The 3 Step Plan for Film Crew to Grow Rich

In my nearly 25 years of hiring film crew, I've noticed that the people with the most freedom to choose great projects aren't always the most skilled. They're the ones who figured out investing. Today, I'm sharing the exact three part investment strategy that I use to build financial security while working in our unpredictable industry. I'll break down the simple system that works specifically for freelancers with irregular income. No finance degree required. I'm on a mission to help 1,000 freelance film crew members build $1 million in wealth. That's why I created this channel to guide you through with tools made for our industry in a mindset built to last. Let's take action. But before I reveal the system, I need to show you something that's happening on film sets everywhere. Something that might feel painfully familiar to you. A talented camera operator frantically checking their phone between takes, worried about an overdue credit card payment. Or a gaffer who takes every single gig. Even the nightmare 20 hour days with a toxic director. Well, because Rent is due next week. Or a wardrobe stylist who's brilliant with talent but hasn't taken a vacation in three years because there's no money saved for time off. If this sounds familiar, I get it. I was there too. In this industry, we're taught to hustle harder, work more hours, take every job that comes our way. But you can't just work harder to build wealth. There simply aren't enough hours in the day. The real difference between constantly struggling and having true freedom is. Is understanding one concept. When your money starts working for you through investing, everything changes. Suddenly you're not just trading your limited time for dollars. You're building an invisible crew member who works 24 7, bringing in cash even when you're sleeping. But most investing advice isn't designed for people like us with unpredictable incomes. The standard save 10% of each paycheck doesn't work when there are months where you are flooded with projects and others where you're sitting on your hands. And that's exactly why I developed my three part system for investing as a freelance filmmaker. But before I share the system with you, you need to understand why investing isn't just nice to have for us. FILM CREW.

Unlike people with steady jobs, our income looks like the heart monitor of someone watching a horror film. One month you're flush with cash from a commercial shoot, the next you're wondering how to make rent. This inconsistency creates three major problems that investing directly solves. First, when work slows down, and it always does, investments can provide income to fill those gaps. Imagine having money coming in even when you're not on set. Second, we don't have employer retirement plans. No 401k, no pension, nothing without investing. Many film crew end up working well into their 70s, not because they want to, but because they have to. Can you imagine trying to manage a 12 hour day handling equipment when you're 75? I've seen it and it ain't pretty. Don't get me wrong, these folks are tough as nails, but it doesn't have to be this way. Third, and this is crucial, investments give you the power to say no to jobs that drain your creativity and passion. Think about how different your career would be if you could choose the projects based on what excites you rather than what you need to do to pay the bills that month. It's financial freedom and creative freedom. It's getting back to why you fell in love with this industry in the first place. Just so you know, I'm not a financial advisor. I'm a producer who survived 25 years of budgets, overages of surprise light items that were would make your head spin. Even though I've turned financial chaos into smooth sailing more times than I can count, always do your own research. After watching thousands of film crew try to build wealth, I've identified three crucial mistakes that almost everyone makes. Avoiding just one of these could literally cut years off of your journey to financial freedom. What most crew get wrong Mistake number one is not starting early enough. You know, this is something I learned the hard way. I didn't start investing until I was well into my producing career. I and while I wish I said it earlier, I'm living proof that it's never too late to begin building wealth. The truth is, there's never a perfect time to start in our industry. There will always be ups and downs, slow seasons and busy periods. But here's what I want you to understand. While starting early gives you a huge advantage, starting late does not disqualify you from building real wealth. It just means you might need to be a bit more intentional with your approach. Whether you're 25 or 55, time is still your most powerful asset when investing. Yes, someone who starts investing $100 a month at age 25 will build more wealth than someone who waits until 40. But that doesn't mean the person at 40 should give up. The key is this. You can't change when you start, but you can control when you begin. You don't need a lot of money, but you do need to give Your money time to grow through compound interest, which is basically interest earning interest. Earning interest, Earning interest, earning interest. Now, I know compound interest can sound abstract when you're dealing with unpredictable film crew paychecks. Okay, so let's go on a financial journey with Maya and Chris. So this is a little slideshow I put together for us, visualizing your financial journey, the power of investment versus saving. Welcome to a visual exploration of how different financial decisions can dramatically impact your wealth over time. Let's follow two individuals, Maya and Chris, through their distinct financial journeys. All right, so here's Maya. She's a young makeup artist. She looks like she's just getting started in the business. She's all bright eyed and bushy tailed with her little makeup brushes there. And she's 20 years old. Okay. But she's managed to get enough clients that she's able to put an investment of $500 a month into a brokerage account, probably a Roth IRA and putting $500 a month in. And she's making 7% on that money. So it's probably an S&P 500 ETF, which means that has an average of 10% a year for the last 100 years. Not every year was at 10%, but the average over a long period of time of investing averages out to 10%. I say 7% because of inflation. That robs us about 2 or 3% of our dollar value. So I like to play it safe and just say 7%. And her time horizon is 30 years. So, uh, we're going to look at what it looks like at age 50. Now, is she planning to retire at age 50? Maybe. Maybe she just wants to slow it down at, at age 50. Let's see what happens. Ah, look at Maya. She's 50 years old. She's playing tennis, taking a little time off, and she's probably still in the business because she has only built $588,000, which is amazing, but maybe not enough to retire. So she's probably got a few years left. But look at this. She put in $180,000 and gained $408,000 from interest. That's what compound interest does. 7%. 30 years, $180,000 turned into $588,000 with $408,000 growth. That is amazing. All right, so next is Chris. Chris is a camera operator. He looks pretty happy too. He's 30 years old and he probably makes enough money to put some money into his investments, but he chooses to save. Okay, so he's putting his money into a, into One of the big banks, you know, bank of America, Wells Fargo Chase, something like that. And he probably makes some money off his gear rental, right? So he can also save $500, but again, he puts it into a bank instead of an investment. His interest is.01%. Okay, 0.01%, which is unfortunately for Chris Pennies. And his time horizon is 35 years because he would have liked to retire at 50 or even 60, but you know, he got partway through and realized that he just did not have enough savings in order to retire. So he's probably going to keep working through his 60s. And look, we were right. So.

