Nestled along North Carolina Highways 158 and 13 is Ahoskie and its five sister municipalities that make up Hertford County—a region once prospering with the promise of economic advancement, now struggling to hold onto the last fraying threads of a once booming economy.
There are six municipalities in Hertford county: Ahoskie, Cofeild, Como, Harrellsville, Murpheesboro and Winton.
It is a county that has the second highest projected rate of population loss in North Carolina according to the North Carolina Office of State Budget and Management.
In a state projected to have an increased population over the next ten years, why is Hertford different?
Residents like long-time salon owner and Hertford resident, Ida Harris said it is because of the state of economic pitfall that the county has been in since she was a young stylist and mom.
The town of Ahoskie’s soil is lined with abandoned railroad tracks and littered with an impressive number of abandoned vintage city buildings, and seems ghostly upon arrival. The few open and operational businesses hide behind decrepit storefronts that you could tell were in their prime 20 or more years ago.
The North Carolina State Census Reporter found that over 20% of Hertford county’s population is under the poverty line with 30% of minors under the age of 18 are also poor.
Harris, a feisty salon owner who has aged much better than the town, is the owner of Salon 21 and a Hertford native of 69 years. Still working in the downtown strip of Main Street in Ahoskie, Harris says that over the years, she has seen the town dwindle.
“Main Street was really busy,” Harris said. “It was the place to be. Now, ultimately, the shopping center gets what’s left of the foot traffic.”
While styling the hair of a client, Harris reminisced on what the downtown area used to look like when she was a young stylist. She listed businesses like “Dan’s Discount,” the drug store, and countless restaurants that used to greet locals and out-of-towners.
Now the average per person income earned in Hertford County, according to the Census Reporter, is $27,562 annually.
Harris says the building that her salon is in now is much nicer and newer than the one she was in across the street, and yet pedestrians can tell the newer storefront is well past its prime.
Her salon was located across the street from her current location, she said, but she moved buildings because the other building was in bad condition.
“People move away and one reason why I feel like businesses are leaving is because these buildings are old,” Harris said.
The exodus of families and young professionals is not surprising to Harris, because she says Hertford does not offer any sort of financial opportunities to them. The people of this county age like the buildings do, she says.
Harris raised her son in the county, and once he graduated high school in the Hertford school district, she said he attended college at Elizabeth City State University, just under an hour drive away.
Her son moved to Raleigh after he graduated from ESCU, and she said she doesn’t blame him for not coming back home.
When asked what she would tell other North Carolinians about Hertford and her little town of Ahoskie, she said, “Stay where you are.”
Hartis attended Roanoke-Chowan Community College that is located in Ahoskie. That is where she finished her degree in cosmetology. As a single mother, Harris would have moved out of the area a long time ago if that meant making a better life for her son, she said.
The only thing, or person, tying her to the town was her grandmother. Taking care of her son in the salon while she was trying to work was less than easy, Harris said, but she made do.
“We’re not doing anything to build it (the local economy) up. If anything, we are doing stuff to take away. Some people are talking about a new by-pass. You know what that means don’t you? People are going to by-pass us,” Harris said.
With very little construction and upkeep of the buildings downtown, Harris suggested “no wonder people don’t seem to be attracted to the area.”
According to the NC census report from 2021 to 2022, the total employment percent was -3.9%, which means employment in the county that year, and predicted trends indicate that this decrease might become normal here.
East Carolina University has a medical facility in Ahoskie, which provides a number of economic employment opportunities and better health outcomes for its local residents.
Yet, with a staggering decline in population, few job opportunities, and the dilapidated downtown infrastructure, Ahoskie and the other towns in Hertford only have the resilience of small business owners like Harris to hold onto the remains of the economic culture of decades passed.
As an on-going construction project continues in the downtown Greenville area, small business owners and employees begin to feel the negative impacts of closed roads and new parking ordinances.
Drew Cheshire, The General Manager at Uptown Brewing Company on Evans St. in Downtown Greenville said, “Businesses all over downtown, especially us, took a downturn. Business slowed down a lot; foot-traffic slowed down. Potential customers were dissuaded from coming down here because the first time they couldn’t reach the turn they wanted, they would just give up and go home.”
Uptown Brewing Company is not the only downtown business that says it is struggling for business because of the construction, but it seems that the construction will not be finished for a few months.
The street blockages set up for the construction to take place have made it much harder for people wanting to come down to the affected restaurants, shops, and in Cheshire’s case, the brewery.
