Sujata Day, Actor, Writer/Director: If you're a guest star, you should be living like a co-star.
If you're recurring, you should be living like a guest star. If you're a series regular,
you should be living like a recurring.
Film Courage: Can you talk about living below your means and how you've adopted that
early in your career so you don't want to maybe spend too much here or there
get too confident like this amount's always going to be coming in.
Sujata: I have never really in my life needed like expensive stuff and I've always been
able to live below my means and really good at balancing my budget in my checkbook and even when
I mean when I was working at Accenture I was making a ton of money and so I did not spend that
money so I did not live how my coworkers lived and my co-workers were buying BMWs and living in
these like really fancy apartments in Manhattan Beach and I but I was always aware of my plan
and I was like oh I got to save this money because who knows like when I do get laid off or when I do
when Accenture finds me out and realizes that I'm a terrible employee then I'm gonna need this money
to live on so just from there starting there I knew that I needed to save and I knew that I
needed to live below my means because after that I was you know doing short films for uh USC and
UCLA that you don't get paid for and I was doing a lot of free acting work just to get the tape
and and I was I was living off you know my center money for a while and then and then I would do the
waitressing jobs and the restaurant jobs and and that would pay the bills and like I said I would
book a co-star here and there or a commercial and and that would be a nice chunk of money which I
knew again that I couldn't spend right away and so I I've always been pretty good about living
below my means something that one of my friends Yvette Nicole Brown told me that I always have in
the back of my head is if you're a guest star, you should be living like a co-star. If you're
recurring, you should be living like a guest star. If you're a series regular, you should be living
like a recurring and so I keep that in the back of my mind and I think about that a lot and I tell
her all the time I'm like I'm always thinking about that and she she's she gives good advice
so when you got let's say the first big acting related check did you have a temptation to I
want to splurge this on a b and c and and did you reward yourself or did you say no
this is my this is my winter money I need this I said this is my winter money I need this I don't
think I've i've never splurged on anything unless I needed it so my splurges have always been
if I have a 10 year old laptop then I need to get a laptop because it keeps shutting down
or if I have a six-year-old phone then I'm gonna get the new iPhone but I'm not someone who you
know the iPhone 13 just came out I don't need to go rush out and get that I think I'm very happy
with small rewards when I when I book let's say you know like booking a commercial I'm like
okay I'm gonna go get pizza for my favorite place or I'm gonna go get ice cream like like food is
something that I care about a lot and the foods that I like aren't very expensive so so that's a
splurge for me I I'm not someone I will only go out and buy a car if my car is on its last legs
and un-drivable so I guess I'm like really good with money in that sense and I had there's I love
to travel but I have traveled a lot throughout my childhood and even up through college so even
when I moved to la I was like oh I don't need to go to Europe because I've already been to Europe
or I don't need to go spend my money in Asia because I've been to Asia so so I would
always keep that in mind and i'd be like well I actually need to get new headshots as opposed to
do something splurgy and crazy so so that something that you can reinvest back into
whether it's your acting career or a film is something you'll put money into but it sounds
always will be I’ll be putting money back into my career right but not you don't need a new
model of whatever car no no and I love Groupon I love living social I'm always looking for a deal
where are some of the best places that an actor or creative can invest in themselves what can they do
I believe the best thing that you can invest in is your work so for example I did a short film
in 2016 called cowboy and Indian and this is how it came about basically I was doing my taxes and
I noticed that there were these stocks that I had never noticed before and I called the number
that was that was on the tax information sheet and I asked oh what are these stocks and they said oh
these were gifted to you when you left Accenture and I said excuse me okay how much are they worth
and they said fifty five hundred dollars and I said send me the check and they say well we
don't recommend you cashing out and I was like send me the check and I got a check for fifty
five hundred dollars that I put directly into funding my short film cowboy and Indian which I
wrote produced directed and starring and it was a really freeing experience because I gave myself
the permission to fail on making that short because I knew it was my first short film it
would probably turn out to be a piece of no-good but guess what nobody was going to be
blamed except for me because I was putting my own money into it that I didn't even know I had so it
wasn't money that I needed to make back I was just like this was free money out there that was mine
and I had just discovered it so I had already written the short film and it was a five page
script and I put my crew together put my cast together and we went out to the desert to Joshua
Tree to shoot it was a one day one night shoot and came back went into post-production and
when I when it was finished I said oh this isn't bad I was like this is not a bad first short film
and I started submitting it to film festivals and got didn't get into any of the biggies you
know didn't get into Sundance, TIFF, Tribeca or SXSW but I got into a lot of Asian-American Film
Festivals and Indian American film festivals and so I did the festival circuit I traveled with it
uh I believe it got into over 15 film festivals in 2017 2018 and it was just really fun and it was
amazing watching it on the big screen along with four or five other short films that were in the
same block as mine and I have never regretted putting that stock money into my short film
was that part of like a 401k that they had it wasn't part of a 401k it was just it was just
stocks it was it was stuff that you could actually cash out
and get the the price of whatever it was at that time.
How do you feel about living below your means to help sustain doing what you love?