[FYI this post contains a bunch of links to books you can buy on Amazon. None of them are affiliate links. I do not get paid if you click them – I just want you to have good information and be setup for life.]
Consumer and student debt is a super hot topic these days.
Wrap that into what you get if you go to a for-profit trade school (I’m looking at you, The Art Institute, Los Angeles Film School, Full Sail University, etc.) and how much money that costs compared to what you get out of it…
To say it’s easy to make a living – much less a prosperous one as a creative – is simply not true. It takes a considerable amount of work, regardless of if you’re fully employed by a company or you’re doing your own thing.
The first chapter of Quit Aspiring, if you were to pick it up, hits you over the head with this brutally. Not only general money talk but “what do you want out of life and can you get that by doing game audio?” talk.
Why?
Because money itself isn’t easy to manage. Add a creative career with no promise of stability to that and if you don’t educate yourself – you could be in for a world of hurt.
So today’s post is a simple list of books for you. These are the books that taught me the basics of money management and financial planning when quite literally nobody else helped or taught me.
I had no idea what to charge (I made a hair over $20k one year and thought I was doing great).
I had no idea how to do taxes (My TurboTax income tax return paid a month’s rent for me once… because I didn’t have the money coming in)
I couldn’t afford a car, could barely make the minimum payments on my student loans, and was afraid of getting a credit card because it would enable me to get into further consumer debt.
Seriously – I was a joke, and I had no idea what I was doing.
Now, I’ve paid off around $50k in debt between student loans and my car. I have credit cards, and pay off their balances in full every month. My family has an emergency savings (which helps when through nobody’s fault your contract with a AAA game company ends early). We also have a good chunk put away for retirement, a house down payment, and a 2nd car.
All of that was only possible due to reading, educating myself, and experimenting with the information enclosed. Even if both my wife and I made six figure incomes individually – I previously lacked so much financial sense that we still somehow would’ve wasted it.
So if you’re shaking in your boots every time you log in to your bank account (I used to have panic attacks such that I couldn’t even enter my login) and you want to get past that – here’s what I’ve got for you.
Continue reading The Books I Used to Pay Off $50K
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