When I got laid off, I felt kind of numb and shocked at the same time.
I bought my house not even a year before being laid off.
I was like panicking.
I was very, very scared.
Now that I'm like 10 months into this journey, I feel like this year my brain has been like rewired around how I see money.
Every month I've still been able to pay all of my bills.
I've never had a late payment on anything.
I'm just like really surprised. by how I've been able to be resourceful this year.
My name is Symone Austin.
I'm 33 years old.
I live in North Carolina.
And even after being laid off in January, I've been able to cover my mortgage every month without a full time job.
Hey, everybody.
Welcome back.
It is the beginning of a new month, which means it is time to do my budget for the month.
I have been documenting my personal finance decisions online on my YouTube channel for several years.
At this point,
My YouTube channel is monetized in multiple ways.
The main one is ad revenue.
Another is sponsorships or brand deals.
Overall this year, I've been able to make around $21,000 through YouTube.
On average, I've been able to get like around $2,000 a month.
Before I was laid off, I was working as a UX content designer and my annual salary was 131000 a year.
I was working for a retail company.
It was primarily in the digital landscape, so apps and websites.
The day I got laid off started like a regular workday.
I got an email from someone like higher up in my team saying clear your calendar.
We need to meet in an hour.
It was super vague.
I knew that like I was gonna get laid off.
I just had a gut feeling.
I felt like a wave of emotions, scared, very nervous, very anxious.
I cried.
I recorded the layoff, so I was kind of talking through my feelings afterwards.
It's a difficult decision to restructure the XD org and unfortunately you're impacted by this change.
Okay, thank you.
See you on LinkedIn, I guess.
I don't know.
I don't know what's going to happen.
I don't, I don't know.
I don't.
I think like within a week it had like 500,000 views, which had never happened before on my channel.
After that video went viral, I realized the type of money that I could make with content creation.
It's definitely helped this whole year to be able to pay my bills.
When I was laid off, I received the last paycheck, which was two weeks pay, and it also included any of my unused PTO.
And then I received a small severance as well.
I also received my last year's bonus.
They paid that out in the spring.
I think I applied for unemployment benefits like the week after I got laid off.
I got unemployment for 12 weeks and it was $600 per week.
I just tried to identify the things that were like, really valuable to me and things that meant a lot to me, and anything that wasn't valuable I cut out.
By far, my biggest bill is my mortgage.
I think the exact number is $2,746.
Outside of that, I've had to pay for health insurance now and right now that's $350.
I also have student loans that I have to pay, so that's $223 a month.
Right now I'm paying $200 a month for my credit card debt.
I have about $33,000 in student loans.
And it's all from my master's degree.
Immediately I want to pay off the credit card debt, and then I would want to move into the student loans.
I have an emergency fund and it has around $40,000 in it.
And for the majority of this year, I actually haven't had to use it.
And it's just like 10 months into this journey that I finally had to pull money out of it.
The size of my house is somewhere between like 1,100 to 1,200 square feet.
I have two bedrooms and two full bathrooms and one half bathroom.
I bought it in the spring of 2024.
I bought my house for right under $340,000.
I put $10,000 as a down payment and then I had to do about another $4,000 in closing costs.
So in order to buy the house, I had about $14,000 that I had to bring to the table.
January, I'll have a roommate and that will significantly bring down my expenses every month.
How much I make on YouTube kind of changes every month, so it goes up and down.
The highest I've made on YouTube was around 5900, and then the lowest I've made on YouTube this year has been around 900.
Outside of content creation and the money that I make through YouTube, I've also been working as a virtual assistant.
I work for a Pilates studio and I'm their administrative assistant.
And so I make around $300 per month working for them.
And then I also sell digital and physical products through my YouTube channel.
The digital products that I sell are different templates.
So one is a budgeting template and then another is a job search tracker.
And then my physical products that I sell are t-shirts and sweatshirts, different like clothing items.
As far as my expenses go, I feel like I've cut out close to a thousand dollars in expenses.
I change the way that I shop.
I change where I shop.
I really just buy something like when I need it and I don't buy more than what I need.
I first started my YouTube channel in July of 2015.
It was right after I graduated college.
At first I did like a wide range of topics.
I did like beauty and hair type videos.
Then I did like TV reviews.
But in 2018, I was in a car accident and my car was totaled and I had to buy a new car.
That was my first time having to buy a car by myself and I felt like the whole process was very overwhelming.
I felt like I got taken advantage of and I just did not like having a car payment.
So I made a goal of paying off my car in one year and I completed that goal.
It taught me a lot about money.
It taught me a lot about budgeting and During that year I got very focused on personal finance, and that's when I switched my content on YouTube from kind of doing like whatever I wanted to like, mainly just focusing on personal finance and how money affects every area of your life.
Before going viral, I would say that I was kind of sporadic with my posting, but now I'm a lot more consistent, because I have to, because it's how I make money now.
I try to post three long form videos a week and then do short form videos like sprinkled in between the long form videos.
Typically, I kind of do different things for different days of the week.
Monday Wednesday, Friday I focus on content creation, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays I focus on getting a full-time job.
Again, I do like being able to decide what I do every day, but it also requires a lot of discipline and a lot of like planning things out.
I still go to the gym.
Moving my body like really helps with my mental health.
Making sure that I'm going for walks when I can all of those things help physically.
And then mentally just doing things that can kind of like I can turn off my brain for a second and just focus on something else.
I like reading, so I'll read on my Kindle through the Libby app.
Or I like drawing, so I'll do digital coloring on my iPad, things like that.
I would say the job market right now is very, very tough.
Now that I'm like 10 months into this journey, I would say that I'm open to a lot of different jobs.
I am still interested in UX design or content design.
I've also been interested or applying to like social media type jobs as well.
Long term, I want to pay off the credit card debt.
In an ideal world, I'd like to pay off the student loans.
I'm interested in one day being a part of the FIRE community.
I'm looking forward to when I'm financially stable again so that I can start kind of building the foundation to achieve that one day.
