Amanda [00:00:02] I feel more clear, like I just feel more organized about what the numbers actually are and what my course of action can be following our conversation. I’m also feeling a sense of gratitude for you and the way that you can actually take things that are a total mess, that are happening for someone else, and somehow just be like, Oh yeah, this makes total sense. Let’s just do it this way. 

Linzy [00:00:28] Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So this is our season closer for season seven of the podcast, which is a very strange thing to be able to say. But time is really flying. And this episode is our only coaching episode that we’ve actually had this season so far. And it’s with Amanda Starfield. Amanda is a very recent graduate of Money Skills for Therapists. She is a clinical social worker, therapist, supervisor, and director. And she lists her specialty as specializing in being human with other humans, which I love very much. She’s based in Massachusetts and works with youth and families. And in addition to doing individual and family therapy, she also provides consultation on everything from therapy to supervision to leadership dilemmas. Amanda is a lovely human. She was like a such a treat to have in Money Skills for Therapists. And in our conversation today, we get into creating simplicity when you are in a complicated transition. So Amanda has recently switched her private practice to S Corp tax status in the United States. So now her money has to flow differently. So she was using a profit first system before, which is a budgeting system for business where you use multiple bank accounts and you divvy out money on percentages. And she had a system that was working for her. But now with her new S Corp status, the way that taxes work has changed. There’s some reimbursements she has to be giving herself. And there’s just some complexity that’s been thrown into the mix that has taken something that used to be simple and makes sense and has made it confusing again. So in this conversation today with Amanda, we dig into her numbers and we look at how to take something that is complicated, how to take her numbers and to make them clear and simple so that they work for her brain and give her the clarity to know how much to pay herself in dividends, how much to set aside for those dividend taxes, how much she needs to be putting towards her payroll, just getting her tweaking her big picture again to get numbers working in this new incarnation of her private practice. So if you are considering switching to S Corp status or recently have switched to S Corp status or have/are going through any kind of other transitions in your practice or feeling like your numbers are complicated, this coaching session is going to walk through that process of taking something that could be super complicated and making it simple and clear. Here is my conversation with Amanda Starfield. So Amanda, welcome to the podcast. 

Amanda [00:03:35] Thanks for having me. 

Linzy [00:03:36] I am so excited to have you. So, Amanda, you finished up Money Skills for Therapists in the Community in October. 

Amanda [00:03:44] A month ago. 

Linzy [00:03:45] Okay. Yeah, so a month ago. And I’m curious before we like dig into your coaching piece today, what made you decide to join Money Skills for Therapists? 

Amanda [00:03:54] So I run a fully private pay practice, and I started that about two years ago now. And I did Tiffany McLean’s program, Lean In Make Bank, which really helped me start to unpack my money stories and really kind of understand what was going on for me and really deep in my clinical work as well. But I didn’t really have a handle on how I was actually managing the money that I was making. And I knew that there was more there for me and that I wanted to feel confident moving forward. And I really have this base as I was building my business of I actually know what I’m doing in terms of managing all this money. 

Linzy [00:04:33] Right. Yeah. So the how. It’s like you figured out how to make more money, but then it was like, how do you manage the money that you made or were making? Yes. Okay. And today, I feel like we’re going to dig into a topic that I think is going to show just like how deep you’ve gone into the money management world. Because I know you have some questions about profit first and S Corp. So tell me, what question are you bringing to our conversation today? 

Amanda [00:04:58] So I’m in this transitional period, which is a little bit confusing. So I went through your program. I was like, okay, totally understand profit first. I got these percentages down and then it was like, Well, I’m actually making enough to transition my business to becoming an S Corp, which now means that there’s different tax rates for different buckets of things, and there’s a different flow of how the money is moving. And I’m adjusting at the end of the year, but it’s actually going back to the beginning of the year, right? 

Linzy [00:05:28] Yes. 

Amanda [00:05:28] I’ve actually already saved plenty for my taxes for this year. 

Linzy [00:05:33] Yes. 

Amanda [00:05:33] So where I’m sort of putting my money, where and how I’m allocating it when it’s coming in isn’t going to be my ongoing system necessarily. And I’m very confused about what I actually am paying myself. 

Linzy [00:05:47] Right? Yeah. So you’re in a transition period right now because what I’m hearing is by transitioning to an S Corp, you now have some kind of like catching up or applying retroactively to do to the new way things work to understand that correctly. 

Amanda [00:06:00] Exactly. Yeah. 

