In my new show, I joke about how long women have to stay sexy, but it is no laughing matter.
In showbiz now, it seems like forever. I’m worried I’m going to still be on Instagram trying to thirst trap in my 70s because to be youthful and sexy is to be relevant and I need to stay relevant for my entire life because I have zero pension and therefore no retirement plans.
I’ve been renting the same property for 15 years. There was a beautiful little window before the pandemic, where we were looking at mortgages and had an in-principle offer. In fact, things were going well enough that I had an American visa and I was ambitiously set up to straddle working on two continents. Then boom, that best laid plan became isolating and wearing a mask.
As you can imagine, it was not the best time to be a stand-up comedian, and ever since, I have been financially catching up. Saving money has not been an option – ditto any thought of putting money away for a pension. So I’ll be utilising my free bus pass and hauling this act around the high-end care homes that I can’t afford to live in myself.
Maybe I could rely on my state pension? Although most octogenarians I know find it almost impossible to survive on that alone. I’m self-employed and maybe I should have been better prepared. My industry is very much feast or famine, though. Riding high in April, shot down in May. It makes it very hard to do forward planning. I’m in my 40s now, so it feels too late to even begin. I just have to hope to land the “big one” – that job that pays silly money, which I can use to rebuild that pre-pandemic nest egg.
Every now and then, I find myself overwhelmed with rage at my state school education because there were zero lessons about money. There was a weekly Home Economics class. Economics may have been in the title but mainly we learnt how to slap ingredients on top of a pre-made pizza base. One lesson focused on how to load a washing machine. We didn’t even cover a household budget. What about Higher Maths? Well, that taught me how to calculate the circumference of a circle, but not how to complete a tax return or how cash ISAs work.
It also makes it hard to recommend any kind of self-employed or freelance work to working-class kids, like I was. Anything in the creative fields or showbiz doubly so. The barriers to entry are way higher if you don’t have familial wealth to fall back on. I’ve gambled what could have been pension savings year upon year at the Edinburgh Fringe, where it costs a minimum of £10,000 to produce a show.
A few performers I know have got financial advisors to help them start ploughing their money into assets and become limited companies to lower their tax bills, all in a bid to save for later life. This kind of advice and implementation costs a fair bit, though – and it’s something I haven’t been able to justify.
So, unless something drastic changes, I’d better start looking forward to my care home tour. It’s that, or I move to a beach and catch my own dinner. I may take small comfort in the fact that by the time I reach that pensionable age, Artificial Intelligence (AI) will probably have taken over most of the jobs. At least everyone will be in the same boat as me, trying to catch those fish.
Tiff Stevenson is performing her new show Post-Coital at Soho Theatre on April 10 and 11 and is touring across the UK.
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