This Duck Boats narrator can make more than $2,000 a week. Here’s how she navigates her finances.

How do people with some of the region’s most iconic jobs make ends meet? We decided to find out.

In Wicked Expen$ive, a new occasional series, we explore how the workers who make the Boston area the place that it is navigate the astronomicalcost of living here.

The worker: Carolina Soto, 25, is a narrator with the Boston Duck Tours.

The job: Soto started working at “the Ducks” in 2022, as a collegesophomore, helping to board the boats. Last season, she became a narrator, guiding the 80-minute tours of historic sites on the amphibious vehicles.

Every narrator assumes the role of a character on board. So from March through November, for as many as five tours a day, Soto transforms into “Kat Burglar” — donningan orange getup, bedazzled handcuffs, and a bag emblazoned with a dollar sign. She approaches the job with the air of a stand-up comedian, leading chants of “quack quack” to pedestrians down below.

“Bostonians are going to give one thing out for free,” she said during a recent Wednesday morning tour, “and that’s our opinions.”

The earnings: This season, Soto is earning an hourly wage of about $18.50. But tips are where the real money is.

During her best week this season so far, she took home $1,422 in tips alone (she keeps track in a spreadsheet). One week last season, when she worked six days, she earned a whopping $2,391.

But when the weather is bad, or she gets lots of field trip groups, she can pocket far less. She doesn’t stress, though. “It all comes out in the wash,” she said.

The gig also comes with a bonus program: For every hour she narrates, she gets $2, and the total is given to her at the end of the season. Last year, that added up to about $2,100, she said.

All in all, she estimates that she made roughly $50,000–$60,000 last year. “‘If you do this thing right, you can make, like, $80k in a year,’” Soto said other narrators have told her.

When the Duck Tours season ends, she files for unemployment insurance. For most of the recent offseason, she said, she got about $510 a week. She tried to find another job in the meantime, applying to hundreds of roles, she said. “There were supposedly a lot of positions open, and nothing,” she said.

The expenses: Last September, in search of cheaper rent, Soto moved from Somerville to Lynn, into a two-bedroom with a friend from high school. The rent costs $1,350 a month total, and she gives her friend $753 a month to cover her share of the rent, plus utilities, she said.

The longer commute does mean higher transportation costs. When she bought her Honda Civic in 2024, it cost around $32-34 to fill up the tank, she said. Since the war in Iran sent fuel prices climbing, it can now top $40 — she tries to fill it up when it’s a quarter-full to try to pay a lower price at the pump. Her car loan payments are $333 a month, and car insurance is about $260 a month, she said.

Another place she tries to outsmart sticker shock is the grocery store. A few times a week, she goes to either Whole Foods or Market Basket — supermarkets with notoriously different price points — to shop for ingredients that she tries to reuse in multiple meals. Even so, she estimates she spends about $75–100 each week on groceries.

Her time at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (and Salem State University before that), meanwhile, left her with student loans that now stand at around $22,000. During the offseason, she put her student loan payments on pause, but recently started back up again, forking over $400 a month.

After she graduated, she began to accumulate significant credit card debt, “making those minimums, and then they would max out,” she said.

She paid down one card last season, but it “knocked right back up” because she had little money coming in during the offseason. She has also taken plenty of vacations recently — Puerto Rico, Barcelona, Mexico. Swipe, swipe, swipe.

Right now, she has about $19,500 in credit card debt — about $12,000 on one card and $7,500 on another. This season, she’s working to make a dent in those numbers, trying to put around $1,000 a month toward paying down the card with more debt, and $400 a month toward the one with less, contributing extra when she can.

She puts 11 percent of her paychecks into her 401k, with an additional employer contribution. Last year, she said, she contributed about $4,500 to the retirement account. She has about $1,000 in savings, preferring to follow her dad’s advice to prioritize paying down debt.

The mindset: “My friends say I have a very Type B personality when it comes to money,” Soto said, and that’s particularly true when it comes to debt.

“It just feels not real,” she said. “You know how you can’t really imagine what a billion dollars is? That’s what all this debt feels like.”

That makes it hard for her to regret any of her financial indulgences, such as her recent trip to Barcelona, which she considers her “best purchase.”

“At the end of the day, I’m here to live my experiences,” she said. And if taking on debt is the way to do that, she figures, so be it.

That’s a big contrast to how she grew up, as the daughter of Dominican immigrants. “There’s a lot of tension there, specifically in my debt and where my money goes,” she said, so she stays — by and large — financially independent from her parents. (She remains on her family’s health insurance, but come December, when she turns 26, she plans to go on the plan offered by the Ducks.) “It’s best for all of us to just not have money involved,” she added.

The splurges and saves: “Flowers, these days, have been my consistent luxury,” she said, and she’ll occasionally pick up bouquets for around $20–30 on her trips to Whole Foods or a local flower shop. She recently got a pair of her “dream jeans” for around $150 from a shop at the Prudential Center, and spends roughly $15 per gin and tonic on a night out in Salem.

She also finds places to save where she can, like getting a manicure from a friend in exchange for $20 and a boba tea. “I’m very lucky to have art school friends who like hobbies every five minutes,” she said.

The goals: Among Soto’s biggest goals is to significantly pay down her credit card debt. This Duck Tours season, she hopes to get the $7,500 on one card down to $3,000, and the $12,000 on the other card down to $7,000. “I’d be happy with those numbers,” she said.

In the longer term, once her debt is more under control, she will feel more ready to take a leap of faith into a career in the art scene, most likely moving to New York City. “You need a certain amount of financial freedom to be able to do that,” she said.

In her “dreamiest dreams,” she said, she is making what she calls “performance paintings,” like a project she did in college where she created abstract paintings on Home Depot drop cloths as she danced traditional bachata and salsa.

She “fell in love with” the combination, she said. But, alas: “It was just so expensive.”