My 2025 Finances in Review

The team-of-one at We Want Guac proudly presents: Darcy’s 2025 finances in review!

2025 Finances: Spending

This was my second full year living in Los Angeles! I knew my spending would definitely increase this year; one reason I knew it’d go up is because my new apartment has a higher rent. I’m feeling the $2k squeeze every month, gosh…

For reference, here is a recap of how much I’ve spent every year since 2017:

Year	Spend
2024	$42,228
2023	$45,969
2022	$46,647
2021	$43,442
2020	$30,722
2019	$29,999
2018	$24,985
2017	$13,280

I’ll be adding a new line to this table soon.

Total on personal expenses in 2025: $43,258

But NOT SO FAST! That $43k number is perfectly in line with my spending habits, and somehow a little lower than my spending before last year. However, that does NOT include my spending on two personal projects of mine. Yes, two. Eagle-eyed readers may recall my mentioning in my full 2025 finances overview that I’d be funding a short film. Originally, I was planning on making a short film that I would both write the screenplay for and be the executive producer of. But I can’t help going overboard on my plans, so I ended up making two short films instead!

I put the movie details in the next section; here’s the highlights for my personal spending only.

Spending Highlights:

• California insurance rates are going up across the board thanks to many carriers leaving the state. I expected an increase for my auto insurance specifically. It did go up, but not by much: I was spending $92/month in January 2025 and now spend about $123/month in December. That’s not as high as I initially assumed; I guess it’s thanks to my hyper-paranoid driving avoiding any accidents, ha.
• I flew to Chicago for my brother’s graduation in May and spent about a week out there. This is also around the time I stopped sending extra spending money to my brother. We haven’t spoken since this summer by my choice.
• I also took a trip to France with friends in June, which was north of $3,000. This was a lovely time with my favorite day trips to the Louvre and Versailles. Best of all, we stayed at a gorgeous French castle with decor from the early modern era! Each room had its own color scheme, and mine was, of course, green. 💚
• Other trips this year included to Florida in February, Boston again in September, and Las Vegas in October. All three of these were for work, but I’m including it here because of the fun experiences after the work meetings and conference sessions; I got to spend a weekend with friends, try out a resort, and see my first Cirque du Soleil performance! I did not end up taking that cruise to Mexico I mentioned in an earlier article, but maybe that’s in the cards for 2026?

Short Film Financial Details

One film, COWBOYS & WITCHES, is completed as of this month; it’s currently being considered for selection by different film festivals and cost about $18k. The second film, TEAM YOUNGBLOOD: 2025, is still getting its final touches in the world of post-production. Once that’s also completed, it’ll also (hopefully!) make the rounds on the film festival circuit. That one will cost about $6,500 and I have spent about $4k so far.

COWBOYS & WITCHES is a ten minute fantasy Western and shot in one day in August. Cast and crew labor cost about $8,800 altogether, set rental and costumes about $4,000, and camera equipment rentals about $900. Other big costs included renting two horses who needed a wrangler along for the ride for $2,100. The rest was spent on feeding everyone, set insurance, and post-production treatment.

TEAM YOUNGBLOOD: 2025 will be a bit shorter at eight minutes. This was also shot in one day, albeit in November. This was much more pared-down, with only one actress and two crew members. Cast and crew labor was about $1,000, with the set rental at $1,200 and camera equipment rental about $500. This one I ended up doing as parody-film-turned-political-critique. I’m looking forward to seeing how it lands with viewers!

Which brings us to the total spend…

Total spending in 2025 (personal + filmmaking): $65,404.62

Whew, that is a HUGE chunk of change! That’s enough to have been paying for a mortgage instead of just rent, had the money gone towards housing. Instead, that increase goes towards putting my screenplays to life via two short films.

The total 2025 finances I’ve spent on those is $22,147. All of this is self-funded, with the only financial backing from my own coffers. I went this route because that was the most accessible way for me to do so, especially since I have the money available thanks to following the FIRE movement. There are other paths to funding a short film, but, as you can imagine, it’s stiff competition for limited funding in the heart of Hollywood. Going this route meant I could skip the funding hoops entirely and jump way ahead.

I’m planning on representing this in future finance reviews as “$43,258 (+ $22,147 on filmmaking)”. This is to separate the personal expenses from the film stuff, while also staying honest about how much money is leaving my bank account.

I’m still wrangling the rules around whether or not I can put these shorts up online; the unwritten rule is that it’s best to wait to put them on YouTube or Vimeo until after film festivals have shown them. I’ll update in a new article when anyone is able to watch them so you can tell me if my money was well-spent or not 🙂

2025 Finances: Savings

With all that out of the way, let’s get into my savings! 2025 is Year 5 of making six figures total and Year 2 of making six figures off my base salary alone. I got another raise this year to $105,807 and a bonus of $16,750. After taking out taxes, health insurance, and my 401(k) contributions, my total net pay was just north of $66k. Even with my super-high spending this year, I still ended up spending less than my paycheck after taxes.

My company matches 401(k) contributions up to 5%, which means they’ll put 5% of my salary into my retirement account extra as long as I put that much in myself. In 2025, an extra $6,086 went into my 2025 401(k) finances.

