Choosing Between Income and Safety: How Having an Oh Shit! Fund Helped Me Get Out of a Shitty Situation

Choosing Between Income and Safety: How Having an Oh Shit! Fund Helped Me Get Out of a Shitty Situation

Note: Because this story is about male-female gender dynamics, I will be gendering people.

This past Autumn, I was interviewed for a serving position. I liked the restaurant’s food, I thought I liked their ethos, and the price point was such that I expected tips would be good. I’m not new to the rodeo, so when the (male) GM said “do you have any questions for me?” I replied “Yes. As you know it’s coming increasingly to light that the restaurant industry is rife with sexual harassment. I would like to know the steps that you have personally taken to ensure the safety of the women working in your restaurant.” He stuttered and said “uh….we just hire good people…? It never happens here.” I translated in my head: “I do nothing, I pretend it’s not happening.” But I needed an income, so when it was offered to me, I took it.

In the new hire orientation with the HR head, we breezed past the harassment section (“Basically, if you sexually harass anyone, you will be fired.”) I put up my hand and said “Sorry, I feel like we glossed over that section and I think it’s really important. ” She blinked and said “No. We did it.”

I left that meeting with a sense of foreboding

I had previously had a bad experience in a restaurant with a similar policy. When I was assaulted at work, their lawyer perform gymnastics around its simplicity. The case ended with me fired and the man who assaulted me getting a 3-day suspension. As a result, I’m wary when an organization doesn’t place emphasis on a detailed anti-harassment policy.

On one of my first shifts, I observed a young female server assistant lose her shit on a cook because, she confided in me “He’s been at me non stop. Asking me out, he won’t leave me alone.”

It wasn’t only being a woman that made me feel uneasy there. As a queer, I get very uncomfortable with the old-school gender dynamics baked into fine dining service. Women get served first, a man tastes the wine, etcetera. At this new restaurant, our freaking computer system asked us to identify clients not only by their seat number, but also if they were a “lady.” Yikes.

The Final Straw

I then heard from an acquaintance that a manager there had just been fired for date-raping new hires (he had tried to do the same to her) and that the complainants had been required to sign a non-disclosure agreement just to report him to HR. I realized then that when the GM had said to me that harassment “never happen[ed] [t]here,” he had conveniently forgotten that incident, which had occurred only weeks earlier.

I gave my notice right away, with an email detailing suggestions that the organization could implement to bolster their sexual harassment policy and also how make the place more friendly for queers to work in.

Why I was able to leave

Because I had spent the past few years focusing on building a cushion of a few months’ living expenses (and because I was able to get EI from a previous gig), it was possible for me to get out of that restaurant, which would have been bad for my mental health and possibly dangerous.

Absolutely, my many areas of privilege make it easier for me to build a financial cushion—I am white, cis-presenting, straight-passing, born into an upper middle-class family, and my disability is invisible. These privileges have allowed me to get the experience that gives me a long resume. They make it easier for me to get hired, period. And when tips are not pooled, they likely allow me to earn more. There are lots of ways in which it is easier for me to make the money that allows me to set aside an Oh Shit! fund. I recognize that those reading it may not have these same privileges. Also, If you are experiencing poverty, this advice may not be usable in this moment.

But, if you are able to build a safety net, through setting aside a percentage of every cheque—I like this one, because no matter my income, I can choose a percentage that always feels doable—, decreasing expenses, or by taking on extra work, it can not only relieve stress, but also keep you safe, as it did for me in this case. It also allowed me to to choose to side with myself, in a dynamic in which women are so continuously silenced.

An Oh Shit! Fund Can’t Solve systemic problems, but it can get you out of a difficult situation

Right after I worked my last shift, I called my (male) partner and asserted, with exhaustion, how sick I am of having to choose between income and safety. Implicit in my complaint was the appeal “When will I find a job where I don’t have to make this choice?!?!”

To be honest, I don’t know whether a job exists where you don’t have to make this choice to some extent. When men have commented “Wow the entertainment/restaurant industry is full of harassment!” I respond “It’s every industry. These are just the ones being highlighted.” I can’t think of an industry in which I have worked where I didn’t know of harassment occurring to some extent. Even the organizations I have worked in without harassment have been rare. This is a human problem, not an industry problem.

