[upbeat music]
- Hi Glamour, welcome to my house!
I hope you're hungry.
My name is Courtnee Futch, I'm 25 years old,
and I live in Jersey City, New Jersey.
By day, I'm a marketing manager
at a food startup in New York City,
and in my spare time I run two food e-commerce businesses.
My businesses are called the.spred,
which is my private catering service
and dinner party service,
and thundercakes, which is my e-commerce bakery.
And here's how I spend my money.
I make $98,000 a year in my nine to five,
and anywhere between four to six thousand dollars a month
depending on what events I'm throwing that month.
I have around $12,000 in a traditional savings account.
I have no money in retirement, yet.
I have $60,000 in student loan debt,
all of that actually comes from my undergraduate degree.
I do have my master's, but that was paid for
in full by a fellowship.
I have one credit card, I typically
put most of my business expenses on it,
and for everything else I use my debit cards.
I'm pretty strict now about the way
that I use my credit cards because
coming straight out of college,
I was not the most fiscally responsible
and wracked up a good bit of change on a few retail cards.
I live in a lofted one bedroom in Jersey City
and it's 1100 square feet.
I spend $1750 a month in rent and about $190 in utilities
I spend a little over $300 a month in subscription services.
I travel into New York City Monday through Friday
for my nine to five, and I spend about $81 a month
for my unlimited commuter card.
My apartment is eclectic and cozy and warm and lived-in.
On the morning of an event, I typically wake up around 9 AM.
My bedroom is really cozy,
so because the space is pretty open,
it's kind of hard to close it off
and really have that sense of privacy,
so I like it to feel very airy, very light.
So my favorite piece in my bedroom
is actually my nightstand,
so I bought it for $5 at a yard sale on the side of the road
and took it home, sanded it down,
painted it like this really pretty midnight blue,
and gave it a lot of really funky, gold detailing,
changed out the knob for some crystal,
and I really love the complement of the orange.
I ended up getting into DIYs because both of my parents
are incredibly crafty.
Growing up with that influence
made it really easy for me to kind of
find pieces of my own that are really quirky
and colorful and remake them.
The piece that I get the most compliments on
is my periwinkle blue vanity.
Also a Craiglist find, I found it for $150.
At first I painted it black,
which ended up being a very terrible choice for the space,
and then later decided I wanted to paint it
a really festive, kind of dainty periwinkle blue.
Another way that I decorate the space
using my own resources is with painting.
I recently picked up portraiture,
so I'm attempting to teach myself how to paint faces.
On this particular day, I'm getting ready
to host a dinner party.
On the day of an event, the first thing
that I'm going to do to prep for it
is I'll usually get started working on the sides
and putting all of those in the oven.
The most used space in the apartment
is definitely the kitchen.
I wanted the kitchen to feel loved.
I wanted the kitchen to feel very colorful
I wanted it to not take itself too seriously,
so I think food has to come from a place
of a lot of love and lot of energy and a lot of character,
so I tried to incorporate as much of my personality
into it as I could.
The kitchen when I moved in was all white,
there was no back splash, I actually was able to put that up
myself, which is pretty exciting, peel and stick.
And also, in an attempt to cover up a fridge
that's pretty regular, I put temporary wallpaper on it.
Both projects in total cost about $50.
I've had my main company, thundercakes, for seven years.
On a busy month with thundercakes
I'm spending anywhere between four to $500
on ingredients, about $30 per month on my website,
$400 for my photographer, and about $100 for marketing.
Every so often, I'll have the need to hire a courier service
to handle deliveries that are too large for me
to deliver myself, and I typically end up paying
somewhere between $100 to $250
depending on the size of the order.
Each cake sells for about $40, and I typically
make $30 profit per cake.
In a busy month, I'm typically popping out
about 200 orders.
I started the sister company to thundercakes,
which is the.spred, about a year ago.
Per event, I'll spend about $550, maybe 600
to feed about 30 guests.
The smallest dinner party that I've had so far
was for six guests, and the largest was for 50,
so it really depends on the event and the occasion.
The liquor and wine costs associated with that
are typically like always $200 each.
I typically spend about $300 per event
for my tablescapes and decor.
There are no location fees because I host here.
I charge between 60 to $70 per ticket
and I usually come out of the event
with about $1200 in profit.