Not only is it difficult to navigate around the zones of torn-up roads, the city’s new parking protocols pose an even greater threat to businesses in the affected areas, Cheshire said.
“No communication at all from the city,” Cheshire said. “The only updates I see are what I catch in the news or if another business owner or manager happens to spread stuff around. That’s when I’ll see it, but I never get anything from the city.”
At the beginning of the construction, Cheshire said the transparency between the city and the local businesses was great. City officials communicated well, he said. However, as the project has continued now for a year, less and less information about parking and road-closures has been dispersed.
Even just requesting information from the city regarding construction and parking updates seems to be a challenge, Cheshire said.
“I had to reach out to them. They weren’t rude to me,” Chesire said. “They were a little more curt than I would have liked. It took me reaching out directly to the department head before I got any sort of transparency.”
Brock Letchworth, the city’s communication manager, said that the roadwork construction will wrap up at the beginning of 2026. He said city officials are expecting all roads to be operable by Jan.
There are some aspects of the city’s project that do not just include the road work in the downtown area, but also greenways and sidewalks that will help better connect ECU’s Main Campus to its Medical Campus, Letchworth said.
Even with the prospects of newer, safer and prettier streetscapes, businesses downtown are having difficulty keeping their doors open as the construction continues despite the city’s efforts to draw business to those storefronts.
“I think it important to point out that the city has spent thousands of dollars on either signage to help with promoting those businesses or through loan programs for those impacted to promotion through city media channels,” Letchworth explained.
He said the efforts by the city to help draw attention of patrons to the private businesses downtown is somewhat uncommon for municipal governments.
“I will say that going through (social) media and complaining about the construction is not helping whatsoever with that,” Letchworth said.
With the construction ongoing for well over a year, downtown businesses are beginning to wonder if they will be able to recover from the project that the city took on.
The city applied for the US Department of Transportation’s Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development project grant or the BUILD project back in July 2019. The city was notified that it had received the federal grant four months later.
The BUILD Project’s purpose is to create safer traffic patterns for cars, bikes and pedestrians in the Downtown area, Medical District, western part of the city and the university area according to the city’s website.
The project consists of eight phases of construction in various places along Fifth Street. The construction started on April 1, 2024–now a year later, the project is in phase 7 of 8 and is taking place on Evans street in the heart of the downtown area off of the Five Points parking lot.
(A screenshot from the City of Greenville’s Website showing the phases and the areas in which the construction affects)
The street where the Greenville Christmas Parade route goes through, the place of Doggy Jams in the Spring and the lot that hosts each Freeboot Friday in the Fall is now leveled down to the dirt as of March 24, 2025.
Downtown businesses were notified via flyer of the ongoing project and start of phase seven about two weeks prior to the start of demolition of the intersection of 5th Street and Evans Street according to Cheshire.
In addition to the construction of the roads and sidewalks, the building of the new Hilton Garden Inn on Evans Street did the downtown business owners no favors.
The groundbreaking for Greenville’s latest high-rise hotel happened in 2022 with plans to open in the summer 2023. Instead, three years after the start of construction, the first guests were welcome on Feb. 26 .
A group chat on Instagram’s Direct Messages called “Downtown Merchants” includes many of the local businesses such as The Scullery, State Theater, The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions, Uptown Brewing Company, Purple Blossom Yoga Studio, Club519 and others.
“The silence from the city is deafening,” wrote the manager at The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions. “10 years ago they came around to get signatures and consent for every street closure and event that might impact our street. I’ve felt completely disregarded for a long time now.”
The hotel’s contract included parking spots in the Fourth Street Parking Garage to accommodate guests. However, nearly a month ago, reserved “20-minute” unloading spots for hotel guests took the place of available street spots on Evans Street.
Businesses in the Downtown Merchants group chat were quick to add that they had not been told about the hotel unloading spots, which took up four of the available spots along that strip.
Someone in the chat from Purple Blossom Yoga Studio wrote, “Given the lack of spots along Evans St compared to the number of businesses plus the construction terribly affecting business, no one should be losing parking spots in any capacity.”
The chat discussion wrote that over 70 citations have been issued to shoppers and diners for walking through poorly posted construction zones–areas that lead directly to the front doors to these local businesses.
Letchworth said that he did not know the number of citations the city police have issued to those who cross into the construction zones. He said stronger enforcement of the citations for pedestrians came from when a few college students caused about $20,000 worth of damage to a newly-poured concrete curb.
