Living Together On $178K A Year In Chicago | Millennial Money

Dylan Gutierrez, 30, and Jeraldine Mendoza, 29, live in Chicago, Illinois and earn a combined $178,000 a year as professional ballet dancers. The couple is engaged and owns a condo near Wrigley Field.

This is an installment of CNBC Make It's Millennial Money series, which profiles people across the U.S. and details how they earn, spend and save their money.

Read more about about their budget breakdown here: https://cnb.cx/34CpHiE

Dylan Gutierrez, 30, and Jeraldine Mendoza, 29, are preparing for early retirement. Unlike most millennials, they don’t have decades of career advancement ahead of them — at least not as professional ballet dancers. Most dancers retire by 35 or 40, and with that in mind, the couple is diligently saving a big chunk of their $178,000 combined annual income in anticipation of their next act.

They’ve spent their whole lives in the ballet world — Gutierrez grew up learning from his mother, a professional ballet dancer and instructor, and Mendoza started taking her first lessons when she was 5 — and they know that the physically demanding profession has its limits. With just a few years left as dancers, they’re already beginning to make plans for new careers in the arts.

Gutierrez joined the Joffrey Ballet in Chicago in 2009 and met Mendoza when she joined two years later. Their connection as partners in the dance studio was instantaneous, Gutierrez says: “We crossed paths immediately. And, you know, the rest is history.”

In the years since they started dating, the couple bought an apartment together, adopted a Boston Terrier named Kahlua and got engaged in the summer of 2019.

Their finances are atypical in a number of ways: They usually earn a steady paycheck 10 months out of the year during the company’s season. The rest of the time they focus on earning money through side work and also qualify for unemployment benefits, which combined made up 20% of their 2019 income. And because of their younger retirement age, the couple has spent the last few years getting serious about their savings, setting up streams of passive income and preparing for their future careers and lives together.

Here’s a look at how Gutierrez and Mendoza manage their time and money as professional ballet dancers in Chicago. As lead dancers with the Joffrey Ballet, Gutierrez earns about $77,000 per year, while Mendoza earns about $66,000 per year.

Both make additional money by teaching dance classes and performing in other companies’ productions. Dancing in “The Nutcracker” productions around the country during the holidays can be especially lucrative. Last year, Gutierrez earned an additional $15,000 through work outside his Joffrey contract, while Mendoza brought in an extra $20,000.

Gutierrez is eager to dispel the myth of the starving artist and show how you can earn a good salary in the arts. “If you’re a ballet dancer, you’re not doing it for the money,” he says. “You’re doing it because you love it and it’s something you’re passionate about. But it is a profession that a lot of people make a very, very good living in.”

Like workers in countless other industries, the couple has been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. When the coronavirus tightened its grip on the U.S. in March, the Joffrey Ballet ended its season early. The company guaranteed dancers’ pay through the remainder of their normal 40-week season, which ended in May. “We both were very fortunate,” Gutierrez says.

Typically, during the summer months when Gutierrez and Mendoza aren’t working for the Joffrey, they file for unemployment benefits and make up for lost income through extra projects in the dance community. This year, they were able to file for benefits again and were eligible for the additional $600 weekly stimulus pay provided under the CARES Act.

With the additional benefit, their paychecks were just about equal to what they’d normally earn from the Joffrey, and they used these funds to cover their normal living costs, medical bills for Kahlua and a little more online shopping than usual.

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Living Together On $178K A Year In Chicago | Millennial Money