He doesn't look too happy. He's still working hard at age 65. Poor guy. So listen, saving up $210,368.79 is amazing. Not many people are able to save that much money. However, he put in $210,000, which means his interest, instead of hundreds of thousands like Maya, his interest was hundreds, $368.79. So that shows you. And, and that was the same amount of money and for a longer period of time, too. Right? So it's really not the amount of money as much as what you do with it. Savings versus investment. Investment is going to win every time if you invest smart and safe. Okay, we're going to do some calculating here with compound interest, and we're going to start by going to calculator.net and then we're going to click on interest calculator and we're going to run a couple of scenarios here. Let's say that you want to invest $500 a month. Now, this might seem boring, but it's actually kind of fun. And an interest rate of. Well, the stock market is 10%, right. But the, with, with inflation, it knocks it down 2 or 3%. So I always like to use 7 in the place of 10 just to be safe. Okay? And we'll call it an investment length of 25 years. And we hit calculate after we put zeros there, calculate. And you end up with nearly $400,000. So that's $150,000 of contribution and $243,000 of interest over that time. And if you look at these graphs here, it shows you that the, what you put in is basically about one third of the entire thing, and two thirds is interest. And here's another way to look at it here. The blue is the contribution and the green as the interest. And then you can see year by year how much interest you made. Only 200 bucks the first year, 600 after that. You know, all the way down to year 25. You're making $25,000 in interest, right? Let's do another scenario. Let's just say you have a lump sum, and it's not monthly, and you have $25,000. You saved up. You had it in a regular bank account making 0.1% interest, which is basically nothing. But you put it in the stock market at 10%, we're going to call it 7 because of inflation, 25 years.

Calculate.

$135,000. So that $25,000, you did nothing else, you added nothing to it, and you end up with $135,685.82 again. You see, 18% of it was the $25,000. And then 82% was. Is the interest. So that is the power of compound interest. I made this little. This little Excel sheet here to show you something else. Let's say you're kee grande up, a gaffer, maybe a prop master, and your day rate is 800 bucks a day. And you decide that you're going to devote one day a month to investing, okay, one of your gross paydays. So let's say 800 bucks. So month one, he made 4 bucks, no big deal. 10 bucks on month two. But as you see, it increases, right? Then by the time you get to the 18th month, you've actually earned $800 in interest. So they think, well, that's great. Every 18 months, I make 800 bucks. I can live with that. So that means 36 months, another 800. So 1600. No, look, it only took from 18 to 26, eight months to get to the next 800, seven months to get to the next 800- six months to get to the next, okay? And as you can see now, this is. This is the. This is the fun part. This is a boring spreadsheet. Spreadsheets are basically never fun, but I made this one fun. Look at these yellow lines. They're getting closer and closer and closer together. Every one of those lines is another $800.

Okay? Until year five and six. They're basically on top of each other.

