6 Women Get Real About How They Spend Their Diverse Salaries

Readers, it's been nearly seven months since we launched Money Diaries, and through the series we've seen what it's like to live as an expat in Shanghai, backpack through Malaysia with only your savings, and work as a cam girl in San Francisco.

We've also seen a range of salaries. There was a post-grad woman in Boston making it work with $14,000 a year, while a woman in publishing manages an $80,000 salary — and saves half of it every month.

So to mark our 49th money diary (don't worry, we have something special for our 50th), we decided to compare six different millennial women in six different cities. But unlike our previous comparison, which put together women earning between $65k to $70k a year, we decided to see how similar (or different!) the earning and spending would be within one industry. Our industry of choice? Marketing.

Throughout all the diaries that have been submitted, the most diverse pool has been women who work in marketing, in some form or another. There's a New York woman freelancing in music marketing; a Los Angeles marketing coordinator who works with food and hospitality; a Philadelphia marketing specialist in e-commerce; a woman in Boston who works with startups; a copywriter for a financial group in Chicago; and a marketing director for tech company in Minneapolis.

As usual, not all diarists had an average week. One woman dealt with a root canal (and the hefty bill), while another had an emergency vet visit. Still, it's interesting to see how six women working in a single (albeit fairly diverse) industry can lead such drastically different lives, with different titles, perks, and paychecks. Click ahead to see how these six women manage their money in vastly different ways.

Money Diaries are meant to reflect individual women’s experiences and do not necessarily reflect Refinery29’s point of view. Refinery29 in no way encourages illegal activity or harmful behavior.