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.”