What I Spend in A Week in LA as a Girl on FI/RE
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Today I am sharing my money diary—what I spent a week as a visual designer pursuing early retirement and living in Los Angeles, California!
As a reminder, I'm a 29 year old currently living at home with my parents. I chose to move home to save money to work my way towards financial independence even faster.
But this week I’m back in LA crashing at a friend’s house. Since I lived in Los Angeles for 10 years prior to moving home last year, I don’t really think of LA as a vacation. It’s my home away from home.
My spending is going to be pretty normal, since my friends here don’t play tourist or entertain me. That means buying my own groceries and doing my own thing. It's the perfect situation to share with you as a person striving for FI/RE (Financial Independence/Retire Early) how I think about spending money.
I am collaborating with a couple of my other Youtube personal finance and FIRE friends. Here’s the link to their money diaries so you can binge watch all of our money diaries and see what we spent in a week.
Day 1
To start off the week I'm meeting up with my sisters to go plant shopping. I don’t think I’m going to get anything, because I don’t live here and don’t need anything.
Okay who am I kidding, I love a good plant, so I end up getting one BUT it's not for me. This plant is called a ZZ plant and I got it as a gift for my friend for letting me stay at their place! I am not stingy when it comes to presents for others. Plus I just loved how it looks!
It kind of looks like The Sill but without The Sill prices. You pay so much for the brand markup!
It is kind of annoying because each part was separate—the coaster ($2), the pot ($8), and the plant ($12). Of course I'm gonna get the coaster because I don't want the water to come out of the drainage hole and go everywhere.
The total should’ve been about $24.70, but when the Venmo settled, I somehow ended up paying for a portion of my sister’s plants too. No, I’m not so stingy as to charge my littlest sister a few bucks! However this is a spending diary so I feel like I need to clarify the prices for each thing I bought.
Plant: $27
I go to Trader Joe's and try to be not too awkward about vlogging. I’m getting groceries for the week and trying to stick to Mexican style dishes. But I spot a few new things I want to try like the Everything But the Bagel chips and toss those into the cart too. It’s been so long since I’ve been grocery shopping on my own!
Even when I lived on my own I really was terrible at guessing how much food I needed for a week and never planned my grocery list. I usually stick with a theme. This week's theme was Mexican-inspired food—taco bowls, taco salad, salmon tacos, etc. All of the ingredients can work in any of the dishes, so I minimize food waste.
I don't really budget either. (I have a whole video on that.) But if I look at my previous grocery spending from years past, I only usually spend like $60/month on groceries. It's been a while since I've grocery shopped on my own and my bill shows it.
Trader Joe’s: $106. 39
Day 2
I realized I forgot some of my makeup at home. Since I’m filming my Youtube videos down here, I ordered a few things on Amazon. I got a contour palette and two little eyeshadow palettes ($3 each). I wanted something cheap that does the job because I have stuff at home.
I also forgot a notebook so I got a two pack of dotted, leather-bound notebooks for $15. I got all this stuff on Amazon and spent a little money on that!
Notebooks & makeup: $34.04
I’m making a salad for lunch because I have dinner plans, plus I bought all those groceries. I made a salmon taco salad with Green Goddess dressing—nice and refreshing!
My friend, Rae, suggested Roberta’s in Culver City for dinner. She’s been raving about the bread and I really wanted to try it. The meal was literally SO good! We got a pizza, a salad, and the most scrumptious fresh bread with cheese. I also got a refreshing hibiscus cocktail.
Dinner: $59.65
Afterwards, we walked over to Van Leeuwen’s ice cream. I got the brown sugar ice cream with cookie dough and brownie bits. DECADENT!
Ice cream: $6.75
I love spending time with my friends. These are the experiences that I really find value in spending on, even if it means paying for parking in LA.
Parking: $3.00
Day 3
I thought I wasn't going to spend any money today, but I did. I bought TubeBuddy.
I've watched so many YouTube videos on the importance of improving your SEO. It helps you figure out what is popularly searched and how to grow your YouTube channel. All these major YouTubers use it!
Since I’m at 700 subscribers (at time of filming) and am growing pretty quickly, I wanted to take advantage of it being 50% off before you hit 1,000 subscribers, otherwise you have to pay the full price. This is how they get you!
I know this business in and of itself will pay for that. I already have $70 dollars in Google Adsense revenue from my blog. Although you don't get paid out until you accrue $100, I know I’ll make the money I spend on TubeBuddy back and then some.
Plus by increasing my YouTube SEO, hopefully it improves my blog SEO too. I can write better titles and use them across all my content platforms. I have a whole article on how I’m making money from my YouTube videos, which if you’re a small Youtuber you should definitely check that out. But that's how I validated that purchase.
TubeBuddy annual subscription: $43.20
For dinner I made a poor man's pizza. I used leftover flour tortillas and Trader Joe's marinara sauce, which is basically the same as pizza sauce (right?). My friend let me take all the cheese leftovers, so I made a pizza out of it! Can’t let leftovers go to waste!
