A Week In Baltimore On A $100,296 Salary

Welcome to Money Diaries where we are tackling the ever-present taboo that is money. We’re asking real people how they spend their hard-earned money during a seven-day period — and we’re tracking every last dollar.

Today: a senior communications specialist who makes $100,296 per year and spends some of her money this week on a handmade mug.

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Occupation: Senior communications specialist
Industry: Manufacturing
Age: 29
Location: Baltimore
Salary: $100,296 + $7,000 bonus
Assets: Car: ~$10,000; employer 401(k): $20,200; Roth IRA: $8,973; HYSA: $3,649.
Debt: Federal student loans: $55,225; credit card debt: $5,783; medical debt: $979.78.
Paycheck amount (2x/month): $2,715
Pronouns: She/her

Monthly Expenses

Housing costs: $900 rent.
Loan payments: Student loans: $376; medical debt: $100; credit card debt: $800.
Cell phone: $115
Internet: $60 (split with roommate).
Utilities: $80 (split with roommate).
Health insurance: $130
FSA contribution: $40
401(k) contribution: $750
Car & renter’s insurance: $201
Therapy: $120
Psychiatry: $40
Yoga subscription: $32
Google Drive storage: $10.59
YouTube Premium: $14.83
Apple iCloud storage: $2.99
Portfolio: $12
Chani app: $12
NYT Cooking: $4.99
Peacock: $7.99
Spotify: $12.71
Paramount+: $12.71
Gym membership: $38 (split with roommate and boyfriend). 
Babbel membership: $16 (charged every three months). 

Daylio app: $23.99

Was there an expectation for you to attend higher education? Did you participate in any form of higher education? If yes, how did you pay for it?
Definitely. I’m the first born of a Black parent in a second-generation immigrant family so suffice to say there was a serious focus on education pretty much immediately. I was raised in the classic “work twice as hard to get half as far” kind of mentality (cue the iconic Scandal scene with Kerry Washington and her dad), with the added pressure that neither of my parents were able to complete their college degrees. Good grades were expected and the bar was quite high. I’m first generation in a lot of ways and in terms of the financial part, it was kind of like, “well, figure it out.” My parents gave me a lot of love and support but they just honestly did not have these practices to pass on to me. I was awarded quite a few different scholarships when I graduated high school and worked as a dish washer at a local restaurant that summer to raise enough money to buy a laptop and the dorm necessities for starting out. After that, it was largely a combination of Pell grants and loans that both my parents and I had to take out to cover things. I was able to study abroad but again, only because I was awarded a hefty scholarship.

Growing up, what kind of conversations did you have about money? Did your parent(s)/guardian(s) educate you about finances?
My mom was probably a little too transparent with me about finances from an early age. I was told a lot about what was going on, what we could and could not afford, and had a lot of context for any decisions that were made. While I think it’s great to be transparent with your family, I also think I was kind of “parentified” early on in many ways and I do remember a constant state of fear and anxiety around money. We did not have much money at all growing up and I can remember many times where checks would bounce or cards would decline and we’d have to put groceries back while in line. Things haven’t really changed a whole lot as far as my family’s financial situation goes and any financial education I have is based on things I’ve picked up from friends, school, jobs and the internet. I still have a lot to learn.

What was your first job and why did you get it?
I started working under the table at 13 as an administrative assistant for our neighbor and family friend — basically a lot of organizing, filing and scheduling. Since then, I’ve pretty much always had at least one job, if not multiple!

Did you worry about money growing up?
Absolutely, all the time.

Do you worry about money now?
Absolutely, all the time. I have a great salary, an awesome job and a lot more security than what I grew up with, but I am constantly nervous. Due to a lot of emotional factors, I also have some issues with overspending and managing my money. I’m trying not to make the same mistakes as my family but it can be really easy to get into a cycle with credit card debt especially. Even though I know I have money now, I still get anxiety in checkout lines.

