- My boyfriend and I share a one-bedroom apartment in Boston, one of the most expensive cities for renting in the United States.
- Together we make $55,000 a year — enough for rent, utilities, groceries, and other expenses.
- Take a look at how we live and what we spend money on each month.
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
Seeking financial stability as an early twenty-something is no easy task.
For my boyfriend and me, it’s only made harder by the fact that we have no set yearly salary or office to go to. We’re both a year out of grad school and have the student loans to prove it. Now we have embarked on the exhilarating, albeit terrifying, career path of professional freelancing: He as a filmmaker and I as a journalist.
While balancing record paydays with dry, gig-free months has certainly given us growing pains, it has also helped us learn how to create a budget to fit around our irregular schedules.
Together, we manage to live off $55,000 in our Boston apartment — one of the most expensive cities in the United States.
Read on to take a look into our finances and see what we spend money on each month.
First, take a look at our monthly expenses, including our rent, utility bills, and grocery expenses.
Sarah Wells
Rent: $1,750 for a one-bedroom apartment with in-building laundry and tenant parking lot
Utilities: $90 for WiFi (we opted for the faster speed as we often both work from home) and $40 for electricity
Gym: $27.80 each
Travel savings: $25 each (set to automatically withdraw from our accounts so we barely have to think about it)
Parking/transit: (Him) $150 for parking, (me) $90 for a transit card
Car Insurance: (Him) $200, (me) $0
Groceries: About $400 per month, or roughly $100 a week — we rarely eat out so our local Trader Joe’s gets a big chunk of our earnings instead
Health insurance: (Me) $0 because I’m on a family plan, (him) $90
Student loans: (Me) $360, (him) $0
Phone: $40 each
Subscription services: (Him) $5 for Spotify and Hulu, (us) $15 for Netflix
Donations: (Me) $10 to the American Civil Liberties Union
Importantly, we make coffee at home instead of spending $5 a day at a coffee shop.
Sarah Wells
Our schedules rarely look the same week to week (a blessing and a curse) but if we’re both working from home — me either pitching, writing, or revising, and him searching for gigs or editing — we try to keep as closely as we can to "normal" 9-to-5 hours. Usually this means waking up around 7:30 or 8:00 a.m. and groggily heading to our kitchen.
Our kitchen is by no means spacious, but has surprisingly generous counter space, and just enough room for a two-person dining table (and no more — we’ve tried). In what is now our well-oiled morning routine, we take turns making coffee (a process that involves boiling the kettle, grinding beans, and preparing the French press) and starting breakfast (usually cutting fruit or starting oatmeal).
I’ve also been working to perfect my imitation cafe latte, complete with "steamed" milk. To make it, I shake about an inch of ultra-pasteurized milk in a Mason jar until bubbles have doubled their original size, and then microwave it for 30 seconds to stabilize them. What would easily cost me $4 to $5 at a coffee shop is $0 at home.
We pay a little less than $30 each for our gym memberships.
Sarah Wells
We usually spend the first few hours of the morning answering emails and doing work from our "home office" (a.k.a. our living room) before heading out just before lunch to the gym. Our gym is only a five-minute drive from home and can sometimes be the one escape I get from our apartment and my inbox each day.
About an hour later, we finish our workout, and on Mondays we head out to grab our groceries for the week. With parking validated from our gym we usually pay $1 to $2 on our way out, depending on how long we stayed.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
See Also:
- Here’s how much people with and without debt spend on 9 common expenses
- My boyfriend and I spend just $24,000 a year by living in a van — here are all the things we save money on
- I took a $40,000 pay cut to work remotely from my Los Angeles apartment. Here’s how I live and what I spend money on.
Source: Business Insider – feedback@businessinsider.com (Sarah Wells)