Of course, having an Oh Shit! fund will not solve this. But, this Autumn, when I found myself in a situation in which the danger felt too great, my Oh Shit! fund let me walk away. And that was important.

You Need a Budget…And Maybe Some Donuts

You Need a Budget…And Maybe Some Donuts

My name is Dashon and I’m an opera singer just like Chris. We met after many years of hearing of each other, but, as it often works in the classical singing world, we didn’t meet each other until we were eating meringues together in the heart of Paris. C’est la vie!

I have known Chris’ wife Mireille Asselin, another amazingly accomplished opera singer (seriously, you have got to listen to her amazing voice!) for many years, and she has told me about Chris many times. To meet up with friends, old and new, is always a joy! Between bites of stuffing our faces with lovely food, we started to talk about our projects. As much as we love music, when you’re in “the biz,” it’s also great to share what gets you excited about the world outside of the arts, as well. When we got to sharing about our love of budgeting, it was a lightning bolt right in between my eyes!

We all have these moments when we know that we have found a partner to navigate the rough and choppy waters, and for me, even though I had just met Chris, I felt very welcome to talk about my finances and the practical pressures of being an artist. Having a mentor is absolutely essential in our field, and looking up to peers is just as important for me; they understand exactly what I’m going through in a way that few other people can!

 

The YNAB Connection

Chris and I both have wonderful histories with the app You Need a Budget (YNAB), and for good reason! It has truly saved my sanity, which has in turn allowed me to save my finances and to conceive of my limited resources differently. However, the road to using it as often as I do (I love getting to it every day, it helps my system not pile up, and it definitely helps to remind myself of my goals for the future) wasn’t always so straight.

I started using YNAB about 6 years ago, after I read about it on the Internet (my true love in this world, second only to an excellent donut…). People were saying all sorts of things that piqued my curiosity:

“It changed my life.”
“It’s amazing.”
“I finally got out of debt.”
“I was able to save up to help my family achieve their dreams.”
“This is the most delicious thing I have ever eaten, so perfectly crisp and filled with my favorite Bavarian Cream, I will definitely be back!”

(One of those might have been about donuts, sometimes I confuse my open tabs, of which there are many…)

So, I fired up the computer, signed up for an account and promptly used it with the vigor of a New Year’s Resolver for a few months.

Then, not really having identified any goals… it just became another way to track my money. I’d been using other apps to do so, and while it certainly was interesting to see how much money I was spending on various things, there wasn’t a true understanding of what it was doing for me. So I went back to my other hobbies and other interests, and I just let it go.

 

Rinse, and repeat. For the next two years.

I’d give it a go, and would get tired of tracking, and didn’t really know what I wanted anyway. Even though I had student loans, and credit card debt, I never really thought about that. To borrow a phrase from another friend: those things were “a problem for Future Dashon.”

After a while, though, I started to get a knock at the door of my heart. I have no clue who let him in, or how he found me (my sense of time as a musician is usually great, as long as I don’t have to count higher than four), but there he stood: Future Dashon.

He wasn’t so bad looking, which was nice, but he definitely had a few harsh words for me, which wasn’t so nice. My finances had become messy, and I started to realize exactly how stressed out I was.

 

As artists, we are so used to improvising, and the idea of the “starving artist” is so pervasive, that it becomes a part of our self identity.

I didn’t believe that I deserved to be free of stress, because I just thought that’s how things were!

Great things to hand down from generation to generation via the mentor/student relationship: vocal technique, an endless curiosity and love of your craft, and respect and love for the traditions that you encounter which speak to you. Not such great things to hand down: the idea that getting ahead is impossible, the notion that in order to be successful you absolutely must sacrifice everything financially, and other assorted stereotypes of artists.

 

Go time.

So, after a couple of years of back and forth, I decided to really settle in, buckle up, and ask for help. One of the best things about YNAB is the community of users on the Internet. The official support staff, as well as other wide-eyed travellers were at the ready to help me, and are definitely ready to help you with any questions. I explained my situation to them, posted a lot of screenshots, and they helped me clarify my needs and wants. Finally, things were starting to click in.

More so than the actual method, what was clicking in for me was the need to make goals. Even if I couldn’t stick to them perfectly, knowing what my priorities were (and are) saved my sanity. And that, in turn allowed me to know not only what to spend money on, but why I was spending on those things. That, my new friends, is true freedom. The “learning curve” isn’t as steep as it may seem, and if you can master Yelp to find the best donut shop, you can definitely master your budget. Equally delicious.