Linzy [00:06:00] Okay. And that’s what your accountant has guided you to do. Is these things go back to the beginning of this year. 

Amanda [00:06:06] Yes. 

Linzy [00:06:07] Okay. Okay. What I’m hearing is you’re going to need two sets of numbers. Right. We’re going to need to think about what are the numbers kind of between now and the end of this year to make up for the fact that you’ve already saved more than enough for taxes based on the math that you’ve done. But then also next year, you’re going to need a different set of numbers that are like your new normal. Does that make sense? 

Amanda [00:06:28] Yes, absolutely. 

Linzy [00:06:29] Yes. Okay. Okay. So let’s talk about first the right now. So let’s get into profit first. And for folks listening just to contextualize, if they’re not familiar. So Profit First is a budgeting system that you’ve taken on in your business that helps you allocate money kind of the same way every time to help money go where you need it to be. And now that you’ve changed your tax status, your numbers need to change because part of being an S corp is that you are going to be taxed differently. It’s a bit more complicated, but you are ultimately going to be paying less taxes. So can you share your spreadsheet with me? And we’re going to describe the spreadsheet for people listening as much as possible to have the visual. 

Amanda [00:07:07] Certainly can. 

Linzy [00:07:08] Okay. So now we’re looking together at your Profit first calculator, which you have gotten from the course, and now you’ve added some more pieces based on your S Corp stuff. So tell me what’s happening with these numbers so far. Like what is solid, what is working, and what is not clear? 

Amanda [00:07:23] So the top number in income, that’s the past two weeks. So that was what I just allocated for my paycheck that I’m going to be getting tomorrow. Okay. What’s working is the salary and the operating expenses. What’s really not clear to me is that my tax percentage. The profit percentage, it’s really coming through the distributions, which is this other box a little bit lower. So I’ve basically sort of found that number by doing that, working backwards. 

Linzy [00:07:56] Okay. Yeah. And the number at the bottom here, I’m just seeing here you have like a distribution number of 797.73 that you’re playing with. Can you just click on that so I can see where that’s pointing to? Okay. I see. Yes. So it’s taking your salary and taxes and then your owner’s distribution. I’m just seeing how you have set this up here. So your salary in taxes together is 72%. That combines the 52% that you had for your salary was 52%, Taxes were 16%. So at 72, that’s great. And then I see you have it divvied up so that salary is broken into payroll and owners distribution. Tell me about these numbers here. 

Amanda [00:08:33] The payroll is what exactly what it sounds like. So that is the amount that’s going to be taxed sort of at the highest rate. So my payroll gets taxed at about 20 to 30%. So I have 30% in this spreadsheet right now. It is a little bit short for this month, so I actually had to shuffle. So this 442 in payroll tax, I actually is more like 475. So that’s one thing that’s not quite matching. And that’s because the actual just dollar amounts are lower. 

Linzy [00:09:03] Yes. Okay. 

Amanda [00:09:05] The distribution, it’s is it distribution is essentially like profit. It’s taxed at a lower rate. So these are sort of like the owner distributions. And the way that I’ve thought about the distributions in terms of the profit first model is to think, okay, there’s sort of like a quarterly profit or distribution that I’m thinking about, and then there’s like a monthly, you know, is there anything additional, is there anything sort of bonus, as you know, as the shareholder of my own company, that that would make sense to bounce back? So that’s sort of how my brain has wrapped itself around combining this and the profit first model together. It’s just that the profit is coming further down the line of how the money is flowing instead of right at the top being siphoned off. 

Linzy [00:09:51] Yes. And this is what I’m seeing is like before we started recording, you pulled out like your whiteboard that had like, here’s the numbers your percentage. And then there was like a sub-level where things are broken into further percentages and then a sub-level below that. And I made a joke that it’s like a like a Beautiful Mind kind of equation looking. And that’s what I’m seeing here is it’s like you’re what I see is you’re really working to try to be really precise and like, really like kind of get it right. But it does add a lot of levels, like literal layers to the numbers, right? There’s like layers on layers here right now as you’re trying to figure out how to set this up. So what I would love to help you think through is how to flatten this back into one layer.  

Amanda [00:10:33] Oh, that would be beautiful. Please. 