Every other month, you're making about 800 bucks. Now here's a milestone at month 86, which is the beginning of year eight, you hit 20 grand of interest. Here's another milestone here it. In year 11, you actually start making $800 per month for every 800 you put in. All right? It's amazing. Now, this final milestone here, second to last milestone year 17 is you doubled, you doubled your 800. So from here on in, you're making over $1,600 every single month that you put in 800. Now here's the last one I was talking about. It's the, the tipping point here. You have put in 180,000 over the course of 19 years and you have $180,000 in interest. It's amazing. Now there's ways to accelerate this. You could put more money in per month. I mean, 800 is just one day. Maybe you want to put a thousand, maybe you want to put two days of pay in. Or you start with something like you have 25 grand or you have 10 grand, you put that to start, then that money will, will accumulate interest along with the money that you put in over X amount of years. In this case 25. But I do want to remind you that the stock market, oh, here's another way to accelerate. The market can go up. It's not always just 10%. Sometimes it's 12, sometimes it's 18, sometimes it's 11. But that said, 10% is the average. So the market can go down. So it can go down at any given time. It's been been eight, it's been seven, it's been negative three. Right. But we are investors and not traders, so we're all in it for the long term. There's never actually been a 20 year span where the market did not increase despite the ups and downs along the way. So if you look at it day to day, it's going up, it's going down, it's going up and going down. But you're looking at it over the long term. It's going up and up and up. Okay, so that's that. So now you're asking yourself, okay, one day rate a month. I don't know where, where can I get money? How can I work more, where can I get this extra money? Well, I just happen to have in the, in the description below a link for you to download for free what I call my first call Framework. It's four steps to secure consistent paychecks for freelance film crew. Okay, here's my first call framework. Four simple steps I recommend to ensure you never stress out about your next paycheck. With more competition than ever, using one or more of these transformative game changers will help you stay at the top of everyone's list. If you download this, it couldn't hurt, you know. And you could also go to robperkins.com first call framework and you'll see this. You just put your email address in, hit the button and it will arrive in your email. Now let's talk about the second mistake that's costing crew members thousands. Mistake number two, leaving too much cash sitting in low interest accounts. While that calculator showed you the power of investing over time, many crew members are actually hurting their wealth building by being too conservative with their cash. Most crew members hold too much money in their emergency fund. However, having an emergency fund makes sense. What I call your peace of mind fund. But beyond that, your extra cash should be working for you. Invested in something with higher returns. If you are keeping more than two to three months of expenses in a checking account earning zero interest, that's like paying top dollars for a beautiful location and only using one corner of it. Mistake number three is not diversifying your investments. Some film crew members make the mistake of putting all their money into one type of investment, like a single stock or property, and don't understand the value of diversification. You don't want to put your entire savings into a single stock because if or when that company takes a hit, you could lose your money overnight. Like when you're rigging a stunt. You never rely on just one safety line. There's always a backup. Same goes for your money. A single investment can snap under pressure. A diversified portfolio gives you the protection of multiple safety lines. Now let me share something surprisingly simple that completely changed my financial life. It's flexible, it's low stress, and it actually works even when your paychecks come in waves instead of every two weeks. Most traditional advice isn't designed for that, but this is my three part strategy. The solution starts with a simple three part strategy that works specifically for freelancers. The first part is to set up the right accounts. Before you can invest, you need the right setup. This is like having your gear organized before a shoot. First, you need a high yield savings account for your peace of mind fund. This isn't an investment, it's your safety net. Aim to save three to six months of expenses here. When you've built this foundation, you're ready for two essential investment accounts. There's a Roth IRA. This is your tax free growth account. In 2025, you can contribute up to $7,000 per year. $8,000 if you're over 50. The big advantage is you don't pay taxes on growth, ever. Next, a taxable brokerage account. This is for any additional investing beyond the Roth ira. While you'll pay taxes on the gains, this account has no contribution limits and gives you more flexibility. Part two is to choose the right investments in each of my accounts. I keep it so simple. Think of it like building a crew. First, I have a S&P 500 ETF. Let me break that down real quick. An ETF is simply a basket of stocks you can buy all at once. Think of an ETF like renting a full Grip truck. Instead of picking out every individual piece, you're not just getting one lens, you're getting a whole set. Lights, stands, audio, the works. It's a bundle of high quality assets all working together. One rental, full coverage. And the S&P 500 just means it contains pieces of the 500 largest American companies. