A woman who tried to make her life Instagram worthy went flat-broke in the process.
Lissette Calveiro, who is now 26-years-old, moved to New York for an internship in 2013 and said she felt she was living the ‘Sex and the City’ dream.
The only problem was she was going broke trying to keep up appearances on social media with brunches, new outfits, and jet setting, all to impress her followers.
Her internship only provided a travel stipend, so she worked a part time retail job to supplement her income that went entirely to her quest for photo lifestyle perfection.
Lissette Calveiro, 26, says she went broke trying to live the perfect Instagram lie after going into debt with fancy vacations, like this one in the Virgin Islands, and splashing out cash on top notch, ever changing wardrobes
‘I wanted to tell my story about this young millennial living in New York,’ Calveiro said to the New York Post.
Afterher New York City internship, she moved home to her parents place in Miami where she was working in public relations. After, she accepted a job and returned to the Big Apple for another PR gig that allowed her to keep chasing the Sex in the City Instagram-dream.
She currently has more than 12,000 followers on Instagram.
‘I was shopping… for clothes to take “the perfect gram.”‘
She says that despite moving back to Miami and getting a full-time job as a publicist Calveiro was $10,000 in debt trying to keep up on Instagram.
‘I was living above my means,’ she said.
Her expenditures trying to cultivate the perfect looking life were enormous, with $200 monthly shopping sprees so she’d never show the same outfit, and a monthly splurge on a designer item like a $1,000 Louis Vuitton purse or an accessory from Kate Spade.
On top of that, she had to show she traveled.
She says her biggest travel expense was a $700 round-trip ticket to Austin, Texas, for a Sia concert in 2016.
Calveiro felt the pressure to travel somewhere every month like Las Vegas, the Bahamas and Los Angeles in her social media quest to appear the jet-setter.
‘Snapchat had these [geo-] filters [like digital passport stamps] and I wanted to collect at least 12,’ Calveiro said.
While she did some travel for work, Calveiro said, ‘If you break it down, a lot of the travel I was doing in 2016 was strictly for Instagram.’
According to Fashionista, you would need to spend about $31,400 a year to ‘to maintain the standards of physical beauty represented daily in our Instagram feeds.’
‘I was living a lie,’ Calveiro said. ‘Debt was looming over my head.’
Despite living with her parents in Miami, she still wasn’t able to keep the farce going financially.
Picture perfect everything: She splashed out cash she didn’t have on top notch brunches to impress her followers
She got the much needed wake-up call at the end of 2016 when she landed a PR job in Manhattan.
‘I knew that moving to New York, I had to get my act together or I wasn’t going to survive,’ she said.
She buckled down with her finances, and made drastic changes to her lifestyle.
Calveiro said she went into ‘mini-isolation from the world,’ and slowed her Instagramming.
‘A lot of it was recycled content,’ Calveiro said of her posts.
Instead of having an apartment on her own, she first moved in with a roommate to Inwood at the northern most tip of Manhattan, spending just $700 a month.
She also started cooking and gave herself a weekly budget of $35 for groceries.
Picture perfect everything: She splashed out cash she didn’t have on top notch brunches to impress her followers
After fourteen months she was able to pay off her debt. She worked with a financial coach and used an app called Digit, which funnels money from your paycheck to your savings after rent and living expenses.
While she still has the desire to look like she has a fresh wardrobe, she says she now does Rent The Runway with their monthly membership at $130, so she can sport something different for social media.
She also says she moved to SoHo, but has two roommates and is paying $1,300 a month.
‘Nobody talks about [his or her] finances on Instagram,’ she said. ‘It worries me how much I see girls care about image.’
‘I had a lot of opportunities to save,’ she said. ‘I could’ve invested that money in something.’
She says now she tries to be more real about her life and where she is financially.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk