bit of disbelief that you actually did it, a little bit of “well now what do I do with myself?” It’s very hard to stay off my email and shake the feeling that “someone needs something from me right now!” I know it will pass eventually but it will take a week or maybe two for me to really let go of the expectation that I need to Be Working on Something at every moment.
We have a lazy morning, my boyfriend makes breakfast with the last of the leftover enchilada casserole and some eggs — for those playing along, when he left my apartment yesterday he took all the food we needed to use up before it goes bad since we knew I’d be going out there for the afternoon and evening. During the height of the stay-at-home orders in the pandemic, I became very, very aware of our general food waste problem as a country (which was exacerbated during the pandemic for a variety of interconnected reasons) and my own personal complicity in that problem. I went on a mission to use every single thing in my refrigerator and not throw any food away (including doing things like saving veggie scraps and onion skins to make my own stock). As the pandemic continues to fade further into the rearview mirror and my life has picked back up to its normal busy pace I’ve had to let some things go but I still try to be as conscious as possible about using up leftovers, not letting veggies or meat go bad, and finding a purpose for even the smallest amount of restaurant meals that I take home.
I go to the grocery store to pick up wine to bring to my sister’s house for Mother’s Day along with a few personal care items I need. Good grief tampons are expensive these days. ($48.03).
My boyfriend and I go on an 8-mile bike ride around his neighborhood and town. When we get back I lay on the couch and read for a bit, and fall asleep for a bit, until my boyfriend wakes me up and tells me we need to leave soon. (He wants to redeem his reputation with my sister for being late — it is my fault, not his, that my sister routinely tells us to come over 30 minutes earlier than she actually wants us there.)
We head to my sister and brother-in-law's house for a Mother's Day cookout. Our mom comes over and we all hang out, eat a lot of food, drink a lot of wine, and head back to my boyfriend’s house around 8:30pm (don’t fear: he doesn’t drink and he drove). We stop on the way to get gas because it is usually 10-20 cents cheaper in my sister’s county. The cost is $36.47 for 3/4 tank of gas.
We wind down by finishing up the first season of Wednesday. Tomorrow I am canceling my Netflix account.
Total Spent: $84.50
Total Weekly Spending: $2,369.85
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