How to Recover From a Period of No Income

How to Recover From a Period of No Income

by | Oct 17, 2017 | Living with Variable Income, Variable Income

I’m not sure if you’re in one of the variable income fields that rakes in the bucks during summer, but in the opera world things slow down quite a bit. So we have to survive…. whether we’ve prepared or not.

And now that it’s October, and summer is long over…. you might still be recovering.

Because it’s tough to bounce back after a long stretch of low (or no) income.

So I wanna talk a bit about summer, even though it was awhile ago, as an example for how to bounce back after a long dry spell.

 

Summer SUCKS if you’re not making money (or hella prepared)

Summer is the perfect storm of financial disaster if you’re in a variable income cycle that stops income-ing in May.

You’ve got lots of time. There are tons of fun things to do. Costs are high, and the voice in your head that says things like “you only live once….” is so loud.

February is a great time to stay at home and live on Mr Noodle.

July is not.

So the first step after we run the ice-cream laden, patio stuffed gauntlet is to figure out what the heck happened.

 

Taking stock

The fear of how bad it might be is a major motivation to not get started at all.

It’s so tempting to just soldier on and forget the last 3 months of low income and high expenses, but let me make a case for the opposite.

Yes… maybe it was bad. Maybe it’s even worse than you think it is (how much am I helping right now?)…

But there’s an opportunity to learn here, and that opportunity can help set you up for avoiding the same thing in the future.

You need to know what happened. You need to know how much you fell short on your spending goals. You need to know where income came from (if any), and what the big expenses were.

And you need to know how much new debt you might have to deal with.

 

The things I would want to know:

This is how I force myself to think about times when my financial plan doesn’t match reality… as an opportunity to learn and fix it for next time.

It’s not usually fun.

Here are the things I figure out:

Expenses:

  • Were my ‘normal’ monthly expenses different than I planned?
  • Were there big expenses that I didn’t plan for?

Income:

  • Did I make less than I thought I would? Why?
  • Where did the income I made come from? Can I expect that to happen again?

Debt:

  • Is there new debt that I’ve acquired by overspending?

The things I do next:

Deal with the present. Plan for the future.

The first time I really got hit with a summer that set me back, I sat down in September and made a plan.

I needed to make sure by the time I reached May that there was money to get me through the summer months.

That meant going through my planned income and trying to find moments to save enough to match the expenses I knew were going to happen.

That’s a tricky thing, and one of the reasons I built the variable income spreadsheet that you can find in the TOOLS section. It’s actually really helpful for this kind of stuff.

It can seem like debt should be my first goal, but I don’t think that’s the case. I believe that preventing further debt is always the first step, which means that saving for next summer is way more important than working down any debt that built up.

After that plan is in place, I take a look at the ‘summer debt’ and make a plan to take care of it.

The formula is the same. I use the spreadsheet to find the moments in my variable income where I have some extra to send at debt.

 

The ole variable income dance

Most of us have gone through periods of time when we’ve been forced to live off our credit cards.

That’s the reality.

If that was you this summer, that’s okay. Don’t beat yourself up for it. Take some time to sit down and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.

If you’ve got a long dry stretch coming up, you can use these same tools to prepare for it.

And if you’ve got any questions about how to get organized, or how to use the spreadsheet … send me an email (chrisenns@ragstoreasonable.com) or sign up for OFFICE HOURS.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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You Can’t Eat Like a Mennonite When You’re Not on the Farm

You Can’t Eat Like a Mennonite When You’re Not on the Farm

by | Oct 16, 2017 | Money Meditations

I grew up in a small Mennonite farming community in southern Manitoba. There are lots of things I could tell you about my formative years, but for now I’ll just stick to two.

We worked hard.

We ate a lot of butter, salt and lard.

Now, I live a very different kind of life in Toronto, half of it on the stage, and half behind my desk helping people with their finances.

And generally I eat less butter and lard… not zero… but less.

 

I should have never opened the cookbook

But this week I took a little culinary trip down memory lane. I got into the Menno cookbooks. I made all kinds of old favourites culminating in a perogie fest to celebrate Canadian thanksgiving.

It was a very tasty week.

But come Monday morning I wasn’t feeling so great.

Turns out Mennonite food when you’re working 12 hours on a farm is one thing, Mennonite food when you’re hanging out in a rehearsal room is a different one.

It’s a classic lesson in inputs and outputs. When they don’t match, they probably won’t leave you feeling all that great.

Cue the financial metaphor…

 

There is no correct amount to spend on anything

Lots of people ask me about whether their spending is ‘normal’.

