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In this week’s Ten Money Questions, we speak with Liz Rizzo, one of BlogHer’s Contributing Editors for Sex & Relationships. She also blogs at Everyday Goddess. Liz lives in Los Angeles, dates a hunky actor, and aims to direct television. She also has a great money story and like most Hollywood aspirants she’s trying to get by on a budget and pave her way to success in LA. Enjoy!
1. You moved to Los Angeles to direct films. Has the money followed?
Actually, if I had one adage for aspiring directors, it would be that it takes money to make money. I have accepted that my life goal of becoming a working director is going to take a very long time because I don’t have the time or the money to shoot regularly and build my reel. I suspect I will direct my first feature in my 40s, and I’ve accepted that I’m probably going to have to write something fabulous and fight to finance it. I’m dedicating 2008 to the “write your way in” theory, so we’ll see where that leads.
2. What is your most significant memory about money?
My mother would take me shopping, charge things on her credit cards, and then try to hide the bills from my father. That was how we bought things. And then my parents would fight over credit card bills and spending. When I turned 18, I couldn’t wait to get my own credit cards, but of course, no one was going to be paying those off other than me.
3. What is your worst habit around finances?
Overspending. I struggle to add figures in my head; so often when I enter things into my checkbook, I find that I’ve spent more than I thought. I usually deal with this by simply avoiding going shopping. OMG - I just now realized that this is why I buy myself things in December -precisely because I am unavoidably out (or online) shopping.
4. What role does money played in your relationships, romantic or otherwise?
I landed in L.A. with a significant amount of debt at really high interest rates, so for a while I considered myself somewhat un-dateable – I didn’t want to date someone as buried as me, but I could hardly demand fiscal responsibility when I myself was a financial disaster. That has actually been one of my strongest financial motivations: to become someone I would want to be with.
Hunky Actor Boyfriend has a similar story – and, like me, is finally truly digging out, although he’s definitely ahead of me financially. We’ve not talked actual numbers, but I believe that we have faith in each other, that we are both working hard to turn our financial lives around.
It’s important to me to continue to take care of my own mess as well. It would make me uncomfortable to have someone else just sweep it all away, unless we were married and it was the best financial decision for us as a couple – and I’d already made *significant* progress on my own, so that it was just a question of timing more than anything else.
5. What are three ways you have learned to save money since living in Los Angeles?
Well, I’ve just started a new 401K, which is honestly the only way I’ve ever successfully saved money, besides locking it into a CD. I had a 401K in my twenties, and I used that money to go to graduate film school. The new one may be the only way I’ll ever have the money for a house, but I guess at 36, it’s actually for my (far-distant!) retirement.
Since I’ve moved to L.A., I’ve also gotten loans from Prosper.com and Zopa.com (my Zopa user name is lizriz), so I’ve saved money by getting lower interest rates through person to person lending and social financing. These are new opportunities that are greatly responsible for my financial progress. On Zopa, people actually help you with your payments by opening CD accounts and allocating some of their interest to your monthly loan payment, which is just amazing to me. My Zopa loan is so new I haven’t even blogged about it yet!
Third, I have a “Keep the Change” savings account from Bank of America. Whenever I use my debit card, they round up the charge to my checking, and put the “change” into my savings. So finally I have money in a traditional savings account, which is meant to hold my two months living expenses, but so far
