By Nancy Media When Melissa first started escorting, she signed with an agency within a week. It felt safer somehow, having a company between her and the clients, people who would handle the logistics and screen the men and take care of everything except the actual appointments. She stayed with that agency for two years before going independent, and now, three years later, she'll tell anyone who asks that both paths have their own particular kind of hell. The agency took forty percent of everything she made. Forty percent. When she thinks about it now, about all the money she handed over during those two years, she feels physically ill. But at the time, it felt worth it. The agency handled all her bookings, maintained her online presence, paid for professional photos, and most importantly, screened every single client. She showed up, did her job, and left. Everything else was someone else's problem. For a nervous beginner who had no idea what she was doing, that structure felt ...
The spreadsheet on Camila's laptop is titled "Freedom Plan" and it's the most detailed document I've ever seen. Every row represents a month, every column a different financial goal or milestone. There are target savings amounts, investment portfolios, skill-building courses, networking activities, and a countdown to her planned exit date: eighteen months from now. "I've been escorting for four years," she told me when we met at her apartment in Astoria. "From day one, I was planning how to leave. Because if you don't have an exit strategy in this work, you'll wake up one day and realize you can't get out." Camila's exit strategy is multi-layered and methodical. The financial component is most concrete: she needs three hundred thousand dollars saved before she can stop escorting. That amount will cover a year of living expenses while she transitions careers, a buffer for emergencies, and seed money for the small business she...