How much is the right amount to spend on food? What about housing?

There are plenty of folks that have come up with interesting ratios on all of that, but I think it’s all about the balance between inputs and outputs.

Personal finance folks like to call it ‘living within your means’ and that’s a phrase that lots of people say, but not as many actually think about.

The two sides of the coin have to match.

Just like the food I stuff in my face and the physical work that my body has to do.

 

Striking a balance

It’s all about balance isn’t it?

Perogie thanksgiving probably would have been fine, but since it came on the heels of ‘cake and butter’ week it kind of broke my digestive system.

Spending lots on travel might be fine… but if you’re also holding down a huge mortgage payment things could get dicey.

This is why I think we could all benefit from stepping away from the ‘comparison’ method of spending. It doesn’t matter what George from Regina spends on wrenches. Are you spending more money than is reliably coming in? Yes? Well… you should probably spend less on wrenches, no matter what new shiny piece George just brought home.

Your balance is yours. You have to strike it. And you have to adjust it when things change….like when you find yourself off the farm, living in Toronto surrounded by people instead of cows…

… for example.

Have a great week!

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

Want to start getting control of your money? How can I help?

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Debt isn’t a goal, it’s what’s standing in the way

Debt isn’t a goal, it’s what’s standing in the way

by | Oct 13, 2017 | Debt, Uncategorized

Money isn’t about money.

That’s what I wish I could communicate better to the legions of people who really don’t care about their finances.

Paying back debt might not be exciting for them.

Saving for retirement doesn’t give them a sense of Christmas morning level thrill.

I want to tell them that I honestly understand where they’re coming from. Those things aren’t fireworks and puppies for me either.

Financial practise is not fun for me because I love numbers… I love it because it’s a gateway to a whole bunch of other stuff that I care about way more (like fireworks and puppies).

“I just want to get to a place where I don’t have to think about money”

That used to be my greatest wish.

How do I get enough money to just not have to worry about this stuff anymore.

At what stage can I afford to block this out of my life forever?

But now I think I was thinking about things in the wrong way. To me, money isn’t a goal in itself. Bank balances don’t provide fulfillment.

Money is a gateway to other things that matter way more.

The five things that I want

I have a rotating list of goals and values. Sometimes they’re specific - like a vacation or business investment. Sometimes they’re more general values - like ‘family’ or ‘adventure’.

They’re the five things that I want to be working on right now.

They’re the five things that ideally my time, energy and money are going towards.

They’re the five things that matter right now.

That’s what money is about.

The stuff that’s getting in the way of the stuff you want

And this is why people are always circling around to things like ‘debt’.

Debt sucks up tons of money from right now to just tread water with interest payments. It blocks the gateway between your cash and your goals.

Debt reduction isn’t necessarily a goal in itself. Most of us aren’t super enthused about paying off debt. Debt becomes a major focus because it’s taking a bunch of the capital that we could be using on the stuff that gets us actually pumped up.

Like 5 days on a beach, a drink in your hand… and a head that’s blissfully thinking of anything BUT money.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

Want to start getting control of your money? How can I help?

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How Being ‘Time Poor’ Can Keep You From Getting Control of Your Money

How Being ‘Time Poor’ Can Keep You From Getting Control of Your Money

by | Oct 12, 2017 | Getting Started with your Money, Money Meditations

You know that thing where none of us seem to have enough money? Well, turns out that’s not the biggest issue when you’re trying to get control of your finances… 

I’ve been working with a bunch of people lately, both as clients and through office hours, and one thing keeps coming up over and over again… the first block in the process of gaining control is not a lack of money… it’s a lack of time.

How to find the time to track spending?
How to find the time to meet with a partner and chat about money?
How to create time to dig into financial records and documents? 

People are crazy busy, and so it’s really really hard to fit a new thing into the schedule.

So I figure if it’s happening to almost everyone I’m talking to… it might be happening to you, too (maybe concerning the upcoming tax deadline… just a thought).

Finding extra time is just as hard as (if not harder than) finding ‘extra’ money

From the outside it’s easy to talk about how simple it is to ‘just’ find 10 minutes a day… but anyone who’s actually tried to do that on a consistent basis knows it’s not nearly that easy.

I’ve tried to find just-ten-minutes to learn new languages, become a better runner, write more for the blog and work on a dozen other dream-versions of myself.

But it’s not easy.

Because ‘extra’ time doesn’t exist, just like ‘extra’ money doesn’t really exist. And the worst thing is that no amount of side hustling will create extra time.

There are only 24 hours in the day.

