About Me

I was born in the Philippines (hence the “Flip” part of my blog moniker) and raised in Los Angeles, where I still live.  My childhood experience as a first-generation American was of first being middle-class, then dropping to lower middle-class when my father lost his job due to the recession of the early 1980s.

When I hit 14, I got a work permit and my first job, working concessions at the Hollywood Bowl.  The paycheck wasn’t much, but it was more than zero.  I proceeded to spend all my earnings the way all teenagers spend their money: fast food, concerts/music and clothing.  I think I would shudder if I ever sat down and calculated how much I spent going to concerts and buying their subsequent tour t-shirts in my teen years.  I do still have them stored away and swear that I’m going to make a quilt out of them someday.  Yes, I am actually being literal here.

During my junior year of high school, my father passed away, and I found myself with a widowed mother and a sister paying her own way through college.  I knew I was going to have to do the same.

A combination of going to film school before “pro-sumer” cameras were the norm (i.e., our projects were shot on actual film!), a boyfriend who loved to eat out as much as I did because we never went to restaurants when we were younger, and several jobs in Hollywood where the norm is being over-educated and under-employed, contributed to a lot of debt in my twenties.  My early thirties found me going from a dual-income household to a single one (though thankfully without costly divorce papers to go along with it), which dug my debt hole a bit deeper.

Today, I’m content to have a job, still in the entertainment industry, with the sanest boss I’ve ever had.  Though it isn’t necessarily a career path, it’s a nice, steady paycheck working with good people. I’ve made adjustments after making money mistakes, learned a lot of frugal tricks and will write about them here.

I’ve come full circle to what I said I wanted to do when I was 6, which is write.  My parents’ response?  You can’t make any money that way.  Oh Asian stereotypes, thank you for being consistent for generations.