Vi Hart Tau Chart: Budget Update (Patreon)

Hello good humans! Tomorrow is Pi Day and the video is scheduled to go live at midnight, west coast time. I'm very happy with how it came out, so thank you again for your feedback on the poll a couple weeks back!

I hope to be around tomorrow to comment and frolick and celebrate. Here's a secret link to where the video will be: https://youtu.be/6acbBrLoi14

As I had a little time left over this afternoon and the Patreon has seemed to be at a somewhat stable amount over the past four months, I went through my budget again. Google spreadsheets has this nifty automatic pie chart feature so I thought in honor of Pi Day I'd share what I'm working with, in Tau form!

Basically I'm pretty sure it's all going to work out but I wanted to see how you feel about things and talk it over because at some point I'll need to make another fundraising push and it's good to know what people find helpful to know when deciding whether and how much to pledge.

The above chart is for $8k pledges per month, which is close to where we're at. This sounds like a lot of money to people at first glance, which is totally reasonable as that's totally a lot of money! I've been advised to no longer make that number public, exactly because that at-first-glance impression is misleading to people who often assume internet creators are hobbyists, and that it might be why funding pretty much stagnated after the first couple months.

People want to give money to work that needs it, not to work that appears to be so successfully funded.

On second glance, one can see that 8k in promised funding is not a lot of money when you're a real adult producing videos full time as a real job, instead of living in your grandmother's attic using pirated software and borrowed equipment, with no insurance or responsibilities or paying of taxes, and also you can count on Grandma for a meal every night and you can even borrow her car. RIP Grandma. 

I can never be 10-years-ago-me ever again, and also I realllly don't want to be.

Some of these expenses are obvious once you think about it, like fees, taxes,  and studio space, which take up the bulk of my budget. 

Could I still produce pretty decent videos out of a studio where I use the same space for writing, production, filming, music, recording, eating, living, sleeping, etc like I used to when I first moved out of my Grandma's attic? Maybe, but I'd rather quit and do something else for a living. For one thing, a lot of time gets wasted setting things up and tearing them down. More importantly, working from home in that kind of cramped space is a recipe for mental horrors. I won't do it.

Luckily I have a very nice set of spaces now, even with room for the dogget to frolic. This costs $1800 a month which probably sounds like either a lot or very inexpensive, depending on where you live!

The next big chunk is debt, which isn't something I have control over. Even hypothetical omniscient past-me couldn't do much different besides buy a worse piano... not that I could ever regret adding Béla to my life. Self-employed artists generally don't get to have decent pianos, so I'm lucky to have someone providing dedicated funding for her! 

Also, a mathemusician has to have a piano. A piano has to have a nice room to be in. It's just the nature of things.

Next is a pile of utilities and expenses that aren't really optional for this career path... I need good reliable internet, phone service, electricity. I need to heat my living space and studios, which is expensive enough that I usually wear a coat indoors in the winter, but my work requires me to be able to use my hands without gloves on so that kind of cost-saving can only go so far. Insurance also isn't optional, including for equipment.

Also as a grown-up video professional I pay for software instead of pirating it, and I can't make videos without expensive software all of which is monthly these days. I don't know how the potential Vi Harts of the future would get started.

I also think its important to the mission that I make work available free to access and download, and I feel its important to sustainability to not be beholden to any one particular website and its ever changing interface and algorithms. So that means a couple hundred bucks a month goes to web hosting, and I also pay for the fancy expensive accounts on sites like Vimeo and Soundcloud. I suppose the first possibly-optional thing on the list is I could take down my vimeo, soundcloud, elevr.com, and vihart.com, but compared with the cost of making my work it seems wrong to cut corners on the little extra it takes to make it so people can actually access it and so that YouTube doesn't have a monopoly on my work.

Oh and of course professional internet video work means paying for online storage, backup services, dropbox, etc. We're not going back to 2010 when I lost an entire video because my computer crashed and a file got corrupted and I'd already deleted the raw footage because I was out of space.

Ok so then we get to the last 6% of the budget, things I could technically not pay for and still do my work well enough. The purple slice is too small for the label to show up but it is for piano tuning and other instrument upkeep. 

Then there's a little slice for books. Research requires reading actual books, sometimes expensive academic texts that are difficult to find in a library or just faster and cheaper to buy than to hunt down by other means, and I take copious notes in them to keep around for future reference so I gotta have a book budget. Do I really feel like I need to justify my book budget? I need a book budget!

I don't know why I included the dog in this chart because I didn't include any other non-work-related expenses but anyway after all that you'll notice a little white sliver at the top of the Tau chart remains. That's $89 a month for everything else in my life, things like food and clothing and toothpaste and medical bills.

You'll also notice there's $0 allocated for equipment, travel, or hiring production/editing help. Also $0 for savings, emergencies, retirement. $0 for any part of life that isn't work.

Obviously this budget does not balance, and wouldn't balance even if I ditched my dog, stopped buying books and vegetables, and took down all my websites and pages. I can handle having a $0 eating out budget and $0 scotch budget if the alternative is taking a "normal" job. I'm ok with leaving the days of fancy cocktails and sushi in my 20s. But I am simply not gonna do the starving artist thing.

Point is, I'm pretty sure when people look at the number $7,700 on the Patreon and think "that is a lot, this is successful!" it's because they aren't thinking about taxes and the costs of paying for your own workspace and utilities, not because they think I should be like 12-years-ago-me and rent a room in a house with a half dozen students in the suburbs with no responsibilities or life beyond working and eating ramen. 

I don't want to be 12-years-ago-me!

Anyway I don't mean to make the situation sound dire or anything. I'm pretty sure there's still a lot of folks out there who would make a pledge if they knew that this work still is not 100% funded. I could also take some time to do another round of merchandise, or take other supplemental work, or who knows what else. I still have enough savings to not panic yet. And of course, this isn't about me starving or not. I can always just stop this and go do something that actually makes money. I'm a little stressed about it but not TOO stressed.

Still, there's a little pit in my heart that says "You're un-fundable and despite what people say about valuing your work they don't value it enough to pay what it actually costs and no one thinks you deserve nice things like avocados. You've been through this many times before and no one ever follows through!" QUIET, HEART-PIT, WE'RE CROWDFUNDING NOW AND ITS DIFFERENT.

I probably just need to make another video for my main channel that gets more into how the crowdfunding's going and what it costs and etc, and that'll be enough. Or maybe it'll just take a little more time.

In a way, you're exactly the wrong people to talk to about this, as you're already here! I don't need to convince you that my work needs supporting!

But maintaining my own privacy is another of those things that are essential for sanely/safely doing this kind of work, so I think it would be helpful to hear from you what you think about it all before I decide what I do and don't share with the public internet. I'm much more comfortable talking about it here where I am surrounded by supportive people who have already shown they value my work!

Also I thought you might just be interested in some of the behind-the-scenes details. And it is a very round chart. I made it that way just for you. 

'Tis the season!

Thank you all for being here! You give me faith that we will get there and stay there :D

Vi

P.S. Here's the Pi playlist with previous years' videos and other pi/tau related work, if you want to get in the spirit of things: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5F03A9D6D278C5D9