At what age did you become financially responsible for yourself and do you have a financial safety net?
I became financially responsible for myself at 21, once I had graduated from college, started my first job and moved out on my own. I don’t really have a financial safety net, apart from my emergency savings.

Do you or have you ever received passive or inherited income? If yes, please explain.
My nana would send me $20 or $50 whenever she could while I was in college. I didn’t keep track but I would guess the total amount over the course of four years was most likely around $500.

8:30 a.m. — I wrote my first Money Diary back in 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. A lot has changed since then! I’ve more than doubled my salary, I’m no longer dating the person I was dating back then, and I’ve gotten my endometriosis symptoms under control thanks to the Mirena IUD. I also got a dog a couple years ago, achieving one of my lifelong dreams. I wake up pretty early at my boyfriend D.’s house to go home and let my dog, K., out. Luckily I only live five minutes away. I get home, take K. out, feed her, then lie back down. I try to catch up on RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars but I end up falling asleep again.

11 a.m. — Wake up to a bunch of texts from my roommate, E., the last of which is making sure I’m alive because I’ve been MIA — whoops! She invites me to go to a river and hiking with some friends later and I say yes. We also have plans to go and see our friend DJing at a local event so I hurry up and get ready, eat some granola, and we drive over.

12 p.m. — The event is really great and there’s a lot of vendors with amazing stuff but we’re disappointed to see it’s poorly attended. I end up buying a really cute red mug with flowers from a pottery stand at the event for $35. It’s handmade so I tell myself the price makes sense. We’re putting together a gallery wall in the living room so we buy a little framed, mounted butterfly and dried floral arrangement to go with it. E. pays. I also get an agua de Jamaica for $5. We meet up with a couple of other friends there and chat for a while, then head home so that we can get ready for our river adventure. $40

2 p.m. — My mom calls me while I take K. out again before we go and we chat for about 20 minutes. I’m super close with my mom so I’m always excited to take her calls. I eat a quick snack of some leftover salmon and rice I made earlier in the week and then we’re off to meet our friends.

5 p.m. — It was so nice to be in the cold river on a super-hot day. The group is hungry after hiking so we stop and get tacos nearby. I get picaditas and a gordita with chorizo. $16.96

6 p.m. — After tacos, we decide to stop at the thrift store. We find a little glass ramekin that I decide will be perfect for putting flaky sea salt in and four bluish glasses that are sort of futuristic and retro at the same time. I pay $12.14 total. $12.14

8 p.m. — We drop one of our friends off and finally head home. K. is beside herself with joy. I feed her, apologizing profusely for being so late. It seems like she forgives me. I then make the brave decision to clean out my closet. It’s been driving me insane recently and I’m just fed up enough to do something about it. In an hour, I fill up two garbage bags full of clothes to donate and discover some things I thought I had lost. I take K. out for a quick walk, do my nighttime skincare, take my meds, and I’m in bed reading The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker by 10:15 p.m. I knock out shortly thereafter.

8:45 a.m. — Wake up with a lot of anxiety and not really sure exactly why. I used to love mornings but recently I have been waking up with panic in my chest. I do my morning skincare and get ready to go — I’m meeting one of my friends who lives out of town for breakfast. I do a quick somatic shaking video on YouTube to help me shake out the anxiety.

10 a.m. — My friend B. picks me up and we go to breakfast not far from the house. I get a BALT and a cappuccino and she gets a BE&C. I tell her a coworker of mine once said her brunch move is to get a pancake for the table and we decide to go for it and get a chocolate chip pancake to split. It’s so good! We split the bill and with tip, I pay $28.15. We talk about everything going on in our lives and it’s a really good catchup. We’re at similar emotional stages in friendships and our relationships, so I really value the space we make for each other to talk about our feelings in depth. $28.15

12 p.m. — B. comes in to say hi to K., fill up her water bottle, and then hits the road to go home. I walk her out and take K. on a 30-minute walk while I talk to my mom on the phone. She’s super nervous because she’s about to go on a work trip for the first time ever, basically. She has some really exciting new career developments happening and this training is a massive step forward for her — I’m so proud of her! We chat through her anxieties and what she’s packing. Then I go out in our backyard to read while K. lies in the sun.