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, et cetera. It's stable, consistent, and gives you exposure to the biggest companies in the US without having to pick individual stocks yourself. Second, I have a dividend etf. A dividend is basically a regular payment that some companies send to their shareholders. It's like getting a small cut of the profits several times a year. A dividend ETF is a collection of these payment generating companies all bundled together. You already got paid for the job, but then a few months later, boom. Another check shows up. Turns out the project made the company a ton of money and they're cutting you in on the success. That's basically what a dividend is. Third, I have a growth etf. Growth companies are those focused on expanding quickly. Think tech startups and innovative businesses that are reinvesting their profits to get bigger rather than paying dividends. A growth ETF is like the roller coaster at an amusement park. The one with the longest line because it's the wildest ride. It's fast, unpredictable, and yeah, your stomach might drop a few times, but that's exactly why people line up for it. These are companies reinvesting everything to grow fast. They're not paying you today, they're using every dollar to build the next blockbuster. When you Invest in Growth ETFs, you're not here for the kiddie ride that goes in gentle circles. You, you're here for the rush. And if you can handle the ups and downs, the payoff at the end can be huge. Together, these three types of investments create a strong, well rounded foundation. Just like a great production crew, each plays a different role, but they work together to help you build wealth. The beauty of this approach is how hands off it can be. You're not constantly trying to time the market or pick the next hot stock. You're building a system that works while you're focusing on what you do Best making great productions. The third and final part of this three part system is to implement the right funding timeline. When I first started, I made the classic freelancer mistake, trying to do everything at once and ending up doing nothing consistently. So to avoid that mistake, follow this sequence. First, build your Peace of Mind fund by putting 20% of your take home pay into your high Yield savings account until you reach the three months of expenses. Then split that 20%. Put 10% towards continuing to build your Peace of mind fund and 10% towards your Roth IRA. Once your Peace of Mind fund reaches six months of expenses, shift the full 20% to investment accounts, prioritizing your Roth IRA first and then moving towards your brokerage account. What's critical here is consistency. Even during slow months, try to keep some money flowing into investments, even if it's just $25 or $50. Now here's where most film crew hit a wall. You're probably thinking this sounds great in theory, but wondering how to make it work when your income jumps from $8,000 one month to $800 the next. This is exactly where most film crew get stuck and precisely where I discovered a counterintuitive approach that works with our feast or famine cycles instead of fighting against them. Making it work with irregular income. Here's how to apply this strategy to our unpredictable film income. First, you need to know your baseline numbers. Go back through your bank statements for the last six months and calculate your average monthly income and your average monthly expenses. No matter what you make in any given month, whether it's a slow $2,000 month or a $10,000 commercial shoot, you immediately distribute your income using these percentages. 50% goes into your essentials account. That's rent, utilities, groceries, insurance, 30% goes to your freedom account, guilt free spending gear, entertainment, Amazon Pizza, and 20% goes to your Peace of Mind fund, emergency savings, then your investments. This works better than feast or famine thinking because instead of trying to save extra during the good months and scramble during the slow ones, you're creating a consistent system that smooths out the ups and downs automatically. During an $8,000 month, you're putting $1,600 towards your Peace of Mind fund. During a $2,000 month, you're putting 400 towards it. The percentages stay the same, but your accounts adjust naturally to the income flow. The beauty is that your essentials account builds up a buffer during good months that carries you through the slower months while you keep building wealth. Consistently set up your automatic transfers for these percentages. The day you get paid. Don't wait to see what's left over. There'll be nothing left. What if you have debt? That was my situation too. I systematically reduced debt over time using the snowball method. I pay the minimum payments on all of the debts except the smallest. I aggressively paid that one as much as I could, as fast as I could until it was paid off. Then I moved that payment to the next card and added it to the minimum payment on that one, continuing until they were all paid off. The key breakthrough came when I realized this. Once my debts were paid, I took that money I was accustomed to putting out monthly and redirected it towards gaining wealth, either into my high yield savings or investments, depending on what I needed at the time. That's how I went from paying interest to earning it. And here's a powerful mindset shift that helped me I started treating investing like a bill that had to be paid, not an optional extra if there was money left over. Just like you wouldn't skip paying your rent, don't skip paying yourself through investing, the approach works Whether you make 2,000 or $10,000 this month, the percentages adjust automatically to your income flow. Remember, investing isn't about getting rich overnight. It's about building that financial freedom muscle over time so you can choose the projects that light you up rather than the ones that just pay the bills. But here's the thing. After nearly 25 years in this industry and building my own wealth through these strategies, I learned that success isn't just about the money moves you make. It's also about the career moves, the mindset shifts, and the industry wisdom that sets you up for long term success. I'm on a mission to help 1,000 freelance film crew members build $1 million in wealth. And that journey needs more than just investing knowledge. It needs the kind of hard earned lessons that only come from decades in the trenches. If you want to fast track your path to building wealth and a sustainable career, watch this video Next 10 lessons learned after 25 years as a Freelance Film crew member. Thanks for watching. Stay focused, stress less and Build wealth That's a wrap.