Linzy [00:10:33] Yeah, I think so too. Simple is good, right? And so this is, I think, a great example, Amanda, where like, it can be informative or interesting to, like, dig in and understand, like how something is complicated and how it works. But we don’t want it to be complicated all the time, right? Like we want it that when you sit down to do your paycheck and your distributions, you have the same feeling that you used to have when you had your problem first. Where you look, it’s clear. It’s like you know exactly what you need to do. It takes less than ten minutes and you get on with your life. So we’re going to work these numbers back in to that top level. What I’m seeing here then is you right now have taxes and salary as two separate lines at profit first. Right. And these are your standard profit first buckets, right, we have profit, taxes, salary, operating expenses. There’s a big goals line there that you’re not using at this time. Right. So but it’s so it’s those standard profit first accounts because you’re an S corp and taxes and salary are now coming from the same place. What do you think about just folding those into one category? 

Amanda [00:11:32] I’m totally good with that. I had it that way. And then it also felt confusing that way as well. So I just I had it combined and then I separated it. So I’m happy to put it back. 

Linzy [00:11:43] Yeah. Because. And tell me what did feel confusing about it because this is also like you know, business owners choice right. So we want to think about what makes sense for your brain. 

Amanda [00:11:51] Well, what’s confusing to me in general is that I don’t have clarity on what my overall combined tax rate is. So when I look at sort of the payroll tax and the distribution taxes and how those things come together, I really don’t understand what that overall tax rate is. So it was clarifying in my mind to go Well, that’s just all coming from one big bucket. 

Linzy [00:12:12] Yes, I know that you were working with Sarah Johns, who’s another therapist in the course, because I had to call Sarah. And then you were on the phone. You were on the little video on the phone. So this is a joint spreadsheet that you’ve been working on together, which I love, by the way. It makes me very happy. And I know that she was working also on blended tax rate, like figuring out a blended tax percentage. Do you- have you come to that point here where you figured out kind of how things will shake out for a blended number, or is that totally still opaque at this point? 

Amanda [00:12:41] It’s opaque. 

Linzy [00:12:42] It’s opaque, yeah. Okay. Okay. So let’s take a look here then. So let’s zoom back out and put your average numbers in the top of this profit first box. Rather than the 335, let’s put in that safe 8000, and we’re going to see how these numbers shake out through these different kind of basically like little sum funnels. Right now, the way that things are set up, it would be 5440 would be for your taxes and salary. And of that, payroll and payroll taxes. So that payroll number pulls from 65% gets paid to you, and then your payroll tax rate is 30%. Is that correct? 

Amanda [00:13:20] Yes. 

Linzy [00:13:21] Layers and layers. Okay. So that means that for that 5440 breaks down into 1060 for paycheck taxes. And your distribution taxes are 285 on this same amount. I’m following you now down these little percentage roads. If we work it back in backwards, let’s just be curious about the tax numbers that you’ve now divvied out. What percentage of all the money that came in the door is that? Because that’s what we do in profit first, right, is like we take these very specific numbers and we just apply them to the number at the top. So that we’re like taking out all these different layers. So the total taxes then that you’ve identified you need to save is 1060 plus 285. And I’m using whole numbers. I’m not using decimals. Maybe I’ll make that 286. This was a big evolution, I will say. And in my own relationship to numbers, when I stopped using cents, I was like, I’mma let it go, letting go of the cents, we’re just doing whole dollars. 1346 is what’s total there for taxes. And if I take that 1346 and I divide it by the $8,000 that came in the door, it is 17% of everything. And then what would be left from that money if I take this and I minus the the taxes, 1494 would be actually going to you in salary and distributions and that is 51%. So you see what I’m doing is I’m working them back up into those numbers again. Okay, this is where we are. So what I’m noticing is, the numbers that we just came up with, were these the same or 1% off of what you had in there? 

Amanda [00:15:01] They were just 1% off. They were just flipped. Which 1% went from salary to taxes. 

Linzy [00:15:06] Yes. One to the other. Gotcha. Okay, perfect. So what we’ve done is like, you had taken this, you broke them out into these sub numbers. But when we zip them back up, we’re back where we were at the top, Right? So we’re back into, like, this simple framework that means that actually this piece of the top is giving you what you need. If you combine your accounts, then you would have taxes and salary together. Profit is also a type of distribution, right? So that’s something for you to think about, is where you want to keep your profit. Do you like having that separate profit account where you can take that celebration money? 

Amanda [00:15:40] I haven’t been steady enough long enough in my business to really be able to like take that in or appreciate it. I really needed to because it was getting through that first year, really building myself. I really actually needed to be paying myself that rather than waiting on that as profit. Yeah. So I haven’t had that as a set up, but I would like to. 