2 p.m. — I meet my friends L. and I. at the pool for some sun. We end up chatting and swimming and sunbathing for the next couple of hours. I start a new book: The Guest by Emma Cline. I get so hungry around 4:30 p.m. that I need to head home for a snack. I get home, shower, eat a leftover picadita and walk K. for 30 minutes. Then I watch RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars while I put away laundry, vacuum, and clean my bathroom.

6:15 p.m. — D. comes by to pick me up — we’re going to the movies! We’re seeing Deadpool & Wolverine. I haven't seen either of the past Deadpool movies but he assures me I don’t need much background to jump into this one. We’ve been slowly working through the Marvel movies in order, since I’ve never really seen any of them. I’m enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would — I kind of thought they were just lame action movies but I really liked Doctor Strange and Thor: Ragnarok. I pay for our tickets ($28.38) so D. pays for popcorn and a cherry coke for us to split. $28.38

9:30 p.m. — The movie was good but so violent! I guess that’s to be expected. We’re not ready for the night to be over so we go and grab a drink at a bar nearby. I get a pickle martini and D. gets a sort of strawberry-rhubarb mixed drink. He pays since I paid for the movie tickets. We run into four different people we know, including my roommate, E., and her boyfriend. D. drops me off at my place so that I can walk K. again before bed. I give her a treat, brush her teeth, get my overnight bag together and drive back to D.’s to sleep over. We go to sleep a little after midnight.

7:45 a.m. — Wake up with an unbelievable sense of existential dread. Why does this keep happening to me?! D. and I cuddle until our alarms go off and we need to face the day. I drive back home, take K. out and do a 20-minute yoga nidra video in the hope of rebalancing my nervous system.

11:42 a.m. — I’m a little embarrassed to admit how my morning has gone but I need to be honest — I’ve been really struggling with my mental health. It’s hard because I feel like I do the “right things” like going to therapy, taking my meds, spending time with friends and family, working out, doing yoga, talking about how I feel with others, but I still have a really hard time fairly often. I was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD) two years ago and though I’ve graduated from dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT), I still really struggle on a weekly, if not daily, basis. I’m not 100% sure about my diagnosis. I’m starting a graduate DBT course in a week so I’m really hopeful it will give me the strength I'm looking for. I also started a mood stabilizer for the first time a couple months ago and I'm struggling with not feeling like “myself.” I try to remember to make space for the feelings, not suppress them.

3:44 p.m. — Finish up with meetings for the day. My 1:1 with my manager has given me a lot to do and think about as per usual. I’m really lucky because I have a manager who actually cares about me and the work that we do together and I generally like my job. Our friend A. arrives from out of town to stay for the night and we chat in the kitchen for a bit and catch up. Another friend, L., comes over to work with E. and the four of us co-work for the rest of the afternoon. I book some work travel for November ($72, expensed) and spend the rest of the workday making a table of all of our intranet’s community managers and developing an engagement plan to get them more involved. $72 (expensed).

6:30 p.m. — L. leaves and E., A. and I go to pick up our friend M. before we grab dinner. We bring it back to the house and eat outside under the covered porch. It starts thunderstorming and pouring rain and we watch it come down while we eat. I got a curry chicken and rice bowl with a side bun so that I could eat the rest of it tomorrow for lunch and we split tempura broccoli and tofu bites ($25). We watch the first episode of a show A. is obsessed with, The Boyfriend, on Netflix. It’s like Terrace House, if it were a dating show for gay men. As a huge Terrace House fan, I’m hooked immediately. $25

10:30 p.m. — M. leaves and once it’s just the three of us, the conversation gets deeper as it typically does with us. We share a lot of our feelings about our lives and relationships, we all cry, and we all end up laughing hysterically at one point. The emotional release is very much needed and A. and E. assure me that I am not responsible for things outside of my control and remind me that I’m just a human being with feelings, which is 100% normal. I tell them I feel like an alien on Earth and they affirm that this is part of the human experience. We also order two cookies each from Insomnia Cookies and split ice cream. I go to sleep feeling better than I have in days. $11

8:30 a.m. — I wake up a little later than I probably should have. Luckily, my 9 a.m. call to train a colleague on Canva has been postponed to 9:15 so I have a little extra time. I take K. out, feed her and make my bed.

