Freelance audio engineer: My budget and planning for the future

My name is Kelly Kramarik. I'm 25 years old. I'm an audio engineer, and I'm set to make about $40,000 this year. My relationship with money, I say I didn't really have one until college. My parents paid for my rent in college up until my junior year when I kinda like failed all of my classes, and they cut me off cold, like hard. So I had to pay for my rent. If I wanted to continue college, I had to pay for that. So I took a semester off, and I just bar tended like crazy, didn't spend any money. I figured out how to get the loans that I needed, set up to start school again. Because I just felt, without being in school I just felt weird. I knew I needed to finish my degree. And so I worked really hard and independently to fix my life in that way, and I started appreciating money a lot more. I'll say when I graduated college, that was another big change, when I started having to pay my loans back. That's when I realized how much money I actually took out in college, and I didn't realize it at all until I had to start paying it back. So that's when I started becoming very cheap, and I love coupons, I love any kinda deal that I can get. In a city like this it's cool because we have happy hour all the time. So like I don't go out to eat unless it is a discounted price. I don't drink something unless it's a discounted price. I literally look through every catalog or the weekly shopping list for like the different stores and I go to different stores based on the sales. So I started like penny pinching I guess, and so I'm still kind of like that, although every engineer likes to spend money on gear. And so I have an issue spending money on gear. But being freelance, it's a little harder, because I like right now, last month I didn't, I worked one time the entire month. And then this month, I am having like an insane month, probably the best since I started doing this freelance, with a ton of gigs. And I don't even know how next month. I have a couple of gigs lined up for next month, but I'm not sure if I'll get more or if I won't. And so planning for you know making a bunch of money two months away and not making money the month that you're in is kinda hard, but I also have a joint bank account with my boyfriend who is a bartender and he has a steady income. And we have savings. So I can also dip into that if I need to if I don't have an income for that month. So I came from a small town in upstate New York where you can get a huge house for $60,000. When I was in college, I lived in an apartment that my rent was $300 a month. Then I moved out to Denver and our first one bedroom apartment was 700 square feet and it was 1136 plus everything. And after one year, they raised it by $150. So we moved and got a roommate, and our place now is more affordable. Between three of us it's $1,600. So I love living here. Denver is like the coolest place on the face of the earth, but no one come here. Just stop coming here. (laughing) I want it to not be as expensive. I kinda justify how expensive it is because there's so many things to do that don't cost money. You can go up into the mountains for a week, for a weekend, and you have all of your gear and you don't spend any money because you're just hanging out in the woods. You can go hiking. The most expensive part about it is paying your $5 to the forest system for your parking fee. I would never live anywhere else. I don't want to live anywhere else. I wanna make everything work here, and that's my goal. So my personal monthly income is $4,560. With my boyfriend's added into that, we make about $7,560 a month. After, or the taxes that get taken out every month are about $1,868. Which means our take home income every month is $5,692. Our rent every month is $1,200 plus our gas and electric which is about $30 a month. We only have internet because of like Hulu, Neflix, Amazon, which we actually use other people's accounts for so we don't actually pay for that. So we just pay for internet which is $50 a month. My boyfriend is on his parent's plan still, and I share a plan with my sister, and my share of that is $67 a month. And then we have a car. So our car payment is a little under 500, but we pay 500 every month just to you know have a regular amount that comes out. We pay about $100 in gas a month, and that kinda fluctuates depending on how often we go to the mountains. And then $100 in insurance, which is pretty good. His dad was in the Army so we get a really good insurance rate. My student loan, I only pay $25 while I'm in school on one of my private loans. Everything else is deferred. And then food, groceries, about $200 a month. Recurring expenses is about $45 a month for our gym memberships. And then entertainment is about $200 every month, going out and meeting friends for happy hour or going to see a movie or something like that. Leftover funds is about $3,174. And we have regular monthly savings of about $500 goes into a regular savings account every month and another $500 goes into an emergency fund, and that's just different things that come out every single week about $250 every week comes out of our account and we don't even think about it. Since I'm an audio engineer, as a freelancer, I don't have a company that's gonna ask me to put money away for my future. So I have to do that myself. So I plan on starting a Roth IRA just to start putting money away for retirement, and that'll be another monthly expense that I will work into my budget. As an audio engineer, to be successful you have to be busy. And so I don't have a ton of free time if I'm doing what I should be doing to go out and spend a bunch of money. So I don't. When I'm really busy, I'm really busy, and when I have time, I sleep or I play with my cats. I'm a homebody also. Out of all of my friends, I am the host. So instead of going out and meeting up for drinks, which we do occasionally, but for the most part, people come over to my house, I cook. We get $3 wine bottles, and that's how we live our life. We just have fun playing games at home rather than going out and spending money. The time that I do have to hang out with people, I'd rather to be able to you know hear them when we're having a conversation than going to a loud bar and spending money.