Linzy [00:16:03] Yeah, because like as you have the distributions, like you talked earlier about that idea of like taking the quarterly profit but also having like regular distributions that you’re taking every month. So if that’s the case, like you can leave that profit there. What I want to consider, though, is we want to make sure you’re setting aside enough money to cover those taxes as well. So it might be that we need to think about your tax rate and update a little bit to account for the money on that 4%. 

Amanda [00:16:27] Okay. 

Linzy [00:16:27] So your distribution tax, I see you have as as 15%. So that’s your personal income tax amount, The 15%. 

Amanda [00:16:34] Yes. And that’s- so I actually have the profit wrapped in below in this sort of purple section here. You’ll see that I did the same thing that you just did with the taxes, rolling it back into the 8000. That’s what I did with the profit. So I actually have the profit already included in this 15% tax rate. 

Linzy [00:16:55] Yes. Okay. Okay. So that was already built in. So 15% of the distribution. So those three numbers at the bottom add up to 1904, is that correct? The three numbers below. Okay. That’s how they zip up. Yes. Okay. Beautiful. Can you just highlight those three numbers together and we’ll just see if they sum up. That’s good. And then can you sum up the the 1376 down to the 285, just the numbers, right to the right. 1904. Beautiful. Okay. So the distribution total. So it looks like then there is a little bit of tax that also has to go aside. Do I understand that the way that you’ve you’ve done this math, there’s a little bit more tax. 

Amanda [00:17:30] We’ve already accounted for it in the 17%. Okay. So that 285 and 1060 was added to to figure out that 17% an overall amount. So it should be accounted for. Okay. Beautiful. And this $1,060 amount is actually- there’s a buffer in that. So my payroll taxes don’t add up. They add up to less than this for a month. 

Linzy [00:17:54] Okay. Okay. And have you built buffer in there on purpose. 

Amanda [00:17:58] Yes. 

Linzy [00:18:00] Yes. Okay. Because as I’m thinking about this, I’m like, okay, as you run your paychecks going forward. Right. Well, we’ll talk about this year and your little like kind of transition period soon, but next year going forward, it’s like when you run a paycheck, the taxes will automatically be calculated by Gusto. They’ll be remitted or you’ll remit them. And so your salary taxes are covered. Right. It’s just that that extra bit of dividend taxes that you need to think about is like putting aside enough that at the end of the year when you go to do your tax filing, you have enough money set aside for the taxes that apply to the dividend portion. And the dividend portion is not taxed with that self-employment tax. So it’s 15% less, right, than your salary. And that’s the beauty of an S corp. So it’s making sure you have that money set aside. What I’m curious about is like for yourself, Amanda, if you had taxes and salary folded together, let’s say you have your payroll taxes and salary for that together. We think of those as like one thing. I was doing this with somebody else in the course today. Earlier today, what we did is we looked at her dividend and dividend taxes separately. We broke those out on the calculator so she could see this is the dividend that’s available to me and these are the taxes that would apply to that dividend, separate from the total paycheck. What do you think about playing with the numbers that way and seeing what that looks like? 

Amanda [00:19:14] Sure. I trust you. 

Linzy [00:19:15] Let’s play with that. Let’s make a copy of this because I don’t want to lose your numbers. What I would like to see for you is how much money just needs to be going aside for just to cover your paycheck, like your payroll taxes and your actual paycheck itself. And then what’s available for you to take as dividends and have set aside for dividend taxes for your paycheck. What is the paycheck amount your accountant has you paying yourself? 

Amanda [00:19:41] The take-home or the total? The total net is 1745. 

Linzy [00:19:48] What is the gross?  

Amanda [00:19:51] Gross is 1567. 

Linzy [00:19:51] And your net is more than your gross because you’re adding on the 300 for the office. 

Amanda [00:19:55] No, that is not accounted for in that. So that I add as an additional reimbursement. 

Linzy [00:20:00] Yes. 

Amanda [00:20:02] On top of the check. Yeah. 

Linzy [00:20:03] Okay. Okay. So when you do a Gusto payroll run, then the number that I want to find out is how much does it cost you total to do a payroll run? Like there’s the money that’s paid to you, but then there’s also the payroll taxes that you’re paying on both sides. You’re paying the employer and the employee portion. And then we also have this 321 a month that happens coming back to you. 

Amanda [00:20:23] I do better with paper than me just saving all the things online. So this I actually printed out from my paycheck that I ran yesterday. 

Linzy [00:20:30] Great. Okay. Okay. So what is the total transaction that went through Gusto, then, to run your paycheck yesterday? Like, what’s the biggest number you can see? 

