A creative life, accounted for

The day Sophie Bruza and her husband got the keys to their first house, their six-month-old puppy took one look at the backyard and started running circles in the grass, thrilled with all the room to move. Sophie cried.

“The first time walking into here, and also with my dog, seeing him have a yard and he’s just zooming around the house. Instant tears,” she says. “It feels so unattainable, especially here.”

Planning for the dips

Sophie is a cinematographer who has spent about nine years building a freelance career in film, work that pays well some months and not at all in others. She learned to expect that rhythm early. Her parents each ran successful businesses, but neither had much of a financial cushion when revenue slowed.

“I watched this roller coaster of this up and down,” she says. “They didn’t sugarcoat anything, which I appreciate. And they weren’t the best savers... so I think that was always, from a kid, I was like, I want to plan for the dips.”

She moved to Los Angeles at 18 to chase a career behind the camera and set an informal deadline to buy a house before 30. For a decade, that meant saving on a freelancer’s income and keeping a monthly budget, one that grew more complicated once she married her husband, Kyle, and their finances combined. It also meant a separate savings account they don’t touch, built specifically for the months when work dries up.

“It just hurts a lot less when you’re paying,” she says of planning ahead for the expenses most freelancers dread. “It feels like that was planned for.”

Up 10 points

By the time Sophie and Kyle were ready to buy, her credit history ran a decade deep. His barely existed. He’d never taken out student loans or a credit card, so there was nothing on paper showing he paid anything back reliably, a gap neither of them had thought to worry about until a mortgage rate depended on it.

They turned to Credit Karma to figure out what to do. It flagged credit age as one of the factors working hardest against him, so they added him as an authorized user on Sophie’s cards to give him some history overnight, then used Credit Karma’s recommendations to help him open a card of his own. They talked through his existing debt with their lender, weighing whether to pay it down or put that money toward the down payment instead.

Watching the number move became its own kind of ritual. “He would come in and be like, look, it went up 10 points!” Sophie says. He was very excited about it, flagging her down every time a new notification came in. Watching the score climb felt good, but the real weight of it was something else. “It was just this house thing that felt so unattainable,” she says. “Seeing it go up was just this little glimmer of hope, like I think we could maybe do this.”

They closed on their house in the middle of a stretch of strikes that hit the entertainment industry hard, money going out and very little coming in. “It was definitely a time of uncertainty,” she says. They’d prepared for exactly this kind of dip. It was still scary.

Taxes are fun?

Once they were married, Sophie and Kyle filed a joint tax return for the first time, which meant she spent the year tracking both of their income and expenses instead of just her own. She used QuickBooks to categorize everything as it came in, a habit that turned what could have been a chaotic tax season into something closer to simple bookkeeping.

“It was so quick, if you’re just staying on top of it for the year,” she says. “I use QuickBooks to track all of my expenses throughout the year and categorize everything, and it’s just plugging in numbers, and it’s truly so easy.”

That confidence didn’t come from nowhere. A couple of years earlier, Sophie had started preparing her own taxes rather than handing everything to someone else, and understanding the mechanics took the fear out of it. She’s since used that knowledge to help Kyle dig out of several years of unfiled back taxes, the result of a preparer who had dropped the ball one year and left him unsure how to recover. They tracked down every document they could find and mailed them off. She showed him it wasn’t as scary as he thought. “I literally was like, taxes are fun,” she says.

Among her friends, she’s become the one people call with tax questions. She jokes about eventually throwing “a tax party,” wine, snacks, and a room full of people finally getting their returns done.

Four ventures and a Mustang

What started as managing her own freelance income has since expanded into managing several. Kyle’s band reunited after 15 years apart and started booking large shows with no financial infrastructure behind them, so Sophie stepped in, building profit and loss statements from their tour. The couple also bought a 1966 convertible Mustang to rent out for weddings and photo shoots, another line item to track alongside her cinematography income and Kyle’s production business.

All of it runs through QuickBooks, sorted by which venture it belongs to. “It’s a lot, it’s a lot,” she says. “I like being busy.”

A home base for what comes next

The accounts that got them the keys to the house are beginning to refill, this time without a ten-year deadline hanging over them. These days, Sophie and Kyle talk through new goals like a kitchen remodel, a second property, maybe an investment home. Further out is something she laughs at herself for wanting, a small farm outside LA with emus and goats.

“If you talked to me five years ago and told me I’d be in this house, taking the jobs that I am,” she says, “I would be in awe.”

Most mornings still start the same way: coffee in the backyard with the dog, watching the light come up over grass they worked hard to grow.