I'm not ready to set my sights on a capital C career.
I look around and I see so many people who have a big career and they're so unhappy.
I feel like with my little C career and my little life that I have, I feel like I get so much more meaning and fulfillment on a day to day basis.
My name is Eileen Tyrrell.
I'm 26 years old and I live in New York City on 53K a year.
New York just has an energy to it that I don't know if I've experienced anywhere else.
It just feels electric when you're walking around.
I commute into Brooklyn every day.
I am the store manager at the bookstore, and from that I make $45,000 a year.
The remaining $8,000 comes from side jobs, primarily freelance writing.
I also do pet sitting, and now I'm making money from TikTok.
Spend the day with me as a normal person living in New York on about 50k a year.
I want to show people that you don't need to be making six figures to have a good life in New York.
It does feel very romantic and just getting to be around books all day long and getting to talk to customers about books and shelve books and see what new books are coming out is a very special job.
It's the kind of job that maybe you wanted when you were a little kid and then you grew up and you had to be funneled into the corporate pipeline or whatever.
Budgeting in New York can be hard.
I make $53,000 a year and people ask me all the time how it's possible to live here on that income.
I'm not going to lie.
I'm not going to sugarcoat it.
It's hard, but it's so worth it.
Once or twice a week, I'll meal prep multiple meals and that will be my lunch for work.
It's okay that I'm living on this tight budget.
For me, it comes down to three things.
I don't have a lot of debt, I have very reasonable rent, and I don't spend a lot of money.
This is one of my staple meals.
Ate so many of these that the dentist told me I had five cavities.
My parents pay for my phone bill.
Thank you, mom and dad.
Other than that, I pay for everything myself.
However, I do have the safety net of knowing that they would be able to help me if something were to go wrong.
This is my go-to meal honestly when I don't want to spend a lot of money.
I have about $3,000 in student loans, so my monthly payment is very manageable.
I pay off my credit cards every month.
I have two of them and I will not let them roll over.
I think my parents, and specifically my dad, instilled such a fear in me of credit card debt that it feels sacrilegious to ever let payments accumulate.
I pay $15.66 a month in rent.
That does not include utilities.
I live with two roommates, so that is a lot to pay to have two roommates.
But for Manhattan, that is a good deal.
I just don't really spend a lot of money.
I don't buy a lot of things.
All of my furniture and most of my possessions are things that I either brought with me from college or are hand-me-downs that friends gave me.
This puffer, someone left it at a party at my friend's house, so this jacket was free.
I kind of had to train myself to find hobbies and interests that weren't related to spending money.
That really helps when you're living on this type of budget.
I try to keep my dining out expenses low because that adds up very quickly.
However, I get a bacon, egg, and cheese from my local deli probably once or twice a week.
Can I do a bacon, egg, and cheese on your toasted everything bagels please?
There are a couple expenses that I don't really stress about.
The first one is buying coffee every day.
Going to a coffee shop and having a face-to-face interaction is so underrated.
Just a drip coffee with half and half.
It's honestly a highlight of my day.
It's absolutely worth the $4.50 that I pay for my coffee every day.
I think the idea that we should be sacrificing these little expenses for the sake of an extra 20, 30 a week, that's an idea that I struggle with because I think sometimes those little expenses are tied to a sense of community and a sense of greater purpose.
I donate about $100 of my monthly budget to various organizations.
I want to give back to a city that gives me so much.
I try to focus on local organizations, food banks and mutual aid, stuff like that.
I have thought about the risks of living with this little in savings and to me at this moment in time, it's worth it.
I'm comfortable taking that risk and hoping that things are gonna work out further down the line.
A lot of people might view that as naive or financially irresponsible, and that's okay.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and I studied civil engineering at Iowa State University.
But about two years into my degree, I remembered that I'm not really a math and science person.
I'm more of a language person.
I love books.
I love reading and writing.
At that point I was already halfway through the program, and so I figured I would just stick it out, because I had taken way too many math classes at that point to give up.
I started to develop a backup plan because I knew that once I graduated, I was probably not going to be pursuing a full-time career in engineering.
Once I graduated, I was ready for something else.
I was ready to try living somewhere that I had never lived before.
When I moved to New York, I had about $3,000 in savings.
That was after I had paid for the moving truck and for my first month of rent and the security deposit.
These are gonna be so good.
I knew I obviously needed a job.
Hi.
I did apply to a couple of engineering jobs and I actually got an offer.
It was $67,000 a year.
Thank you.
I thought about it and I ultimately turned it down.
I had just made a promise to myself that I wasn't going to take a job just because it felt like the natural step or the expected thing for me.
I wanted a job that filled my cup every day.
I didn't want a job that was going to require me to sit at a desk and do work that ultimately wasn't meaningful to me.
It was from that decision that I ended up first working in a bookstore.
I always kind of pictured it as more of a stopgap job, but just fell in love with it.
I didn't expect it to expand into what is now my full-time job, but that's how things go, I guess.
You never know what's right around the corner.
I'm pretty content with my life.
At the moment, I'm not yearning for anything else.
I have a job that I love.
I have a life that I love.
And the financial stability is not quite there.
But for now it's a trade-off that I'm comfortable with and I'm willing to make because I love my life so much.
There's this Oscar Wilde quote that goes something like with freedom flowers, books and the moon, how could one not be perfectly happy?
I have freedom.
I can go buy flowers.
Okay, sometimes I can't afford flowers, but I have freedom and I have books and I have the moon.
And that is enough for me a lot of the times.