Amanda [00:20:38] The biggest number is 2817.75. 

Linzy [00:20:42] Okay. Right. 2817.75. Okay, great. And that’s going to be your gross paycheck and your payroll taxes. 

Amanda [00:20:52] That is the total that was paid out. 

Linzy [00:20:55] Yes. Okay. The total that was paid out to you or the total that was taken from the business? 

Amanda [00:21:00] The total that was taken from the business. 

Linzy [00:21:01] Yeah, that makes sense. 

Amanda [00:21:03] Yes. 

Linzy [00:21:03] And is this a weekly or bi-weekly? What’s your frequency? 

Amanda [00:21:07] Twice a month. So the 10th and the 25th.  

Linzy [00:21:09] Okay. And then one paycheck a month also has this reimbursement of 321. Is that correct? 

Amanda [00:21:14] Yes. So this paycheck had 1072. 

Linzy [00:21:19] Okay. 

Amanda [00:21:19] That because it was the entire first quarter of the year. 

Linzy [00:21:23] Okay. Okay. Yes. And what was your thinking on managing that like you have, yeah, like you said, this like catching up on paying yourself back to do. Are you planning to pay yourself back all of that before the end of the year for the whole year? 

Amanda [00:21:35] This is one of the things that I hadn’t really figured out. Yeah, in my mind I was going to do the first quarter today and then I was going to see how these numbers panned out and either next paycheck or next month do maybe one more quarter. Like I don’t actually know because it’s a reimbursement. I haven’t been setting aside money to reimburse myself. So it’s essentially that that’s one of these places where it’s confusing. It’s not like I’ve set aside separate money to reimburse myself. So I just basically right now I’ve been using the distribution amounts to put towards the reimbursement. 

Linzy [00:22:11] Yes. Yeah. And then next year you would want to think about this as part of your operating expenses that gets paid back to you. But you weren’t thinking about that as you’re running your numbers this year. 

Amanda [00:22:20] Hadn’t thought about it like that either though. So that’s quite helpful. Yes. 

Linzy [00:22:22] Is it like the way that this is broken up is it’s like, yeah, instead of paying rent to somebody else, you’re paying rent to yourself. But it is an operating expense for your business. That 321 a month is an operating expense and that 1200 a month is also an operating expense. 

Amanda [00:22:33] That I have folded in the 1200. 

Linzy [00:22:36] That’s in your op ex?  

Amanda [00:22:37] Yeah. 

Linzy [00:22:37] Okay. And is that a separate transfer or how are you paying yourself that? 

Amanda [00:22:40] I wrote myself a check. 

Linzy [00:22:42] Okay. Okay. So check for that. And I’m curious, like, what did your accountant explain to you about why you should do one on your paycheck and the other one as a written check. 

Amanda [00:22:50] She didn’t actually specify? I think maybe just for ease of tracking. It gets much easier to go in and just like look up like check number. I don’t use checks for very many things. So it’s like the one thing that. It’s just I can look up checks and it’ll be very clear. 

Linzy [00:23:07] Mm hmm. Okay. Yeah, because something that I’m noticing, like, just as we’re talking about the new complexity. Right? And I’m feeling it, like, as we’re talking, I’m like, okay, wait. And then what’s this? And then what’s that? I’m thinking, how do we create simplicity? Right. And so, wondering that I have, and this is maybe a question for your accountant is like, would you have the option of paying yourself 1521 in a check once a month rather than putting it on your payroll? And then it just can come right out of your op ex account. Or two checks, one for 321, one for 1200. But that makes it clear it’s like, okay, this is my business paying me rent. 

Amanda [00:23:40] Yeah. 

Linzy [00:23:40] Just from a clarity perspective, getting it out of your paycheck, especially since you have 2 transfers happening that are kind of the same thing, but a little bit different. How does that idea sit with you of maybe having those just come out of your op ex in the future as checks? 

Amanda [00:23:53] I would imagine that that would make sense to her. I can’t see why not. Okay. 

Linzy [00:23:59] Because, like what I’m noticing here as we’re thinking about this is with profit first, it’s nice to be able to know that your op ex number is what you need it to be, and it’s covering everything. Right. And so with this piece of like, putting it on your paycheck, you could totally do it, but it’s almost like you would want to like have that money folded into your op ex and then make it transfer from op ex to your paycheck account to make it clear like, and this is my business paying me back like it’s- I’m thinking about how do we still give you the clarity of like, what is you and what is your business within this new structure that you’re in. 

