Don't Spend it All in One Place

In fact, don’t spend it at all until you’ve got that money in your hand or you’ve at least physically modeled for your session.

When you get multiple bookings over the course of a few weeks or a few months, you’ll find yourself tempted, to (ahem) bank on that money to the point where you begin to consider it as good as yours. And proceed to start spending it in advance. This probably won’t happen to you after your first gig or two. It’ll most likely happen when your modeling career starts to take off and you find yourself working multiple times a month as opposed to once or twice every few months. Your popularity and demand will increase, and with all these bookings coming in, you may find yourself tempted to treat these upcoming sessions like the money’s already in your pocket.

I’m here to tell you this is generally a bad idea. Gigs can and do get canceled. In the past week, I’ve had one gig canceled due to low class enrollment (luckily, I was only on deck to model once for that class. I think there were one or two models who got screwed out of multiple sessions), and today, a drawing group canceled an upcoming session later this week (though I did get rebooked for later in the year).

And naturally, since one of these sessions was on the tail end of a long weekend, I figured I’d use that money in advance to splurge on some food and wine for the long holiday. After all, I reckoned, I’d be getting that money in cash in just a few days’ time.

It’s honestly no big deal, because these things happen, and you have to roll with the punches. No one owes you a living, and you’d be wrong to treat artists as such. But I realized that it’s a really good teaching moment: Don’t spend that money until it’s either in your hands, or until you’ve actually modeled for that class and know a check’s in the mail (and even then, you may want to wait until you have a check in hand).

It’s really, really tempting to start adding up that upcoming windfall of cash over the coming months and automatically make plans for it. Ever find a spare $20 in a pair of pants you haven’t worn for a while? Well, pretend that $20 is now several hundred dollars and instead of a pair of pants, it’s in the form of an email that says someone wants you to work for them three times in the next month. And now you’ll hopefully begin see where you find yourself thinking that money’s as good as yours. So why not spend some of it? After all, the email just said you were going to get three bookings.

Well, even if that gig doesn’t cancel, you could get sick. You could get stuck having to work late. There’s a whole host of reasons that you'd have to cancel, and you just can’t predict these things.

As I said in my last blog entry, you should view your modeling income as easy come, easy go. It’s just not a reliable enough source of income (for most people) to treat as steady money. I’ve been very lucky in the sense that I’ve only had a handful of gigs cancel since I’ve been doing this, and in most cases, I just got rescheduled later in the term.

But then, I’ve also had people promise to book me for sessions and they never followed through. You don’t want to treat vagaries as promises and just assume that someone who said they’d “definitely” book you in the future is going to come through. There’s a gambling term called “betting on the come,” which means that you may have a bad hand now, but you hope that things pick up and you’ll have the cards you need when the time comes. It’s basically whistling past the graveyard and hoping your luck will change when you need it most.

Bad idea. Do not, do not, DO NOT do this. It’s one thing to mentally determine how you’d spend this (X amount for a credit card bill, Y amount for a new pair of jeans, Z amount for dining out next month), you really don’t want to start solidly earmarking money that’s not even yours yet. Once you’ve been modeling for a while, you’ll generally get a good feel for which schools and groups are reliable, how much work you’ll average in a semester, etc. But you really, really need to resist the urge to think “okay, September’s usually busy, so I can assume I’ll pull in at least $300.”

Like I said: easy come, easy go :) Keep this in mind, and you’ll do all right!