Creatives Need to Talk More About Money — We Don’t Need to All Be Starving Artists!

Let's normalise the notion of not struggling financially to make art. 

Okay, creatives. Let’s talk money. No, it is not a taboo topic, it doesn’t meant you’ve sold out, it doesn’t cheapen your art. It is simply a necessity. 

And we don’t do it enough. We as creatives don’t tend to talk about money enough. We’ve somehow glorified the “starving artist” life and believe that being destitute is us paying our dues on the road to achieving creative greatness. But it’s not a rite of passage, and it doesn’t have to be this way. We need to normalise being creative and financially self-sufficient.

Creatives and money? Yes, they do go together!

I used to think that it’s tacky to talk about money when it comes to creating art—namely, writing books. In my teenage years and my twenties, I held a really romanticised view about my writing career, that people would read my work and just pay me enough to make me a full-time author and I don’t have to worry about anything as long as I managed to get a cushy publishing deal. I used to think that considering the monetary returns from my writing was reducing my writing to quantifiable gains, when what writing brought me was far more than that. 

BUT as creatives, we need to talk about money. We need to plan for rainy days, we need to budget enough for our expenses, and many of us—if not most of us—need to have a day job to sustain ourselves while we create art on the side. Unfortunately, artists aren’t typically paid as much as an investment banker.

And because most of us would be in modest-paying jobs like copywriting in industries like marketing, advertising, or the media, which are just as hectic as investment banking, we have even more reason to plan our finances (and time) well. 

How my relationship with money changed

In my twenties, I was very sloppy with my finances. I didn’t invest, I didn’t plan out my finances, I didn’t even have an emergency fund built up. All I did was leave my salary in my savings account and apportion some of it into endowment funds. Needless to say, I didn’t get very far financially after ten years. 

It was only after I became a sub-editor at a personal finance website that I started learning about the importance of personal finance, and how much money I had been missing out on all these years by leaving my money in a regular savings account. 

That revelation galvanised me into cleaning up my finances. I got rid of all unnecessary subscriptions (including Netflix—all I have left are my Spotify, Canva, and New York Times ones), paid off my debt, set up a recurring monthly payment for my credit card, and built up a six-month emergency fund within a year, then started looking at ways to invest my remaining funds. All this so that in the event that I lose my job, I won’t have to scramble desperately for freelance gigs and live paycheck to paycheck ever again.

I also went back to traditional employment after half a year of freelancing. 

(For more details on how I cleaned up my finances, here's a piece I wrote for SingSaver.)

Is financial freedom ever possible for creatives?

“But Joyce,” I hear you say, “the whole point is to have time and freedom and flexibility to manage our own schedule and work on things that we genuinely love and care about!” 

I know. I know. 

Of course I would love to not have to report to a boss someday and trudge to the office four days a week and have my performance constantly assessed by higher-ups. The dream of most creatives I know—including myself—is to one day not have to work for others and be able to support ourselves through making art, be it selling books, freelancing, or running an Etsy shop. We want to regain our autonomy by building our own little empires, not someone else’s. That all still stands.

However, I’ve found that when I don’t have financial stability—for example, when I’m in between jobs and have to take up ad-hoc freelance gigs to tide through—I don’t have the headspace to create. My creativity suffers when I have to constantly keep a close eye on my finances. As much as I would like to not have to manage bosses or report to office several days a week (peak-hour commute is truly the bane of my existence), having a day job provides stability, which frees up the headspace to pursue. Yes, I have much less time to devote to my own projects, but it’s a trade-off I’m willing to accept—for now. 

Settling for a good-enough life—or striving for more

Manifesting that ✨soft girl life✨

The good news is, there are ways creatives can make an income on top of their regular day job salary. It’ll take time and effort, as most worthwhile endeavours do, but the alternative is to settle for that route that most people take: toil at a day job from 9am to 6pm every day, dread Mondays, dread the daily commute, look forward to weekends and holidays, rinse and repeat for ~40 years, retire at 65. 

Not that there’s anything wrong with this route; many people live very comfortably—and even happily—this way. But I personally have always wanted more. I want to have something of my own creation—be it a business or books. More broadly, I want to be free to tailor a life for myself that is soft, creative, and inspiring but also financially abundant. And staying in the corporate rat race until I’m 65 is not exactly Plan A.

(The pandemic years also gave us a taste of what it’s like to not have to commute to an office Mondays to Fridays, and have much more flexibility and autonomy over our time and schedule. My mental health got so much better in the years of working from home that followed, and I stopped having heart palpitations and other anxiety symptoms. I would like very much to return to that.)

And to regain control of my time and energy again, the long-term goal would be to be free of the corporate treadmill and build a life where I have that freedom, flexibility, and financial stability. Not only that, where I also do meaningful work that fill up my soul and bring value to the world—and get to spend more time with my loved ones. Grandiose, some people might say. But I’d argue that there are people already living my dream. So who’s to say that a goal is too lofty? I owe it to myself to at least try. 

Financial independence for creatives

There’s so much more I have to say on this subject of creatives and financial stability, so maybe I’ll make this a series. Being an investment content specialist by day and author by night, I'd love to find an intersection between these two identities of mine and exploring ways to combine these two very pertinent topics for creatives living in a capitalist society. 

I’ll cover the potential income sources for creatives—among other related topics—in another article. For now, I'll share a few books that I'm reading on my journey to financial freedom.

Personal Finance Reading List:

1. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss: Bookshop.org

2. Girls That Invest: Your Guide to Financial Independence through Shares and Stocks by Simran Kaur: Bookshop.org | Amazon

3. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel: Bookshop.org | Amazon

Q: What has your relationship with money been like, and what are your financial aspirations?

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