Amanda [00:24:30] That makes a lot of sense to me. Mm hmm. 

Linzy [00:24:31]  So with that, then, what I would love to play with is let’s look at putting your salary and taxes number together to find out what the what is the percentage that’s going to cover this paycheck amount that we need to see? How do we make sure that Gusto has the money sitting there that they need for those two paychecks a month? So on your calculator, I’m going to ask you to put taxes and salary together. Like just rename one of the lines and the two paychecks together that you’re paying yourself is 2817.75 a month. Times two. Two paychecks a month. Right? 5635. 

Amanda [00:25:06] That total amount from my- well, I guess like my next paycheck would be close to that too. Like I’ve been reimbursed like the next quarter. It would be closer but it won’t necessarily be quite that high on an ongoing basis. 

Linzy [00:25:18] Right. Because this. Okay, so was this paycheck. This was there was reimbursement in there as well for the 2817? 

Amanda [00:25:23] Yeah, that included 1072 of that operating expenses reimbursement. 

Linzy [00:25:29] Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. 1072. Okay. So we actually need to bring that number down by 1072. 1800. That seems low. Amanda, you’re paying yourself 1800 twice a month. Yeah. So, 3601. That’s your salary. 

Amanda [00:25:46] That’s the salary. Yeah. 

Linzy [00:25:47] Okay. Right. Yeah. Because if we multiply that by 12 and then there’s little taxes there, so it’s like 40 K a year just for you. Yeah. Okay. And that seems to be like the number that I notice that gets set as like the reasonable salary is like around $40,000. Okay, great. So 3601 then is actually the number that we are looking for in your taxes and salary line. So what do you notice about the way the percentages are set up right now? 

Amanda [00:26:11] Well, there’s a much higher percentage in taxes and salary. 

Linzy [00:26:13] It’s giving us $5,400. 

Amanda [00:26:16] Are we going to do a separate line for taxes and distributions? Is that the plan? Okay. Okay. 

Linzy [00:26:21] This is like your payroll line. Then we can call it payroll. So this is like Gusto. We’ve got to feed Gusto the money that it needs to give you. So now let’s play with that percentage. Okay. So let’s start by bringing down that payroll amount. To get it to the 3601 a month that needs to be funded to run your paycheck. So now you have another 20% to play with. So that would get you- that’s like the full distribution amount. But we also want to put aside taxes for your distributions and profit. So with that, yeah, like if we look at your distributions and taxes together is like if I take the 24 that’s left and I multiply that by your 15% is your distribution tax rate. It gives me 3.6. So I would say make your distribution taxes four and then you can make your distributions 16. 

Amanda [00:27:09] Does it make sense to still have a completely separate line for profit? 

Linzy [00:27:12] What that does for you, if it resonates, is it gives you a spot to have like specifically celebration money. That’s the function of profit, right? Is like it gives you that little like build up and it’s like you see the money building up and you get to anticipate like, oh, at the end of, you know, December, I could just take my profit money and you had to think about how to use it. For some folks, that really resonates. Does it resonate with you to have like celebration or reward money building up? 

Amanda [00:27:37] Well, at the moment I’m about a thousand bucks on average short on my personal budget. Yeah, so not presently. 

Linzy [00:27:45] But maybe one day. Yeah. So let’s fold that into your distribution amount then. Let’s make that distribution amount 20% and we’ll make profit zero. So what this is showing you right now is that. You will be able to fund that paycheck if you have your numbers at 48 and it would give you 1600 that you could take as a distribution each month. And then there’d be just 320 a month to set aside to cover the taxes for that distribution. And that’s based on a 15% tax rate. How do these numbers look to you? 

Amanda [00:28:16] They look good. 

Linzy [00:28:17] Okay. And let’s add those two numbers together. Let’s add your payroll number and your distribution number, like the 3840 and 1600. Because this is important, right? This is what money is actually available to you. So this would mean you have 5440 coming home to you each month in cash. 

Amanda [00:28:31] That would be minus about 925 for payroll taxes. 

Linzy [00:28:38] Yeah. So you would look and see like what is your payroll amount and then you’d have $600 distribution. How does that sit in terms of your needs? 

Amanda [00:28:46] Well, first of all, it’s just a lot clearer to understand. Yeah. And in terms and in terms of my needs, it makes a lot more sense to me. This is much clearer. 