On top of that, I’ve gotten an extra $3,772 from company equity payouts. A little less than last year, but hey! Free money! I’m not mad about that! Chart below to itemize all of my full-time employment pay:

Income Source	Total
2025 base salary	$104,965.18
+ bonus ($16,750.00)	$121,715.18
+ 401(k) match ($6,085.69)	$127,800.87
+ profit sharing ($3,772.00)	$131,572.87

My total 2025 savings – including my 401(k) contributions and match, my equity profit sharing, and the $886 I didn’t spend of my net pay – amounts to $34,243.

Now for the MEATY stuff: how badly did my ridiculous spending affect my net worth, even with those solid savings?

2025 Finances: Net Worth Change

Answer is… not at all, since the stock market was up a ridiculous amount for the third year in a row.

Not that I ever claimed this, but I formally will never understand the way the stock market operates. I figured 2025 would be a negative year for stocks and I was only right about that in April. Once the tariffs stopped affecting the market so badly, it roared upwards to increase over 16% YoY. If you invested at the end of 2022, your money would have grown about 70% since that time. Ridiculous.

Since I didn’t change my index fund investment strategy, I came out way ahead. My net worth increased from $543k to $665k. I reached a $600k net worth just before my birthday and kept watching it increase. As mentioned in another article, that’s more than enough to comfortably retire to Europe on. And that’s AFTER dropping tens of thousands of dollars on filmmaking not guaranteed to give any return at all. All that work in my 20s sure set me up for success in my 30s, huh.

Smaller Factors to Increased Net Worth

I got back into bank account churning after the high spending got me re-interested. I didn’t do that much with it in 2025, but I did get a $900 bonus from Chase and a $400 bonus from Wells Fargo to total $1,300 before taxes.

Two other income streams I haven’t mentioned yet would be the interest Ally Bank pays me in my savings account, and the dividends I get from investing in the total stock market. Ally Bank’s current APY is 3.3%, which is half a percentage less than last year. I keep my emergency fund with them and got about $390 in interest. My spending account is a more pitiful 0.10% APY that got me $2.04. That is a whole dollar more than last year, so a win is a win.

My 2025 finances further netted me $3,713 from dividends paid out by my taxable account and Roth IRA. I haven’t added much to these accounts in 2025, so the bump from last year is awesome to see!

My Personal 2025

2025 was a busy one for me. I was on my first set in April as an unpaid production assistant for a student-led short film; that’s about as low in the set hierarchy as you can get. Fast forward to August, and I was on a different film set as the Executive Producer: the person with the most responsibilities. I was on multiple sets in-between these months and researched like mad to understand enough about filmmaking to, you know, make a film. My own work aside, it isn’t lost on me that I only made that bananas of a jump because I had the money to do so.

I’ve made this point on We Want Guac before, but it bears repeating:

When you live under capitalism, opportunities abound the most with capital.

Since we don’t live in a meritocracy, merit is not the most important resource to getting things done. The merit of my films will become important if I want it to resonate with audiences, of course, but first, I needed the money to actually tell the story.

I’ve seen other writers I’ve met figure out how to tell their own stories through sheer grit and leaning on their communities/support systems. It’s fantastic to see these stories come to life onscreen. I also know many more writers who are stymied due to lack of funds to make the movies the way they want to; one of my closest friends in LA is being held back because they need to focus on their full-time job before they can feed their last fumes of energy into their craft.

The only reason I’m not in that same boat is because I learned the tenets of financial independence in my early 20s. It makes me incredibly grateful for my own circumstances, while also incredibly disillusioned with the way the system works.

In the words of the wise: The horrors persist, but so do I.

I’m hoping that the personal growth I’ve done in 2025 will bear great fruits in the years to come. There were some lows, where I let go of once-close connections that I realized didn’t care genuinely about how I am doing or what I am working towards.

This connection was my last remaining one to anyone I knew growing up, which was when I lived with angry, violent parents. I keep assuming I’ll have a big grief episode about it, but that episode never came. My guess is because I have people around me that show me what genuine care is like. I have chosen family who happily celebrate wins with me and make losses more bearable.

I also have multiple friends who respond to any and all messages I send them, even it it’s a silly video on social media with zero context. Heck, I have multiple friends and acquaintances who will MAKE silly videos with me for dirt-cheap, all for no other reason than they like me or they like my writing. And I’ll show proof of that in film festivals in less than a year!

So my 2025 finances ended up great, which is the same I can say for my personal 2025 in general. I’m still very PO’d about the fascism cementing its status quo in the US. (My second short film was done so I could show how f’ed up it is in a story that starts out a comedy, fun fact.) Goes to show I can hold gratitude and focus for myself along with feeling horrified with the malicious policies affecting others. I am large, I contain multitudes.

Looking Ahead at 2026

I wrote the following in last year’s finance review:

Should things go horribly wrong, I plan to buy a crumbling castle in Ireland and have my friends and loved ones live there to help me renovate it/deal with a sea of historical renovation paperwork. “Pray for the best, prepare for the worst” is a mantra I slam my rubber stamp of approval on all day, every day.

Unless my screenwriting career suddenly blows up, I’m thinking at least relocating to Ireland is gonna be the move! I’ve got the better 2025 finances on my side and a whole lot of European cities to go visit once I visit all 32 counties in Ireland. That travel may get put on hold should that crumbling castle start calling my name, but I’ll leave that to Future Darcy to finagle. 🙂

And that’s a wrap on 2025 finances! May 2026 bring truth and justice to those that need it most.

Cover image credit: Doug Bagg via Unsplash