10:08 a.m. — I remember today is payday! I transfer my rent money from my default checking account to the one designated for bill payments and make a credit card payment (mentioned in monthly expenses). I truly have no idea what I’m doing financially so please feel free to advise (aka roast) me in the comments. Though my title is in communications, I would say 80% of my job is graphic/visual design. I spend the morning going through comments that my manager left on some new design assets I shared with her yesterday. We have a call later today to go over her thoughts on them.

11 a.m. — I work a hybrid schedule but my work is flexible on when I go into the office, which is really nice. There’s a lot of trust and respect; they mostly just care that I get my work done and there’s less emphasis on where/how it gets done. I take K. out for a walk while I listen to my weekly horoscope from Chani Nicholas, get my lunch packed, and head into the office.

12:10 p.m. — My friend who is pregnant texts with an invite to her baby shower in August. I’m so excited for her! This is her first kid and she’s going to be the most amazing mom. She lives in West Virginia and I start making plans with my two friends in Brooklyn to have them drive down, stay with me, and then we’ll finish the last part of the drive together.

4:28 p.m. — Had a productive meeting with my manager going over her feedback on the design assets I shared her way. I spend the rest of the afternoon working on implementing the feedback and rethinking my approaches. I love working in the design field, even if I am in more of a communications role now, and I look forward to working in UX or UI design in the future. I just finished a visual design course that my job paid for and soon will start a foundational course in HTML, CSS and Javascript.

7:57 p.m. — After work, I go with E. to drop off all of our donations at Savers and head to Target. I spend $101.09 on dog food, protein bars, bathroom cleaner, paper towels, swiffer pads and hair products. Then we go to Trader Joe’s where I spend $80.26 on pasta, olives, capers, arugula, tomatoes, plumcots, pine nuts, frozen waffles, oatmeal, hummus and olive oil among other things. $181.35

9:35 p.m. — I do a 40-minute cardio workout on YouTube, take an everything shower, slather my face in serums and eat my leftovers for a late dinner. I talk to my mom on the phone for 30 minutes before I head to bed around 10:45 p.m. I fall asleep to the sound of the Real Housewives of New York screaming at each other (my favorite lullaby).

8:05 a.m. — I wake up after hitting snooze many times — I’m exhausted for some reason. I do yoga and meditate, then take K. out and give her breakfast. I then make myself a waffle with peanut butter and a coffee. I drive to the office and start my workday by continuing to make edits to the assets from yesterday.

3:15 p.m. — I’ve been diligently designing all day. I’m getting a bit of cabin fever from just sitting and staring at the screen so I go on a quick walk around the block (it’s 91 degrees out today, so I mean very quick). After finishing the updates I needed to make on the template assets, I start working on redesigning our benefits booklets in InDesign. I led us through a brand refresh a few months back where we introduced new colors, fonts and visual elements, so now I’m updating all of our outdated design materials. I email a potential venue for my 30th birthday party. I’m super excited but nervous to be throwing myself a party. I think the last time I had a birthday party for myself was years ago, maybe even when I was little. I challenged myself by inviting some more recent friends and I'm nervous! Why is it so hard to make new adult friends?

5:37 p.m. — I drive home from work, take K. out, feed her and make a lemony pasta salad with crispy capers while FaceTiming my dad. He’s having some health issues right now so we talk a little about that but then I can tell he’s getting stressed, so we talk about movies instead. After we hang up, E. and I paint an accent wall in the kitchen. We’re going with orange! We’re so excited about how it looks. We watch Love Island USA in between coats. I finish The Art of Gathering before bed and get a little further into The Guest before falling asleep around 11 p.m.