Linzy [00:28:56] Because we also need to remember that you’re also having $1,200 come out of your operating expenses to you and another 321 a month come over operating expenses. So functionally, there’s also another $1,500 coming home to you to cover home expenses. 

Amanda [00:29:10] Yeah. I actually might want to actually increase my operating expense percentage to cover that. So I might actually do this. 

Linzy [00:29:18] Mm hmm. And what I’m and is doing is she’s playing with numbers. This is like what we do, right, is to see, like, okay, that number doesn’t sit great, but that number feels a little higher than I need, so we’ll do a little switch. These numbers then gives you whatever your after-tax paychecks are. Do you know how much actually comes home to you on your paychecks? Like how much hits your bank now? 

Amanda [00:29:37] $1,269.81. 

Linzy [00:29:40] Okay. Approximately. And then we have 1440. That would be your distributions. And then we have 1521 for the two different types of rent you’re paying. So it’s $4,230 for your household. 

Amanda [00:29:57] The sorry, the 1200 amount, that is one paycheck. So that’s actually that should be twice that. Oh, okay. Okay. The month. 

Linzy [00:30:08] So 1269 is your take on paycheck times two of those plus 1440 plus 1521. Yeah. Okay. 

Amanda [00:30:18] So 5449 that I can work with that I can like actually not be in a deficit on my personal budget. 

Linzy [00:30:26] I like that for you a lot. So much. So much. So these would be your going forward numbers. Yeah, right. So this is based on like, okay, next year if 8000 is your safe number. That’s the average. Then you would be able to be paying yourself 5449 totally would be coming home to you in these different ways. Slightly complicated ways, but ways that ultimately benefit you using the percentages that we’ve set here. So what are you noticing about these numbers so far? 

Amanda [00:30:52] Well, I guess it’s so much clearer to me right now that I will have like the 1521 with one payroll and then I will have the distributions, 1440 to go the other payroll. I just when and where the money is sort of being dumped out is a lot clearer to me. 

Linzy [00:31:11] Great. Okay. So you can see what the flow should look like. Yes. Yes. Yes. That makes sense because yeah, actually, you do have three different amounts over four weeks. So you could create nice flow around that of when to expect those payments. Yeah. Ooh, I like that a lot. Okay. So this is now like a flattened version of what we were looking at before. That’s more clear of like, what is there for dividends and what’s the dividend tax like? What I like about looking at these numbers together, I mean, it is I can see like you’ve thought about dividend taxes that’s covered and you can set that money aside like either in the business or you could have that sitting in a savings account for home. But we know that when that tax bill comes, you have been thinking about the dividend money and saving for those distribution taxes as you go, which I love for you. 

Amanda [00:31:51] Yeah, it also really clarifies for me as I’m making my profit first bank accounts, what actual accounts to make. 

Linzy [00:31:58] Yes. Yes. Yeah. 

Amanda [00:32:00] Because I was still very confused about that. 

Linzy [00:32:02] And this would be, I think, a good structure to set up these four accounts, which are a little bit different than the accounts you had before. Yes. So now there is a second piece that we can touch on lightly, which is about catching up then for the rest of the year. So this is like a plan for next year. This year you have this catching up to do with paying yourself back for the 321 a month, right, for the running your home office. Is there any catch up to do on that $1,200 a month rent for groups or no? 

Amanda [00:32:30] Yes. 

Linzy [00:32:31] Okay. Okay. So it’s just like a lot of catching up to do. 

Amanda [00:32:35] Precisely. 

Linzy [00:32:36] Yes. Okay. Okay. There’s something that I’m curious about is have you talked to your accountant about taking less paychecks for the rest of the year and have some of these reimbursements coming home instead? 

Amanda [00:32:45] I haven’t. I can ask if that’s possible. 

Linzy [00:32:49] I would ask about that, because there’s going to be a balance there. And this is accountant stuff. This is not my area of knowledge. But of like hitting that, you know, reasonable salary. But also it’s like there’s only so much money in the business. So if you’re going to be reimbursing yourself for that, like the business can’t necessarily give you both of those things at the same time. At this moment, how much money do you have to catch up on or how many months you have to catch up on this $1,200 a month rent. 

Amanda [00:33:11] So you can actually rent 14 times in the year, which means that there’s two months that you can actually rent twice. So I paid myself for one. So that leaves 13. Okay. 

Linzy [00:33:23] 13 times 1200 is 15,600 that you’d be kind of due to apply for all this time that you’ve used your office for these groups. And then the 321 that you need to pay yourself back. You’ve done one quarter so far. 

