New Year, New Budget: How to Invest in Your Acting Career

The new year brings about a wave of goal-setting energy, and for a lot of us in creative careers, that means a recommitment to our artistic practices.

You may have goals like getting more callbacks or booking your first on-screen role, but these goals lead to the smaller, more practical action steps that make these goals possible.

These action steps may look like getting a new demo reel together, which could require new self tape equipment and possibly hiring an editor.

Or it looks like doing research on which casting directors are casting the shows you’re a shoo-in for, and then buying tickets to their workshops or events they’re attending.

It could also be attending more in-person auditions like EPA’s (Equity Principal Auditions), which leads you to buying a nice insulated mug and noise cancelling headphones to make the waiting process more enjoyable.

There are plenty of actions you can take to hit your acting goals this year that won’t cost you anything, but there are also things that could greatly support you in your goals that do cost money.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through how you can budget for these actor essentials, so you can feel confident creatively and financially.

Insights: Ways to Budget for Actor Essentials

Evaluate your financial situation to establish a budget for acting expenses.

Make a list of acting essentials, prioritize them, and understand their impact on your career.

Cut unnecessary expenses and save specifically for high-priority acting investments.

Assess Your Current Finances

The first step in planning to invest in your acting career is figuring out your current financial baseline. That way you’ll know what extra money you have to put toward actor essentials .

This article, 4 Steps To Creating a Money Plan With Fluctuating Income, walks you through understanding your current finances, i.e. your income, monthly expenses and how to save so that you’ll have money left over.

Once you have those numbers and have a simple way to manage that money, you will be able to clearly see what you have left over to spend on your acting career.

Create Your Wishlist

Make a master list of everything you want to spend money on for your acting career, as well as what they cost. Here’s an example of what this list could look like:

Travel lighting (for self tapes while on vacation): $60

Headshot refresh: $600

Audition pants that go with everything and make me feel incredible: $37

Two casting director workshops: $100

TOTAL: $797

Make Decisions

Now that you have a total number to work with, you can start the decision-making process. Start with getting clear reasons why you want each of the items on your list and the result each item will give you. When you do this, you must be specific! This article, How to Make Responsible Financial Investments in Your Acting Career, can help you discern what is actually a responsible investment.

With the financial knowledge you have from step one (aka what is in your bank accounts and how much extra you plan to have coming in over the next few months), does spending this amount right now feel good? If not, put these items in a list from highest priority to lowest priority, and use these next few months to save up for the things lower on the list.

You can also look at your current day-to-day spending and decide if there’s anything you are currently spending money on that now feels like less of a priority than the actor essentials you’ve listed out.

For example, do you have a gym membership that costs $150 a month that you barely use? Cancel the membership and put that $150 toward getting back into your favorite improv class.

You can then create a bucket in your savings account (or open a separate bank account if your current bank does not have that feature) titled “Actor Essentials” that you can fill up and spend with confidence once you’ve hit that total number.

To boil this article down to one sentence: Get clear on what you want, be specific on why you want it, and decide how it fits into your current finances.

Making a plan for how you will afford actor essentials will allow you to make moves in your creative career without taking on any additional financial stress.