Miata Edoga’s wake-up call to the realities of proper financial planning came on a morning just like any other.
The actress, who some years ago worked the morning shift at a restaurant in L.A., had expected to be let off as she always was at 10 a.m., with enough time to spare for a 12.30 p.m. matinee call at L.A.’s Civic Light Opera, where she had a role in a production of “Annie.”
But that morning, her replacement did not show up.
“The restaurant was full and my manager refused to let me go,” Edoga recalls. “There I was, serving people with tears streaming down my face, and the manager said if I left, I would be stealing because I wouldn’t have closed my register. The only choice I had was to take all the money I’d made for the day and dump it on the table, but I had no idea how much there was and whether there was even enough to put gas in my car.”
Although Edoga made it to the theater 10 minutes before curtain call, the experience was a slap in the face.
“I realized that I had very nearly not showed up for a performance of what I do best, acting, because I was so financially out of control,” she says. “So I set about to learn everything I could learn about money.”
From that moment on, Edoga read whatever she could lay her hands on and attended every free financial planning class she encountered. She tackled her debt and within a span of three years, had paid it off.
Then, armed with newfound knowledge and confidence, Edoga founded Abundance Bound, a company that specializes in financial literacy and education specifically for the artistic and creative community.
Today, Abundance Bound caters to a host of different artists that run the gamut from actors and musicians to jugglers and fire-eaters. Edoga has also served as the financial wellness counselor for the Actors’ Fund in New York and the Tisch School of the Arts has invited her a few times to speak about financial planning and wellness to students.
“Most artists believe they don’t need to know about money, but actually, artists, more than anyone else, need to know how to plan for the future and how to handle the financial peaks and valleys that we encounter in our profession,” she says.