Given that incident, Letchworth said, “I don’t understand any kind of sympathy or empathy for anyone who received a citation for crossing into a construction zone.”
With businesses still angry about the lack of communication and the steady decrease in sales due to lack of foot traffic downtown, organizing might be the next step for them.
Someone from The Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions shared the shop’s consistent drop in sales in the group chat.
“Sojourner sales dropped another 40% in 2024, 30% down in 2023. This city seems to be working overtime to shut down the little guys,” one message from Sojourner Whole Earth Provisions said.
Downtown Greenville Partnership’s Instagram account is also a member of the group chat, and responded to the grievances by saying that the organization does not have much control over what the city chooses to do regarding the BUILD project, parking and the new hotel. The message said that the Partnership was also taken by surprise by the hotel check-in parking on Evans, calling it “not-ideal.”
Matt Scully, the owner of The Scullery Cafe and Creamery on the corner of Evans and Fifth, is also a city councilman elected in 2023, which has put him in an interesting position as a middleman between downtown businesses and the city.
Scully said both the road construction and the hotel closing the one-way section of Evans Street has been a pain not only for employees, but also for sales. He added that a lot of businesses downtown are losing a great deal of business to people simply not wanting to have to navigate around the roadwork.
“This is a huge project. It’s not just resurfacing, it’s all the way down to the dirt, new drainage, new utility infrastructure. It’s going to be a totally new streetscape,” Scully said.
He said he thinks the city has done a fairly good job at keeping up with the construction and being as transparent as it can be during what has been a long period of uncertainty for businesses.
Due to the state of construction last Spring, the city did away with the pay-to-park app that it was using and it suspended the two hour time allotment, allowing unlimited parking time in and around the downtown area.
As of March, now there is a two hour time limit on all parking spots downtown. Tickets have been issued to those who keep their vehicles in city spots past their two-hour time limit.
A few businesses in the “Downtown Merchants” group chat wrote that they are worried about having to close because of the lack of sales partly due to the consistent road closures and reroutes that cut off foot and street traffic to their business’s doors.
King’s Deli on Fifth Street announced on its social media pages that it was closing its doors later this month. It is uncertain at this time if the reason for their closing is primarily due to the loss in sales caused by the construction, but their storefront has been affected by several stages of the BUILD project.
Scully said the city understands the inconvenience that the construction and the change in parking protocol has put on downtown businesses and their patrons. With businesses in mind, he added that the city was in the beginning process of adopting a business loan program to compensate for the losses that the ongoing construction has caused.
“They (the city) have started a loan program for businesses, which is a $10,000 no interest loan,” Scully said. “I really wish it was a grant.”
Scully said a hardship loan is now available for downtown businesses that are struggling with sales during the BUILD project. However, Drew Cheshire said he has not heard anything about such loans.
(Photo Used from the School of Theatre and Dance Instagram @ecusotd )
East Carolina University School of Theatre and Dance students have come forward with alleged race-based discrimination practices the school has engaged in.
The students, some of whom have asked for anonymity, allege that an unusual show audition schedule that made it difficult for black female students to be chosen for both fall 2024 productions was followed by the sudden exit of the school’s beloved and only black faculty member.
In the Fall semester, the program put on two productions. One, “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” and “Sweeney Todd.”
The first production for the semester was African Mean Girls, and according to PlayBill, the show by Jocelyn Bioh, “takes place inside a boarding school for girls in Ghana in the 1980s, and looks at themes of beauty, adolescence, and colorism.”
“Sweeney Todd” was the musical that took place later that semester. However, the drama began when an uncommon casting practice for the school took place the night before the start of the semester.
Unlikely Casting Practices
Casting and callbacks for auditions for the program typically take place the night before the first day of class in the fall semester. A Theatre and Dance student and cast member of “Sweeney Todd,” who asked for anonymity shared that the School of Theatre and Dance had callbacks for two shows at the same time, which she claimed made it difficult for student actors to audition for both shows, “African Mean Girls” and“Sweeney Todd”.
“The way that it works is, we have general auditions the day before school starts so we have them that Sunday [Aug. 18],” said the junior Theatre and Dance student. “Normally it’s that evening that we get a list of who is called back for each show and when those callbacks are going to be for each character.”
The student said she requested to remain anonymous for fear of consequences with the faculty, explaining, “I work very closely with a lot of the professors in the program, and I am terrified of losing their trust and the consequences it might have.”
