Some Excellent Financial Advice For Performers

Do you have ten pairs of sunglasses and did they each cost more than $500? Did you spend $2,000 on a tiny dog that doesn’t have the skull space for the necessary brain functions that might prevent it from peeing on everything? Are you the single occupant of a residence that has more than 3 bedrooms or are you the proud owner of the most expensive car you could get financed for or have you ever worked regularly and still found yourself unable to make the payments on any of these things come the first of the month? Is your boyfriend’s job somehow a derivative of your job? All porn girls can identify themselves in at least one of these descriptions. It’s understandable. We mostly come from lower socio-economic backgrounds and then suddenly there is more cash pouring in then we’ve ever seen in one place. Everything seems accessible and we want to prove that we have it. Well everything is not accessible, unless your life expectancy is 30.

Mine is 94 years old according to a shitty little test I just took. Those younger than me are looking at 100. Do not delude yourself into thinking that you will ever make the kind of cash again that you will make in porn. Do not delude yourself into thinking that porn will last more than seven years for you if you’re especially tenacious. Sure, a few girls have carried strong names and actively performed for well over a decade, and a few have moved on from porn to make even more money somewhere else. But “a few” typically means somewhere in the ballpark of the number three. You are likely not one of these three, and neither am I. Plan accordingly.

Ways to plan:
A) open a Scottrade account. Buy some stocks. Not sure where to start? Research the top picks at the time for the sectors you feel like you can believe in. I’m 27. I have a lot of stock in media and casino companies. That’s worked out well, as any other 27-year-old might assume by simply hearing the words “media” and “casino”. Buy the stock and sit on it. You are not, nor will you ever be, a day trader. But long-term and short of an apocalyptic event, if you’ve picked stocks rated “buy” in sectors that make sense to people with common sense, you will end up ahead. Long-term does not mean six months. It means years and years and years. Never buy a stock that your buddy recommends on account of it’s “going to blow up”. Never buy penny stocks.
B) Open an IRA. You can put $5500/year into this account and not pay taxes on it now. And trust me, taxes in porn are a beast. We are typically paid our full rate in one check and then at the end of the year are upset to find that all of our taxes are due at once. Open an IRA. That’s money you don’t have to pay on now that you can invest in a second Scottrade account. Then, don’t touch that fucking IRA until every hair on your head is grey or gone.
C) Buy your own place. Buy only what you can afford easily. By the time you retire you should be able to rent it out for more than you owe on it (not much more, but that number will keep going up as your mortgage stays the same).
D) Save everything else. Put it in CDs or let it fester in a bank account or throw more of it into stocks as you become more knowledgeable about the market. You do not need 75 pairs of shoes, or Fendi anything, or an $80,000 car. You do not need to upgrade your seats to first class when you fly and you don’t need to prove to anyone, anywhere, that what you’re doing is right based on your ability to buy things that they cannot. Save what you make. You can pursue almost any other field after porn if you’re sitting on six figures in the bank, a retirement account, some stock investments, and your own home. On top of it you’ll be coming out thirty years ahead of most of the rest of the population that applied the same diligence.

Pay your fucking taxes. Seriously. They will not be ignored. But also write off everything. Your make-up, your gym dues, your bathing suits and the shoes you need for signings and the dangly little earrings that go just right with the award-night dress and the fake eyelashes and the lube and the testing and the gas you used to drive yourself to set and the miles you racked up on your car doing it. Save the receipts. Even easier, get an American Express card and use it for all porn-related expenses and at the end of the year they’ll sort the expenses and send you the report that you can just forward to your CPA. And for fuck’s sake, use a CPA.

You have no excuse not to have health insurance in porn. There is also not much of an excuse not to get the vaccines that protect against certain strains of HPV and Hepatitis. This is a job that uses your body, not your big beautiful brain. If something like a car accident takes you out and you didn’t have health insurance and now have no way of working, where does that leave you? An easy cost-competitive individual health plan can always be found at Anthem. I used to pay $116/month for it before I went to Digital Playground. That’s less than what one agent will take in commission off of one booking. No excuses.