Celebrating my YNAB Birthday

Just as I am writing this, I’ve decided to think of one of my favorite days of my life: my YNAB birthday. February 25, 2013 was so important to me! Even though I had a very circuitous route to learning how to use the software in a way that brought me freedom and joy, it’s a great thing to celebrate. Make today your YNAB birthday! Reach out to any of us here and we’ll help you along the way. Your future self will thank you.

Check out You Need a Budget HERE.

Dashon Burton

Dashon Burton

Opera Singer and YNAB Enthusiast

Dashon Burton is a singer based in New York City, and dreams of donuts on the reg. Raised in the Bronx, he found a musical life while in high school in Williamsport, PA that changed his life forever. After graduating with a degree in Vocal Performance from Oberlin College, and later received a Master’s degree in Early Music from the Yale School of Music in 2011. Since that time, he has been a full time performer and educator, and has sung in opera houses and with orchestras around the world. For more information: dashonburton@gmail.com
How to Recover From a Period of No Income

How to Recover From a Period of No 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

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

Manipulating the TIME-SPACE-MONEY Continuum

Manipulating the TIME-SPACE-MONEY Continuum

I hope no one in my lifetime invents a time machine.

I really shouldn’t be given the ability of going back or forward to try to ‘fix’ things. I can pretty much guarantee I’ll make an absolute mess of it. Marty McFly will seem like a time lord compared to my disasters.

It’s better that I just work from right now.

Except… that’s not really how I work…

Sometimes I’m focused on next week or a year from now and completely lose sight of what the kids like to call… ‘the moment’.

And sometimes I’m firmly living in the past, obsessed about trying to change something that cannot be changed.

And I know I’m not alone, because I’ve been talking to lots of people lately during my OFFICE HOURS about this idea of ‘time’ and how it connects to the way we manage our money.

The time-money-space continuum 

In my mind, there are three ways we manage money. 

• looking back to the past
• figuring things out as they happen
• making choices in the future

And like any conversation around time, there are lots of ways to look at it… but I’m going to focus on more of a strict cashflow line of thinking. Not investing. Not risk management. But the day to day of dealing with your money. 

Living in the past

You know that thing where it feels like you’re always paying off last month’s bills…?

It’s not a problem exclusive to variable income earners… but man does it happen a lot to us. You’ll go through a couple of months of no income … living on your credit card… and then you get a big job! But the problem is those earnings go entirely to paying off your last few months of expenses. 

It’s really demoralizing. It feels like you can’t possibly get ahead. 

There’s always a balance on the credit card or line of credit and it just plain sucks.

Putting out fires in the moment

 How well do I know the feeling of ‘barely skirting by’…. quite well. 

It’s the feeling that you always make it to the end of the month, most of the bills tend to get covered… but you have no idea how it happens. 

On one hand, you can trust that it happens every month… but on the other hand HOW CAN YOU TRUST IT? Because sometimes you have a panic attack on the 16th about where your next month’s rent is going to come from. 

When big expenses come up… you deal with them… but they hurt. Man. Do they hurt. And they might knock you back to the ‘living in the past’ mode. 

It’s a place of reacting to the things that are happening to you, and it doesn’t feel any more in control than ‘living in the past’. 

Making choices in the future

This is where things get better.

After long years of living in the past, and putting out fires in the present…. now I’ve shifted my time-space-money continuum to more of a future feel.

Now, I’m a few months ahead of the game. I’ve got three months of basic salary saved up, not as an emergency fund, but as a buffer against variable income.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have dry months, but it means I have way more time to prepare as those dry months happen. I have time to come up with solutions instead of reacting.

I’m way more aware of my regular expenses, and the weird ones…

Taking care of the regular ones means I can put money away and prevent the ‘living in the past’ credit card debt. Taking care of the weird ones means that I’m constantly stashing small amounts to cover big expenses…. when they come, they don’t surprise me anymore… my money is ready.

It’s not just about ‘saving’… it’s about shifting WHEN YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE CHOICE.

I’m not forced to spend because of choices I’ve already made.

I’m not forced to react in 5 seconds because of things that are happening to me.