Day 4
I just finished work and was so busy I didn't have time to spend any money even if I wanted to. The sheer amount of hours I spent in meetings today made me realize (just kidding, didn’t make me realize) reminded me why I want to achieve financial independence ASAP. So yeah, I didn't spend any money today, good and bad, for better or worse, richer or poorer, yadda yadda.
Now, I'm gonna go eat a snack from my Trader Joe's haul. I definitely bought too much stuff for one week. I think it’s enough food to last closer to 2 weeks. I've eaten less than half and it's been half a week. I guess I gotta stay another week in LA to eat all my food! After that I’m going to meditate and do yoga. My first no spend day!
It's my quarterly goal to do yoga every single day even if it's only for 10 minutes. Being consistent with these daily micro habits is better than not moving my body at all, which is what I normally would do. I use the Down Dog Yoga app, which is free, changes the routine up every time, and has some good yoga jams.
Yoga: $0
Day 5
I’m about to head out to go to Starbucks since I have a gift card. Since it’s a gift card, I'm not gonna count that towards my spending. There's a nearby park and I'm going to meditate, enjoy my coffee, and journal there. I've always wanted to do this because I'm not a very introspective person...probably because I'm always connected to technology and don't really have time to think. I thought today's a good day for that!
WARNING: Sexual harassment incident described below. I documented my thoughts immediately after attempting to process what happened.
Oh my god. I was walking to get my coffee and a guy rode by on his electric scooter on the sidewalk and literally slapped my ass. I've never been sexually harassed but I'm really scared now. I wish I'd gotten a video, but I was so shocked.
I was like, what the F!$k, dude?!? You can’t just do that! And he was like, oh, I'm sorry.
NO, YOU’RE NOT!
That guy sucks. I don't know if I should go home or keep trying to walk. I'm feeling very confused and angry and upset...
I decided to continue to get Starbucks because I'm not gonna let this dude ruin my day.
Starbucks: $0 (gift card)
After that I headed to the park to journal and meditate. I was literally about to do a dissipate anger meditation and then *BOOM* a baseball hits me square in the chest.
Have you ever been hit with a baseball before? Well let me tell you, it hurts 🤬!
At that point I lost it. I started sobbing uncontrollably.
I look up and see a little boy staring at me. The dad, who was playing catch and had missed his son and hit me, runs up to grab the ball apologizing profusely.
Through my tears, I was like, no it's not you, I'm having a really rough day.
I posted about the incident on my IG story and everybody was so nice. Many told me it’s okay to cry and heartbreakingly shared similar experiences.
I didn't want to cry, but after the ball hit me I was SO overwhelmed with feelings. Hitting random women is never okay!
Clearly the universe is conspiring against me, so I packed up and called my sisters crying. One of them works really close by so she's like oh, I'm coming. I'm six minutes away, we're gonna get you Mcdonald's. I love my family.
Day 6
It’s going to be a good day. That is my mantra today. I'm meeting my friend for coffee. I needed a little pick-me-up to get the day going before work after yesterday.
I honestly forgot how bad LA parking is. The worst!
Parking: $2
I meet Laura at Good People coffee and order an an ube latte. Whenever I buy coffee I try to get things I can't make at home. I also only really get nice coffee if I’m meeting up with a friend or as an experience like I tried to have yesterday.
Coffee: $8.51
Day 7
I'm actually half Chinese and half Japanese American. My friend from Shanghai hosted a Chinese New Year meal of dim sum in the backyard of my old spot in LA. Everything was so delicious.
I wanted some coffee so I could go home and edit YouTube afterwards, so we walked to go get some. To be honest, the Horchata latte I got from Mañana Coffee was way too sweet, but the journey was still worth it.
Total & reflections
Thanks for spending a week with me in Los Angeles. I hope you enjoyed all the highs and lows, certainly some lows, but lots of highs. I loved documenting this process, it was so fun! For my grand total I spent...
TOTAL: $296.39
That isn't too bad and if I multiply that by four, it's about $1185, which isn't horrible for a month.
For context, I’m living at home I'm not paying any rent or utilities, so no expenses like that. I get a paycheck weekly and after taxes it’s usually around $1,200. But at the moment I am front loading my 401k, so my paycheck is $0. I prefer to front load instead of dollar cost averaging because I like to spend more time in the market.
Between taxes and putting 75% of my paycheck into my 401k, I basically get nothing. I’m doing that this year since I’m taking advantage of living at home.
Right now I am living off of $3,000 checking account and then I have my emergency fund with 6 months expenses that should cover anything, since I'm not getting paid for the next several weeks. That is my current paycheck situation, it should return to normal at the end of March.
Again, I'm a visual designer working in tech. I make six figures a year and you can check out my wealth journey to get a full picture of my salary timeline. I used to make $22,000 starting out and have slowly over the course of eight years worked my way up to my current salary.
This was so much fun to take you behind the scenes and show you how I spend my money as a girl on FI/RE. I hope you found it insightful and if you did be sure to subscribe to my channel below so we can spread the FI/RE.
I want us all to get rich and retire early together! xo
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