“African Mean Girls”is a show that requires a full-female cast of primarily black actresses. With the callbacks being the same night at the same time as “Sweeney Todd”the actors auditioning for both roles, primarily female African American students, were not given the luxury of time in the auditions as other students were. The “African Mean Girls” production occurred in September, and “Sweeney Todd” in November.
The student who asked not to be named said that she was called back for a leading female role in “Sweeney Todd”. She added that in the call-back room, the director was giving notes and tips for the auditions, and his tips were missed by the female students who were in between auditions for “Sweeney Todd”and “African Mean Girls”. This created an obvious disadvantage for them, she said.
“I think it is because “African Mean Girls” started so early in the year, they (faculty) decided they were going to do the “Sweeney”call-backs the same night. So a lot of the women of color had to be running back and forth between those two,” she said.
@ecusotd
Bryan Conger, the co-artistic director of the School of Theatre and Dance said the decision to hold auditions and cast performers for two shows simultaneously was not unusual. “Every other university I have worked at, does that. That is not an unusual practice. It is not an unusual practice in the profession. There are multiple call-back days that I have known actors who have had to drive across New York City to go.”
Conger said that faculty noticed the double call-back night was particularly difficult on stage-management students, but he did not mention the difficulties student actors had who auditioned for both shows that night.
Though Conger said that the faculty were mainly concerned with the timing of when rehearsals started, students have claimed it was an attempt to keep black female students out of the “Sweeney Todd”cast.
“I know that it was a complaint of the cast of “Sweeney Todd”that it wasn’t black enough,” Conger said. “I hear that criticism, I take that in. It certainly was not intentional, and you know sometimes intention doesn’t matter.”
The professor who directed “School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play” was Lisanne Shaffer-Dickerson.
Conger said Shaffer-Dickerson brought “African Mean Girls”to the faculty’s attention, and showed interest in directing it for the Fall 2024 semester.
A disappointing surprise to many Theatre and Dance students was when they realized African Mean Girls was the last show Shaffer-Dickerson would direct before abruptly departing from ECU near the end of the semester. Schaffer-Dickerson was the only black faculty member in the School of Theatre and Dance.
Conger shared that students and others did not know the full story regarding Schaffer-Dickerson’s leave, but he did not go into detail about the information he had about the matter because he said he was asked not to by administrators in the School of Theatre and Dance.
“People think they know the full story, but they never actually know the full story,” Conger said in response to questions about Shaffer-Dickerson’s departure. “They take a piece that they’ve heard from somewhere and it blows up into something bigger.”
Conger said he and the faculty were sad to hear that their colleagues had made plans to take a new position outside of ECU.
Kieran Eustace, a senior Theatre and Dance student and friend of cast members in “African Mean Girls,” said that many of Shaffer-Dickerson’s students claimed she was “asked to find alternative work,” after a speculative racially-targeted event that happened just prior to a showing of “Sweeney Todd”.
Schaffer-Dickerson’s ECU employment contracts were obtained following a records request to the ECU Office of University Counsel.
The first employment contract to Shaffer-Dickerson from ECU dated June 22, 2022 said, “I am pleased to extend an offer to you of a nine-month faculty appointment in the School of Theatre and Dance with the College of Fine Arts and Communication. If you accept this offer, you will join our faculty at the rank of Assistant Professor for a term beginning August 15, 2022, and ending May 15, 2025, excluding summer terms. Your annual (nine-month) salary rate for the initial year of appointment will be $63,000, payable in twenty-four semi-monthly installments.”
In November, shortly after students speculated that Shaffer-Dickerson was asked to leave ECU, a second letter dated Nov. 20, 2024, was sent to her which notified her that her salary and full-time equivalency were being amended and cut.
Instead of being a full-time employee making $5,250 a month, she would be making only $10,000 in total between Jan. 10, 2025 and May 15, 2025, the last semester of her contract, which reduced her pay from the university to $2,000 a month.
In an email thread with School of Theatre and Dance Interim Director, Kate Bukoski, who declined an in-person interview, she was asked if Shaffer-Dickerson was asked to find alternative work.
Bukoski responded, “Employment details, including contracts and other personnel actions, are not accessible to students, faculty, or staff unless they are directly involved in the hiring or administrative process. This means that students would not have access to information regarding a faculty member’s employment status or any separation from the university unless that information was shared directly by the faculty member. Any information circulating beyond that context should be regarded as speculation or hearsay.”
She did not comment on whether Shaffer-Dickerson was asked to find work outside of ECU and why her contract and salary were amended so closely to the end of her allotted contractual time.