The only way to create more time is to take time away from something that you’re already doing.

And that’s hard.

So how the &$#% do you solve that problem?

This is what I’ve been thinking about for a week, and I think that some of the principles of budgeting can be applied to this same problem.

You can’t budget bullshit, and you can’t budget ‘vague estimates’.

If you accept the statement: “Spending time with your money is essential, if you want to get control of your cash”… then building in some really deliberate time planning is important for the majority of us.

So after you make the list of things that need doing, it’s time to take a look and be really honest about how long each item is going to take you (YOU… not the ‘average’ person… but YOU). If you’re not sure, overestimate… what would definitely be enough time to completely that task? Is it something that needs repeating for a few weeks or something that’s possible to do in just one day?

That could look a bit like this:

Then you have to sit down and plan when you’re going to find that time.

For most of us variable income earners… our time is just as variable… but once we have an idea of what we’re looking for we can start finding slots of time and committing to setting them aside.

I’m not sure if that’s the solution to the problem, but I do know that it is a problem. For those of you who really want to make some financial changes happen… finding the time to start that process is going to be the first major challenge.

You need to know that all your time is currently spoken for… and if you want to free some up for finance …. you’re going to have to make a really deliberate decision about it.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

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Boston Cremes and daily financial practice

Boston Cremes and daily financial practice

by | Oct 11, 2017 | Getting Started with your Money

I tell all my clients that regular financial practise is the key to success.

… it sounds good right?

And I believe it too! But that didn’t stop me from barely opening my budgets or bank accounts this summer.

I paid my bills, but mostly I ignored things.

Does that make me a hypocrite? Probably… but I’m not too worried about it. I’ll be the first one to say to any client that this kind of thing happens. You go through periods of discipline, and then slip into parts of your life when you have other priorities.

That’s life.

The tricky thing is getting back on track.

 

Why are good habits so hard to form, but bad habits seem to entrench themselves in a matter of minutes?

Seriously.

I go the gym every day for a week, and it’s still hard to go the next week.

I eat a donut two days in a row… and all of a sudden my body is sending me signals that it can’t live without it’s daily boston creme.

UGH.

Heading into September, I knew I was out of shape (and not because of the donut thing).

I wasn’t used to setting aside regular time to budget, sort through financial priorities, or any of the other things that I knew would set me up for success.

But getting back in shape can seem like a bit of a nightmare.

 

The immense power of collective shame

I guess collective shame is a pretty glass half empty way to describe accountability.

But that’s what I turned to.

I asked a few clients, and some other R2R subscribers to join me in daily text checkins after we had done a daily financial practise.

There were no rules as to what had to be done, just that we take the time to sit and do something financial.

And it worked. We all had a few days where we forgot (well, at least I did), but mainly we spent at least 5 minutes every day.

Success right?

Yes. Success. But I learned a few interesting things a long the way.

 

A few thoughts and small lessons from a month of 5 financial minutes…

  • In the beginning, it was easy, there were lots of things to do and it felt great to get them off my to-do list
  • In week two I started to get bored. I’d sit and refresh my budget and then wonder what else I should be doing.
  • In week three I started to realize my brain didn’t get as stressed when it found something financial that I really needed to do. As soon as the thought came up, I knew I would get to it in my next 5 minute session. The problem was that at first I forgot what those things were, but after I started jotting them down in my phone… the system worked quite well.
  • I did my financial 5 over coffee, often in the morning. I noticed that if the papers/receipts/cheques weren’t actually right beside where I was sitting… I wouldn’t deal with them. So I moved my inbox close to where I have my coffee.
  • The benefit of being really on top of my cashflow wasn’t just that it helped me plan my spending, but it planted longer term financial questions in my sub conscious. It feels as if I’m engaged with some of the big financial questions again, even if I haven’t come up with solutions yet.

It’s been a good month. I’ve learned some things, and the accountability from the group has been huge.

Will I continue to set aside 5 minutes a day?

It’s a good idea… but I know that it’s never that simple.

Only time will tell.

Emily Nixon

Emily Nixon

Rags to Reasonable Community Outreach Coordinator

Emily Nixon is an actor/writer/director/filmmaking Swiss Army Knife. She is also a big money nerd and Community Outreach Coordinator for Rags to Reasonable.

She came to this work after becoming completely fed up with living paycheque-to-paycheque and being too afraid to look in her chequing account. She is passionate about empowering other artists and variable income earners to keep doing what they love and feel confident about their finances.

Email Emily at emily@ragstoreasonable.com

Want to start getting control of your money? How can I help?

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