[Sound up on Financial Therapy session]

Amanda Mills: Okay, so where do you want to start with your money?

SF: Well, that’s a good question. I guess my biggest concerns about finances have been that over the past few years as I've really been working and out of school for the first time I've found it to be way more of a struggle than I expected. The kind of work that I do is creative. I do freelance writing and audio production and editing, and journalism and creative-stuff, and I do contract work as well in education and media facilitation so between those things I have been able to support myself but my income is very low.

AM: Are you willing to tell us how much? Like, how much do you think you made last year?

SF: Well okay, I think that this year I'll make about $20,000

AM: OK, and what do you think you would like to make?

SF: That’s a great question because, um, I think that's a question that I can’t answer realistically, because I can say what I would like to be able to afford and income towards things that I would like to be sustainable in my life, but because I've never been in a position where it has been that way I’m not actually sure how much it costs. I’ve actually found that I felt a huge amount of anxiety just living day-to-day because there are projects that are really important to me and I feel I can’t work on them because I always constantly have to be hustling to find new work that will pay for itself and pay for itself fairly quickly.

AM: And pay for you.

SF: And pay for me.

AM: Because you do need work that will pay for you. You don’t live here free of charge right?

SF: I don’t buy clothes very often. I rarely buy things except for equipment, which again I would rarely buy, only if I needed it. Essentially I only buy the things I really need. I have no real disposable income because I have student debt, but if there are times…

AM: Actually the main reason you have any disposable income is that your salary isn’t high enough.

SF: Ok…

AM: Its not about the student debt. And actually one of things I wondered was, if you could just visualize owning a house for a second – it’s a beautiful house and you have a $300,000 debt on that house. How is that debt going to feel?

SF: Ahh, like a huge anvil which is trepidatiously hanging from the ceiling, about to swing down and crush everything in the house.

AM: The difference between good debt and bad debt as they call good debt and bad debt is that when you buy something like an education, which is where all your debt has gone to, you know this debt was incurred in order to achieve a bigger purpose. It’s the same when you buy a house, not too many people can just put the cash down. It’s a bigger purchase than most people can do and they usually have to go into hawk to do it. And its true on any huge things, and that’s why good debt is when you decide you need an education and you are willing to go into debt to do it. Bad debt is when your lifestyle just sort of erodes – it’s a little more expensive than you can afford.