My other business expenses are about $300 a year
to maintain my food processing license
and $299 a year for my liability insurance.
In the future, I'll be spending about $250 a month
to rent freezer and refrigerator space
at a commercial kitchen nearby.
I love working out of my kitchen,
but I'm getting to the point where I really have to expand
and expand into a more professional space.
I really wanted an ode to spices in my apartment,
and I wanted to be able to display my love
for all the spices that I use,
and so I put them on a rack and purchased all of them
from one company, which sources a great deal
of their spices from Africa, which I think is pretty cool.
Spices can be moderately expensive,
especially if you want to invest in quality.
At some point in the very near future,
I plan on upgrading my current oven,
so I am hoping to get a really beautiful
stainless steel one that will allow me
to kind of optimize my baking.
One appliance I definitely wish that I had
was a dishwasher, but I also really enjoy
washing the dishes by hand after each of the parties,
it's pretty therapeutic for me, actually.
So truth be told, I really don't mind.
I spend a lot on flatware, I also spend a lot
on my cooking appliances,
so I feel like that's definitely,
if there's ever a place to invest,
invest in your pots and pans and definitely in your knives,
and of course in your flatware.
Now we've got about four to five hours
before the start of the event, and I've got
a little bit of downtime.
I'll typically spend that time sitting on the couch,
re-watching Scandal, scrolling through Twitter,
or maybe if I have a little bit of time,
I'll start on a DIY project.
So my living room is actually the opposite of my bedroom.
If my bedroom is warm and cozy, then the living room
is kind of cool and collected.
There's a lot of mixed metals and cool colors
and I really wanted it to feel kind of like, sexy.
My favorite piece in the living room
is absolutely my green velvet couch, and I also really
wanted to start investing in pieces
that I felt like I'd carry with me into my future homes,
and would also match with all of the other furniture
that I've either DIYed myself,
or have been collecting throughout the years.
A reoccurring theme in my apartment is definitely texture,
so the blue velvet wall kind of came to me
kind of in a dream, I just wanted something
that felt like very lush and kind of sophisticated
and just me and my staple gun.
Now I move on to prepping drinks.
And I like to do them about two, three hours in advance
so the flavors have an opportunity to meld with one another
so that they don't just taste like pure alcohol.
Fun fact, I actually have a French bartending license.
One of the first companies that I worked with
coming out of grad school sent me over to France
for like a month and a half, and during that time
I took an expedited crash course.
So the cocktail that I'm making today
is called the Miss Rodgers,
because it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood,
and it includes vodka, mint, elderflower,
sparkling rosè, and lemonade.
Final touches before guests arrive
are usually putting on my playlist for the dinner party
and then lighting the candles and just kind of
setting up the table that the food will be going on.
Aside from the chairs, which are the only product
that I rent for my dinner parties,
I buy all of the tablecloths, all of the plates,
all of the napkins so that I can start to build
an event inventory.
Once the table is ready and the food is holding
in the oven to stay warm is the time
for me to get myself ready.
So my closet's a little atypical.
It's kind of like, long and you can tell
it was a DIY from the previous tenant,
who put rods up at the top instead of
having more of the traditional shelf format.
One area that I might splurge on myself in
is definitely shoes.
Just recently, I bought a pair of gorgeous Louboutin
heeled sandals, which I'm very excited
to pull out this summer.
I like shoes because they help my posture,
I do a terrible job of slouching,
but I also really love how powerful they make me feel.
And if I particularly like a pair,
I'll send a picture to my mom and see how she feels
and if she likes them, I'll buy her a pair too.
I have to literally force myself
to participate in self-care.
It's very important for me now to find pockets
in my month for dedicated relaxation.
So I pretty recently got into skincare,
one of my best friends is an esthetician
and she makes a lot of recommendations for me.
The price of skincare products is pretty high
and I'd definitely rather spend that money
getting actual services for my face with an esthetician,
but I'm coming around to the idea of spending
quite a large chunk of change
to maintain my face on a daily basis.
The area that I splurge on the most in my life
is definitely in my apartment.
I really want to invest in feeling at home
when I come home, there's not the greatest separation
of work and play here in my space,
because I do use my kitchen for work purposes,
but I really think that it's very important
for the rest of the space to kind of reflect me
and be a place of comfort and solitude.