I’m able to make choices with my money before I need to actually use that money… and that allows me the time and space I need to make the best choice I can.

How to make the transition

How do you get from stuck in the past to living in the future…? Well… if you’re anything like the people I work with and have variable income as well as hard to plan expenses… it’s hard.

But it’s sure as shootin’ not impossible.

It’s a slow process of getting control of your spending and managing income so that you’re not living in the past anymore. Then you can begin to plan for the big expenses… so they don’t throw you off track. That’s when you’re ready to start building up an income buffer… and extending the time you have to make your financial decisions.

What I’d really love, is to be able to explain it to you…

If you’re interested in hearing me talk at your for 30 minutes (for office hours regulars … you know that sometimes happens)…. sign up for an office hours session.  I’ll be happy to give you a sense of what your next step might be in morphing your own personal space-time-money continuum! … all without a time machine.

SIGN UP FOR OFFICE HOURS

FREE 30 MINUTE SKYPE SESSIONS

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?

How to start controlling your variable income

How to start controlling your variable income

Controlling your variable income

There’s a trap in the challenge of controlling variable income, and it’s baked right into the term itself.

The key to managing ‘variable income’… doesn’t lie in your income at all.

Over my years of living with and managing variable income I’ve learned that the first focus has to be on the flip side of the coin:

In the murky world of expenses.

The concept of ‘enough’

It is impossible (or at least I think it is…) to control variable income without first being able to answer the question “How much do I need?”

Now, that question has a bunch of different levels to it… do I mean ‘how much do I need this week’, or am I talking about ‘how much do I need for my life’?

Well… kind of both… but for right now…. it’s mainly the first one.

It’s easy to just assume that’s an impossible question to answer.

Every week is different, right?

Some weeks you stay home and only leave to buy popcorn, and other weeks you book 3 flights and dine with a Peruvian prince.

But I’ve got a theory about that.

I think that we’re more prone to remember the things that are different. We remember the crazy weeks. We remember the variable expenses. We remember the time we spilled our coffee on our computer and had to spring for a new one.

All those memorable one-off expenses… can’t always be planned for.

But there’s a whole other school of things that you might not remember…

..and that’s the stuff that gets bought over and over again in order to maintain your life.

Expenses: the key to controlling your variable income control

One of the things I was pretty surprised to realize when I started tracking my spending was it was much more… regular… than I thought it was.

It’s a hard pill to swallow for someone brought up to believe he was a unique snowflake…

But it was true…

Beneath that crust of crazy, variable expenses and income… was a core of regular, predictable expenses… and it’s more precious than gold (at least in this variable income fight that we’re in).

Once I became aware of how much I needed to run my ‘core’ life – a place to live, food to eat, tools to be healthy and happy, and of course enough money to pay off any creditors that might have my address … I could do things like:

  • pay myself a salary
  • budget effectively
  • find extra money for debt and savings
  • figure out how long a lump sum cheque would last me for
  • check my needs against my expected yearly income (and see if I was falling short)

All the things I thought were impossible because of my ‘variable income’… weren’t.

How to get to the core of your expenses:

Step one is to find out what you know… and what you don’t know.

Check out this list:

Controlling your variable income

These are the core expenses that make up my regular spending. Do you know how much you spend on these things every month?

I would challenge you to take 5 minutes this week to sit down with this list (and a big glass of wine) and just jot down what you know and what you don’t know.

That’s it.

Do you know how much you spend on food? Do you know how much you spend on random stuff throughout the month? If you don’t know, that’s totally okay, just write a question mark beside it.

Once you’ve got an idea of where you’re at, I’ll help you turn those question marks into numbers that actually fit your life… and from there we’ll build a plan that will help you kick variable income’s ass.

If you don’t want to wait for me to write about it, feel free to send me an email or sign up for an office hours session.

I’m here to help with whatever you need.

sign up for (free) office hours

30 minutes one-on-one financial coaching with me… no strings attached.

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?

How I managed a $15,000 lump sum

How I managed a $15,000 lump sum

How to manage a lump sum

Who’s it for: Variable Income Earners
What’s it about: The process I use for making sure I’m using a big lump sum as efficiently as possible.
What you get: an infographic breaking down the whole process.

 

What if there’s not enough money?

The problem with budgeting is that you’re painfully aware when there’s just not enough.