Bukowski was specifically asked twice in the email thread if Schaffer-Dickerson was asked to find alternative work by Theatre and Dance administrators. Her response was that Shaffer-Dickerson still remained an employee, contrary to what students had reported.
While the most recent records showed that Schaffer-Dickerson was hired on a three-year contract, which is not necessarily unusual, her pay and terms of that contract were changed so that her salary and hours were drastically cut during the last semester of her contract. After she received news of this sudden change is when students reported that she left ECU.
Students are also angry about what they say was a manipulated photo of a group chat among student performers of both the “African Nean Girls” cast and the “Sweeney Todd” cast that was shared with faculty. According to two THeatre and Dance students, faculty responded with extra monitoring and scrutiny of African American students on the chat, whom they wrongly assumed might disrupt a show. This added to the already-simmering student anger in the school.
Both Conger, the School’s co-artistic director; and Bukowski, the School’s interim director, declined to comment on the group chat incident.
“I can’t speak to you about that,” Conger said, relating to questions regarding the list. “I was told not to talk about it to anybody anywhere.”
With pink fingernail polish on her right hand and light green on her left, Brooke Benson’s artistic take on the little things was apparent even before delving into her business built on the feelings in our finances.
Benson graduated from ECU in 2017 as an acting major from the School of Theatre and Dance, and spent her early post-college years in Florida working as an actress at Jimmy’s Buffett’s Margaritaville
“I knew I wanted to be an actor in preschool,” Benson said. “As I got older, I realized how much different money was going to be for me as a creative and as a freelancer. I had to get into the trenches with my own money and figure out how to practically manage it with a fluctuating income.”
She knew that making money was going to be different for her as an actress in a creative field compared to her parents, peers and other young professionals working steady 9 to 5 jobs, she said.
Benson initially struggled to find a way to manage her finances that made sense to her, because budgeting and penny-pinching were not helpful for the young artist. “As someone who struggles with anxiety, I have a little bit of OCD–a type B creative brain. Spreadsheets and budgeting and traditional ways of managing money were actually extremely harmful to me,” Benson said.
The Beginning of a Six-figure Business
Finding a different methodology to manage money was necessary in her early career. Relating to money and being able to navigate a healthy relationship with funds was just the beginning, Benson said. These two things together, creativity and money, ultimately became the two fundamental components that would later launch her into her own business, “Not Starving Artists” a money coaching LLC (limited liability company). “I was doing all of this [money management] in the background of my own artistic life and career, ” Benson said.
“It wasn’t until the pandemic where obviously my entire path and livelihood shut down, and I had this space where my mantra during that time was ‘Follow your bread crumbs of joy’.” Starting with blogs and guest financial coaching, Benson said that the beginning sparks of her business came from her simple passion for wanting to help other artists navigate the same financial struggles she did.
“Money is our key to freedom, opportunity and choice,” Benson said.
With a “gig-to-gig” income or a fluctuating salary dependent on creative contracts, Brooke said that the best thing for her was to find peace during times when money was not freely coming in. She compared budgeting to standardized testing. She said just like the SAT and ACT are to students, traditional ways of money management can be confusing and intimidating to type-B personalities in the professional world.
There are different types of brains and personalities that standardized testing does not account for, Benson said, and the same goes for traditional financial management methods. “How I teach money, I call it the ‘Money Flow Method,” Benson said. “It’s a cashflow system that automates everything for you. When you organize your money, it flows through your bank accounts in a way that makes sense, you can look at it and immediately know what you can afford. You have guardrails around your spending, but you have freedom to spend without categories, spend without pinching every penny.”
Trends that Statistics Point To
According to Gallup polling data from last year, Americans continue to name inflation as their biggest financial burden when it comes to making and saving money. Benson said that in a changing economy, job security is not just a myth for artists, and that all professionals are at risk for unexpected unemployment. Lay-offs are not uncommon, she said, but creatives might have an underlying advantage to navigating this less than ideal economy than others. “The advantage that creatives have is, we’re actually already calibrated to mitigating risks when it comes to job security,” Benson said. “We have the thought, ‘I can’t depend on a 9 to 5 bi-weekly paycheck. We’re scrappy as hell.”
To Benson, she said people who work in creative fields or have art degrees, have the mind-set of ‘what’s next’ and are already thinking about how they can use their skills to move onto the next creative and possibly lucrative endeavor.
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that arts and design occupations are projected to grow at a quick pace from the year 2023 until 2033. Each year, since 2023, this occupation pool is projected to grow at a rate of 87,900 employees each year. This means that the occupation is gaining more employees than those who are retiring or leaving the field completely.
