The Fuck Does This Make Money: “I work all the time and it’s stupid, and my family wants me to stop.”

“The Fuck Does This Make Money?” is a Q+A about Money and Feelings. Read the rest here.

Who are you/what do you do?

I do both radio production and academic scholarship, and I’m always working on like seventeen other things at once, which is a personal problem that I have. A few favorite things: I produce an activist oral history podcast called Transcripts, I teach classes in the Media, Culture, and Communications Department at NYU, and I work with writers on trans equity and narrative through Sylveon Consulting. I also like to drive around in my Volvo station wagon and, when it’s not a pandemic, go to grocery stores for no reason. 

The fuck do you make money?

Ok, so I took this free financial seminar for freelancers at the start of the pandemic, set up by this radio organization I’m a part of. I’d just quit my full-time job to become a freelancer and then the economy crashed like six weeks later, so I needed help! The seminar was actually pretty good, overall, and taught me a bunch of stuff that I’d never learned before, like that one is not a bad person just for carrying a little bit of credit card debt, or how to make a budget that isn’t all about shame and self-punishing austerity, etc etc. But one thing they did that really stuck with me was this like money personality quiz, which described your earning and spending philosophies. I got the one that was, like, you definitely constantly worry about money, but you soothe your anxiety by just frantically hustling harder to make more money, rather than by taking a deep breath and investigating what you’re spending. It was true as hell. 

So: I have my full-time teaching job at NYU, which pays me more money than I’ve ever made in my life and probably more money than my parents made, but expires after three years. I’m squirreling that money away and living in Minneapolis, which is, duh, cheaper than New York, while I can.

I’m one of those horrible people for whom the pandemic turned into a financial boon (after four solid months of having a three-digit monthly income, anyway). But like, I know that money isn’t here to say, and there are more jobs in audio production than in academia, by a lot, so I’m trying to keep my skills up there and keep working in the industry. For Transcripts, that money is coming from grants, so I help the organization write the grant and then if we get the grant, I get the hourly contractor wage that I wrote for myself in the grant. At Sylveon, we charge an hourly rate (sliding scale depending on the client), and then 35% of that goes back into the business for our overhead (at this point, basically the website and business taxes) and 5% is a donation to trans people in need and the rest is our “take home.”

So I might earn like $100 helping a business write ad copy that isn’t transphobic or a podcast script talk about sex in a way that isn’t all about “boy parts” or whatever. 

I also have a mentor who sends me money sometimes with the understanding that I donate most of it to folks in my neighborhood (which was at the center of the uprisings this summer) but she also wants me to keep a little bit of it for myself. This person is a parental figure in my life (my parents and I don’t have that kind of relationship at all) / I don’t know how to think about this without a lot of feelings, but it’s worth being transparent about. 

What do you spend it on?

Rent, utilities, internet, savings, food, phone, giving money away, t-shirts for local orgs I see on instagram. In non-pandemic times, gyms. I don’t want to get into details for privacy reasons, but until very recently I spent a good deal of my money supporting a disabled family member, and that expense has been shifted out of my hands all of a sudden.

So there’s these like 100s of dollars that I’m suddenly like, oh fuck, that’s just there, beacuse I’m not paying my rent and her rent anymore. Now that I’m involved in the life of my partners’ kid, too, I spend money on her. 

How do you spend your time? How much of your time “makes money”?

I work all the time and it’s stupid, and my family wants me to stop. 

Tell me about your class background without telling me your class background.

I grew up with five people in a three-bedroom one-story house with a nice yard in a neighborhood in a “family-friendly” (read this as a euphemism for “extremely segregated”) Southern city. The kids like ten blocks away who lived on the waterfront had fountains in their front yards and we hated them. 

Tell me about a decision you’ve made about how you make money you’re NOT proud of.

I work for an institution whose values objectively do not align with mine and I think the world would be a better place if it did not exist. I left academia for a while because of those beliefs, which are correct IMHO; I went back because I was flailing in a 9-5 workplace but I needed real health insurance. It doesn’t feel great. 

What’s something you were surprised by when you first started making money this way?

I thought I was going to be underpaid, because non-tenure-track faculty are hideously and routinely underpaid. Instead, I’m paid a whole ton, but the catch is that I’m not in the union bargaining unit because I’m classified differently from other non-tenured workers. It’s stupid; we’re all doing the same job and oftentimes have the same degree, except they’re working more for less money while I get a fancier title. Obviously the university values teaching from some of us but not others of us for arbitrary reasons and that’s bad. I knew that already in the abstract, but at my last university all the non-tenure-track faculty were in the same union, so I was shocked to not even be classified as a “worker” even though I obviously am. 

Anything I didn’t ask that you want to share?

My relationship to money is weird because I have a ton of anxiety about scarcity and lack (see one of my early, rambling answers) but I didn’t actually experience resource insecurity as a child. I think some of this is neoliberalism blah blah blah, but one of my sisters recently pointed out that my mom has “an eating disorder but about money,” which I think is wildly accurate. (She also has, of course, a history of actual eating disorders.) I don’t know how to grapple with this yet, really. All I know is that I think there’s some real wack stuff in my brain about money that makes me think I’m always on the brink of financial ruin and that I always need to have three or four jobs going in order to survive, and I’m starting to be like, is that some inherited BS actually?

But it still feels real, which makes me always terrified that I’m gonna end up like the dad from a 1990s Disney Channel Original Movie whose kids need to convince him to come home from the office early and play catch with them for once (with the aid of like a loveable chimpanzee).