Why "Reverse Budgeting" is essential for creatives.

This might sound like a "woo-woo" manifesting exercise, but it is an essential step in determining your professional goals and boundaries. If you skip it, you will build a prison for yourself.

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As a literary manager, when I talk to potential clients, one of the first questions I ask is, “What are your long term goals? Where do you ideally see yourself in 10-20 years?”

This stumps many writers.

At the beginning of your journey, becoming a professional screenwriter can feel like such a pie-in-the-sky dream that many writers say, “I just want to be paid to write. I just want to make a living writing movies and TV shows.”

This is a red flag for me.

If you want to set yourself apart from the hundreds of thousands of people (maybe more!) who share your exact same dream, you need to find specificity of vision. If you don’t know exactly what it is that you want to build your career making, then how will someone know that you are the person they want to hire or champion?

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash

But there is another reason your vision for the future should be specific.

A more personal one.

If you aren’t specific about the creative career you want to build, you’re going to find yourself in the wrong one. I know this sounds like champagne problems. But as a rep, I have watched so many writers go from aspiring to professional.

Here’s a little secret that you are not going to like:

They hate it.

TV Writers’ rooms are full of petty, insecure bullies. Studio executives give you notes that make no sense. The jobs that pay the best are the least creatively fulfilling. Your dream of having your words read by actors on screen, but in reality, the movie turns out way worse than you had hoped.

When you’re a dreamer, working away at home on your script, anything is possible.

You’re full of passion, creativity, and vision. Most importantly, when you’re not being paid to write, your writing is your creative outlet. Without a creative outlet, many of us feel like there’s no joy in life at all.

But when your hobby becomes your livelihood, that joy goes away.

The more success you achieve as a professional writer, the more paid opportunities will be available to you.

But these opportunities will not all be joyful. They won’t be inspiring, and they won’t be aligned with the message you originally intended to bring to the world. On a practical level, as you start getting paid more and more money, you will start building a more and more expensive lifestyle. Just look at the interviews The Ankler has been doing with “struggling” professionals who make 6-7 figures a year.

They have kids in private school, they have multiple houses, they have expensive hobbies and staff.

So they have to keep taking jobs that keep them on this treadmill.

I’m not saying that you should feel sorry for the rich people. I am telling you this so you can avoid this fate yourself. If you want a long-lasting, sustainable, fulfilling career as a writer, you need to have a specific plan for the kind of writer you want to be. And you need to have the courage to know what to turn down to stick to that plan.

Enter “Reverse Budgeting.”

Instead of doing whatever you can to make as much money as possible in order to Win Capitalism or whatever, Reverse Budgeting is the idea that the amount of money you make should be determined by the vision that you have for your life.

Not the other way around.

If you are a practical, grounded person who doesn’t believe in magic or manifestation, this exercise is still helpful for you, so please stay with me here on this.

First, watch this video. It’s what inspired me to do this exercise for myself:

@lexaltReplying to @Melanin Majik one of my favorite exercises for shifting from scarcity to abundance was creating a million dollar budget. I made a free template anyone can use or you can book a 1:1 session with me if you want to dive deeper, faster 🧠💰#mindsetcoach #mindsetshift #moneymindset #milliondollarbudget #subconsciousreprogramming #scarcitymindset #lackmindset #abundancemindset #VozDosCriadores #screammovie

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If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, here’s the TL;DR summary:

• Think about your ideal income for a year.

• If it’s a million dollars, what would you do with all that money?

• If you want to travel, how much is the trip? How much is it to fly first class?

• What would you buy for your parents to support them?

• Where would you live? Literally, in what apartment or house? How much is the monthly rent/mortgage?

• Once you sit down to write this whole budget, it becomes a visualization practice.

• You are forced to think about, specifically, what you want your life to look like.

• Right down to the amount of taxes you’re going to pay and how much to invest.

If you want to use this as a magical manifesting exercise, I highly recommend doing so, and I support that.

But if that’s not your jam, this exercise is still important. Here’s why:

When the woman in the TikTok video started budgeting out her dream life, she realized that she needed to make more than $1 million a year to achieve it. I, on the other hand, had the opposite realization. I learned that the best life I could possibly imagine for myself—one that was beautiful, spacious, fulfilling, and full of pleasure—actually requires much less.

Now I know the exact number I need to hit every year to get there (or the number I need to hit to make that much in dividends each year).

Photo by Christine Roy on Unsplash

As a creative, having this clarity is essential because now you know whether you should do something for the money.

You will know exactly what you’re working toward when you need to sacrifice. And once you get there, you will know what you can afford to say no to. Just because you have the opportunity to make more money doesn’t mean you need to. If the job is writing a movie that goes against your principles, puts you in an unpleasant professional partnership, or just doesn’t excite you creatively, you now have the power to say “no.”

Your agent might not be happy, but they work for you, not the other way around.

When you build a career to support your lifestyle, you dictate the choices that you make.

You excuse yourself from the rat race and stay focused on your writing instead of on amassing as much wealth as possible. And what would you do with all that money anyway? Those billionaires aren’t happy. They are literally killing themselves just to feel alive.

As a writer, you have achieved a meaning in your life that others can’t even imagine. Don’t give it away by playing the rules of someone else’s corrupt game.

Carve out a few hours this week to do some reverse budgeting. What realizations did it bring you about your vision for your life and what you need to do to get there?

Let me know in the comments!

I’d love to hear about what you learned and how the exercise made you feel.