How the Baby-Sitters Club Does Money: Mallory

Mallory Pike loves to see her name on a white table tent. She loves to see it in Amazon’s “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” list (yes, Amazon will recommend her own books to her, even after she uploads them to Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing herself). She loves to walk into a hotel ballroom, red hair — with one gray streak — tumbling over her shoulders in curls, and answer all of the usual questions.

Yes, she knows exactly where she gets her ideas and no, she’s not telling.

Mallory makes enough money self-publishing her speculative fiction novels to occasionally get referenced whenever people write think pieces about changes in the publishing industry (especially if the person doing the writing is already a fan of her work) but not enough to take an Uber instead of the metro and then the bus as she makes her way home from Seatac, after speaking at yet another sci-fi and fantasy convention. Spending $60 on an Uber, just to get back from the airport a bit sooner, would require her to reach the stage where thinking about how much you were spending didn’t matter anymore, and she’s nowhere near that stage yet.

In fact, Mallory loses money every time she travels to a convention, but Devon and Iris are both okay with that. They’ve had the discussion, just like they discuss every issue that’s relevant to their triad, and they’ve come down firmly on the side of Mallory pursuing her dreams. They both love her and choose to support her, and she in turn supports them.

The three of them use a percentage system to determine who pays for which of the household expenses. Mallory actually earns the median income of the three, and she pays 37.5 percent of the group’s overhead, which includes part of the mortgage and utilities as well as their AmazonFresh account and a few shared expenses like HBOGo. She carefully sets aside money for taxes and for retirement, and the rest of her disposable income goes mostly towards clothes — she’s obsessed with vintage, even though Devon teases her about dressing more like Velma than Daphne — and flying across the country to visit her family a few times a year.

Every time, they ask her when she’s going to get married. Every time, they ask her when someone’s going to make one of her books into a movie. The only reason they stopped asking her when she was going to be part of Oprah’s Book Club was because Oprah retired.

Previously: Kristy

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