9:29 a.m. — I wake up, walk K. and have to jump right into therapy at 8 a.m. It’s a weird time to have therapy but it’s the only time that works for both of us right now. For once, I don’t cry and we work on internal family systems (IFS) for the anxieties I’m having. It’s helpful but not that helpful. I’ve been with this therapist four years now and I idly wonder if it’s time to switch therapists, just for some new perspective. I eat some oatmeal while messaging with some coworkers, walk K. again, and head into the office for the day.

3:03 p.m. — I’ve been working on data visualizations all day and I’m slowly growing frustrated and lacking inspiration to creatively interpret the data. I feel myself start to slip into a depressive thought cycle. I’ve noticed that as I start to feel one negative emotion, I often wrap up other negative emotions with it and they compound each other. I start questioning my career decisions and start to hear overtures of the siren call of grad school in my mind. Am I PMSing? I did have some breakouts the other night. I hope that’s all it is. I make sure to note all of this in my mood tracker. For some absurd reason, I decide now is a good time to try and set up the tripod and teleprompter I ordered for a video I need to shoot. For the next hour, the hunks of metal cause me great distress. I can’t get the teleprompter to connect with the tripod, even after scouring YouTube tutorials and Amazon reviews for clues. I go home very frustrated and a bit defeated.

7:57 p.m. — I get home, take K. out and feed her, change, and head back out to the gym. I do 30 minutes on the elliptical and do my upper body routine with a little lower body thrown in. After the gym, I shower, eat pasta and watch RPDR All Stars, and I feel a lot better. I read before bed and I’m out by 10:45 p.m.

7:45 a.m. — I wake up and do yoga and meditate. It’s a WFH day and with most of my team out today, it’ll be a super chill day. I take K. out, feed her, make a coffee and pick up where I left off yesterday with the data visualizations. It’s a little easier today and I feel a sense of relief. Maybe I just needed fresh perspective.

3:38 p.m. — This diary is making me realize how boring my job seems — but I swear it isn't like this all the time! It’s just a very slow time of year where everyone takes vacation. Rather than taking a big block of vacation, I’ve been doing smaller trips here and there. I continue working on redesigning the benefits materials and manage to complete my first drafts before the end of the day, which was my goal. I wish I could take K. to the dog park but it’s almost 95 degrees and we have an excessive heat warning. Since I’ve been so productive today, I take a break and practice my French. I’ve been trying to learn but it’s super hard when I learned Spanish first! The power goes out right as I’m getting the hang of asking “Qu’est-ce que tu fais dans la vie?” We’ve been having power issues on really hot days with everyone in the neighborhood running their A/C, so this has happened a few times already this summer.

5 p.m. — I chat with D. on the phone while I message with my roommate to try to figure out when the power is going to come back on. Apparently, the app is saying 8:30 p.m. Ominous storm clouds are gathering and my phone says it’s now 97 degrees. Jesus Christ. It starts POURING. After hanging up with D. I sit by the window and read The Guest while I eat some pasta salad. The book is getting good!

8:11 p.m. — By the time the power comes back at 8 p.m., I have finished the book. The ending is bizarre and I’m mad! I feel like the author built up all this tension just to have it all fizzle in the end. I call my sister to complain about it since she’s read this book before. I walk K. while we talk and then head out to see D.

10:30 p.m. — It’s pouring again. I meet D. at a spot near him for a margarita. We chat about our days and do some gossiping. We’re both Libras and we love to gossip. I eat chips and salsa while D. gets a shrimp quesadilla. D. pays. We head back to his place and I help him with getting prepared for an event he has tomorrow. He is going to be selling some vintage clothes and apparel from his brand that he created. He teaches me how to use the price tag gun and I help him price some of the vintage pieces for women. I’m exhausted by midnight so I go to sleep in D.’s bed while he keeps working in his studio. It’s always nice to go to sleep while someone works nearby — it makes the whole thing feel cozier.