It's Pay Day! The ABC's new column where we ask Australians the money questions we don't like to talk about. We aim to demystify personal finance and normalise conversations about what we earn and how we save it — or spend it.

Elfy Scott is an award-winning freelance journalist, presenter, podcaster and producer. Her debut book, The One Thing We’ve Never Spoken About, was published in early 2023 and focuses on the silence and stigma that still surrounds complex mental health conditions in Australia. 

For Pay Day, she discusses the difficulty of planning your finances when you work freelance, her younger self's obsession with black eyeliners, and why just thinking of Sydney's property market is enough to induce nausea.  

How would you describe your financial situation right now?

It's quite unpredictable. I have a casual newsroom job that affords me some financial stability but that was quite a recent development. I'm a freelance presenter, journalist and writer, meaning there can be devastating ebbs but also some quite nice flows. It makes it quite hard to plan financially and save.

What did you spend your first paycheque on?

I got my first job at Harvey Norman as soon as I was legally allowed, and I think it would have been spent immediately on either CDs or one of many, many black eyeliners.