You see… I just got finished with a big month of gigs.

Now those of you that aren’t in opera might be surprised to know that you can make pretty good money in a month … if you’re working.

So in about six weeks over Oct/Nov I made just over $15,000.

Not bad right?

And man did I have plans for that money.

They included:

  • finishing my dental work (5 more crowns to go)
  • funding my winter (it’s a bit slow until March)
  • paying for business coaching (because building a new business is hard)
  • getting some new clothes (I want some new clothes)

On the surface, and by that I mean the quick mental math I did in my head… I had more than enough. I just made $15,000 after all.

But then I looked at the real numbers (and added a few things I was forgetting):

Taxes $3,000
Commission $1,500
Living costs/salary for Oct/Nov $4,000
Business expenses for Oct/Nov $1,000
Finishing dental work $5,000
Funding winter salary $6,000
Business coaching $1,500
New clothes $300

I’m about… $7,300 short.

Shit.

There just isn’t enough.

Here’s the truth: there’s never enough

In my case, I’m not talking about a base level sustenance ‘enough’. I will eat, I will sleep in a dry place, but I’ve also got a ton of things I want to do.

And there’s never enough for all of them… especially for artists with businesses and people who want to have teeth that don’t suck.

15,000 dollars may seem like a big chunk of change for one month, but the truth is it can only do so much.

So here are 4 things to do when you feel like you don’t have enough (and you don’t have to have $15,000 for them to work.

4 things to do when you’re managing a lump sum

How to manage a lump sum

1. Prioritize

What’s most important? What needs to happen, and what do I just want to happen?

1. Taxes/Commission – this isn’t my money. I need to pay it.
2. Salary/Business Costs: this money is technically already spent. It’s living on my credit card. It’s an essential part of my life.

And then this is where things got hard.

The ‘correct’ answer is to tell you I’m funding my winter… making sure that my basic needs are covered so that I’m stable.

But I’m not doing that.

This is where personal finance gets so situational. I have some income over the next few months, but not enough to cover all my salary and business costs. But I know that right now… I need a little pressure to find more income. A little instability is exactly the right choice (although ask me if I still feel that way in February).

It’s not the right ‘financial planning’ choice but it’s the right choice for me.

So number three…

3 – Dental work – this is debt. It’s also one of my biggest financial goals for 2016. Regular readers will know all about my dental saga… I can’t wait to close that chapter forever.
4 – Business Coaching – I’ve been working with a coach that helps me through the process of building a business. He’s great… it’s been really valuable and it just the investment I need right now.
5 – New Clothes – I want them. Nothing noble here. All my shirts are ripped.
6 – Fund Winter – Ranking this last gives me guilt pangs. But I’m excited to put my feet to the fire a little bit.

 

 

2. Apply Available Cash

Work down your list of priorities and fill them up until you’re out of money.

 

3. Examine Underfunded Goals

Take a good look at the goals that are underfunded.

Will there be money to cover them? What happens if there isn’t? What’s the worst case scenario? What’s a realistic scenario?

If you want to look at the bigger financial picture you can use THIS SPREADSHEET (even if you’re not an opera singer).

 

4. Redistribute cash if needed

If the questions in Step 3 got you nervous just redistribute the allotment.

If there really isn’t enough income to cover the things you need, really look at how much you’re falling short and come up with some ideas to cover the difference.

Write down some ideas for making some extra income or maybe take a look at ways you could decrease those costs.

There will never be enough, but making sure you know what goal is next in line means you’ll be constantly feeding the things that you want/need.

There are only two ways to have ‘enough’…

Make more, or change the definition of enough…

No matter what strategy you use, these steps will help.

And I’ll see you at the dentist.

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

Chris Enns

Chris Enns

Financial Planner/Opera Singer

Money never came naturally to me. In fact… I was a bit of a disaster. I remember (very clearly) what it feels like to be ‘financially out of control’.

And honestly, I still get stressed about money… that doesn’t stop… the difference is that now I have the tools to deal with that stress.

And those tools are what’s made it possible for me to build a life full of the things I want: art, creativity, travel, family and more.

If you want to start getting control of your money I’d love to help. You can start with THIS QUIZ, visiting my GETTING STARTED PAGE or by checking out my SERVICES page.

EMAIL ME