As you are starting out on your own as a professional, preparing a realistic budget is important. This will help you know if job or contract offers you receive will allow you to manage financially. While no one enters music therapy and expects to become wealthy, you should not have to take on a second job in order to manage your basic expenses. You should also not be depending on a spouse to “subsidize” a low paying music therapy job or contract.

You will have fixed expenses that occur every month, and you should start with a list of what you estimate those will cost. These expenses include things like apartment rent and utilities, groceries, car payment, gasoline and auto insurance. You may need to consider having a roommate to manage your rental expenses. If your job does not include health insurance, then you may want to check and see if your proposed income will qualify you for subsidized health insurance, otherwise individually purchased insurance can be quite expensive and will be a significant percentage of your fixed expenses.

Other fixed expenses would include any school loan repayment you may owe, medications you may need for yourself, and your phone and internet bill. Remember that you will need to plan to make regular contributions to a retirement account (SEP-IRA, etc.) to insure that you will have income down the road when you retire. That may seem a long way off, but it will come quicker than you may think. It is also wise to have an emergency fund that contains the equivalent of three months of your regular expenses. If you are self-employed, you must pay quarterly taxes as that money will not be taken out of your payments. This should be set aside in a separate savings account so that you have the money on hand to pay the IRS when it is due each quarter.

You will also have a category of rotating expenses; those that occur throughout the year, but don’t occur every month. These types of expenses might include clothing, office supplies and computer cartridges. Other rotating expenses include music therapy equipment, music therapy books, continuing education and your AMTA membership.

An important financial consideration is how much travel a given job or contract will require and how that affects how much you are really being paid. To determine how much per hour you are actually making; do not look at the “per session” or “per hour” rate. Instead, determine how many hours it takes you per day to see the actual clients/groups and make that money. For example, let’s say that you are being paid $45 per session, and you have 4 sessions per day. You are required to drive to each of these homes and they are all at some distance from each other. You leave your home at 8 a.m. and arrive at the first home at 9 a.m. That means your work day starts at 9 a.m. (you don’t count the time it takes to get to your first client nor the time it takes to get home from the last client of the day). Your other three clients are scattered throughout the day; with the last client being seen at 5 p.m. You take an hour for lunch (lunch is not calculated as part of your paid time). This means it takes a total of 8 hours to make the promised income as you are not able to do any other paid work during the day when you are traveling back and forth to clients. So you are not making $45 per hour; you are making $22.50 per hour. You have to look realistically at what you are making per day and determine if that job or contract is really a viable option.

Organize your budget in a spreadsheet or in a computer program or app—there are lots of possible options. The most important thing is to have a very clear idea on what it will cost to run your household. That’s the only way you will know if the job or contract you are considering will meet your basic financial needs.