Benson has hope in this economy where inflation is still high, the cost of living does not seem to go down, and prices for everyday items are exponentially soaring higher and higher. She said that artists might even be a solution. “Everytime we have a crisis, a disaster it becomes that much more important that artists and art exist,” Benson said.
“In 2020, everyone turned to art during the pandemic. We were watching shows, we were reading books. We were engaging in our creativity to keep our souls alive.”The scrappiness that it takes to not be a starving artist in this economy, is the same attitude thatit takes to make real change in our nation’s economic state right now, Benson said.
Personal financial issues may keep many people from being able to save and reach their financial goals, but a large barrier between this generation of young professionals and economic security is a systematic failure in the way America’s economy operates, Benson said.
She added that art amplifies those social issues and makes them relatable to the masses.
Post-Grad Expectations
Griffin O’Brien, a senior theatre and communication double major at ECU, said the curriculum of ECU’s theatre department does more than just teach one how to act. Unlike more traditional science or STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors, art majors are taught a multitude of creative skills that can be applied to virtually any type of job, he said. The intersection of O’Brien’s fields of broadcasting journalism and acting equips him with creativity that would be beneficial in public relations, TV, script-writing and more, he said. Artists may not have conventional ideas of what work means to them after graduation, but qualifications are not things they are necessarily worried about, he said.
“For me, what I want to do is continue doing art,” O’Brien said. “I love to act, it’s always been a thing I have loved to do. I want to do that and possibly finish up some scripts and write my own stuff so I can have material in the future, rather than wait for an opportunity.”
With skills in script-writing, journalistic writing, story-telling, acting and public relation work, O’Brien said that ECU has taught him a lot of hard-skills, but more importantly, it has secondarily taught him how to build a personal brand. When people think about artistic careers in theater, they might only think about acting or directing, O’Brien said. What many people do not realize is that the artistic degree-holding individuals have so many more options than the competitive positions that immediately come to mind. He said art degrees equip graduates with skills that can not really be taught, instead they have to be experienced. Getting an artistic degree is more about gaining experience than lecture halls, he pointed out.
“Being an artist, it is such a scary road at times because there is no set salary,” O’Brien said. “It’s all about looking for opportunities but I would say with how I budget myself and how I try to manage my funds correctly, I will be in a fairly good place after graduation.”
With the state of the economy making things more expensive, on top of an already expensive cost of living, O’Brien said that making art is that much more important to creatives. It’s not necessarily about finding a way to make ends meet, he says. It’s about finding ways to get creative with making a sustainable income. “It’s a weird one [art fields] because it is a market that is so creative that you can almost kind of come up with a job,” O’Brien.
Creative Clientele
Since starting her business with an official client in 2021, Benson has curated a money methodology helping hundreds of creative business owners, artists and other young professionals reach their financial goals and more. Some success stories include helping a client financially build and manage a seven-figure business, and another make a six-figure salary in voice acting.
“I’m now able to slow down and strategize with my money,” Kaitlyn Bettendorf, one of Benson’s clients, said. “I’m mindful with my purchases, and much smarter about how I choose to spend and/or save my money. And I moved to New York while unemployed and didn’t freak out!”
Instead of a budgeting coach, Benson has built her career, separate from acting, on being a financial therapist for many. She has been able to root her practices far beneath surface figure dollar amounts by making her clients realize that feelings and finances are intertwined.
“It is wild how intertwined emotions are with the financial experience,” said Ashley, another one of Benson’s clients who did not include her last name, said. “In my freeze state, it was hard to even ask myself the questions I needed to. It was so helpful to have a weekly place to come and unpack all those things and talk it through.”
Above all, Benson pointed out that finances and feelings cannot be separated, something people are finally recognizing. More feelings-first finance methods are surfacing as compared to the all-or-nothing way of budgeting that was popular for generations. Just like people bring creativity to a canvas, a stage, streaming platforms and pages of books, they can bring to their banking accounts, Benson revealed. Budgeting doesn’t have to exclude type-B personalities, and money coaching that takes both creativity and efficiency into account is a great place to start when planning for economic futures in this unsteady economy.
“What I experienced and what I tell my clients is, ‘Follow your creative urges.’ and also ask yourself tactically, ‘What do I need financially?’” Benson said. “And then just start chasing both paths. They are either going to converge, you hit a wall or you find brilliance at both ends.”