Amanda [00:33:39] Yeah, I actually have those totals labeled out in my YNAB. 

Linzy [00:33:42] Beautiful. Music to my ears. 

Amanda [00:33:44] So for quarter two, it’s basically 1006. Quarter three is 965. And the fourth quarter I haven’t figured out at all that. I’ll probably wait on until after the summer. Okay. 

Linzy [00:33:58] So there’s another thousand and six plus 965, which is 1971. So what I’m hearing here then is between that money and the money for the space rental, there’s $17,571 that your business owes you that is not taxable. That is actually operating expenses that are owed to your household. So I would definitely be asking your accountant, can you just take those reimbursements out of the business for the rest of the year? You might need to still run a couple more paychecks to cover where you need to be, but considering we’re very close to the end of the year, I suspect that those reimbursements could basically replace your paychecks for the rest of the year and then you’re not running paychecks and having payroll taxes set aside. That’s going to sit with the IRS until next May. Right. Because you know that you don’t owe more taxes while your business owes you all this money right now. 

Amanda [00:34:50] Exactly. 

Linzy [00:34:50] Does that make sense as a course of action to check with your accountant about that? 

Amanda [00:34:53] It does. I didn’t even know that was a possibility of something like that to happen. 

Linzy [00:34:56] Yeah, you pay yourself regularly and you can check with your accountant. And again, I’m going to say as folks are listening, this is a question for Amanda’s accountant. This is not me saying this is what you should do, but it’s like, is this possible? Right. And this is where with numbers, as you know, Amanda, that curiosity can be helpful. But like, I’m like, can we do this? And your accountant might be like, Sure, yeah, totally. Or like, Oh, yeah, I totally meant to tell you to do that, right? But just to see if you can work this way. And if it can’t, then she should have a different solution for how to get this money back into your pocket, because I don’t think you have like $60,000 at the moment to pay this back and also pay yourself all your own checks. 

Amanda [00:35:29] Yes, exactly. And that’s what I partly what’s been so confusing. 

Linzy [00:35:33] Yes. So this has been a journey through spreadsheet land and beyond. What are you noticing coming towards the end of our conversation today? 

Amanda [00:35:39] I feel more clear. Like I just feel more organized about what the numbers actually are and what my course of action can be following our conversation. I’m also, as always, feeling a sense of gratitude for you and the way that you can actually take things that are a total mess, that are happening for someone else and somehow just be like, Oh yeah, this makes total sense. Let’s just do it this way. So thank you. You’re welcome. Yeah, I’m just. I’m just feeling a little less overwhelmed. 

Linzy [00:36:08] Yes. Yes. Yeah. And I think, you know, now that we’ve worked the numbers, it’s like you can work them into the profit first. And the beautiful thing about profit first is, like, it can be a conversation, right? So if you go to run a couple of paychecks and then something’s changed about your numbers that you need a bit more, you can tweak your percentages, right? You can like take a little money from our backs and top it up. But I think that this will cover your basic needs and then you can always just tweak and adjust, but this brings that simplicity back into your system. Thank you so much, Amanda, for coming on the podcast and sharing this with everybody today. There were definitely points in this conversation with Amanda where my brain hurt. And I think that’s important to share because money – the work that I do with folks and what I teach is how to make it simple, but it doesn’t mean that there aren’t moments where you really have to think about how these things work, right? And I definitely had these moments in our conversation with Amanda where it was like, Wait, sorry, what was that? What’s this? How does this apply? Because it was in a very, like, complicated place. And so taking the time to understand how the numbers needed to fit together and how they needed to flow to the bank account and taking the time to make sure that we highlighted the important things, right. Like what we did in that conversation as we separated out a number for dividends that could be right in the top of Amanda’s profits calculator. So she knows for every dollar that comes in the door exactly what percentage can go towards her dividends. And then based on that dividend percentage, we send a tax percentage that we know is going to cover the taxes for those dividends. We took it so that the information that was most important was at that very top level. So she could see it really clearly. And it took a little bit of doing to get there, but we got there so that working through sometimes with money, when you’re in the process of creating clarity or looking at your numbers, it can feel heavy, murky, confusing. All of those things can happen. But it’s that like being with it and being curious and thinking about, okay, what do I actually need to see here? What is important? What am I trying to accomplish that can help you bring simplicity and clarity into something that otherwise can be very confusing and overwhelming. 

If you want to hear more from me, you can follow me on Instagram @moneynutsandbolts. And if you are looking to sink your teeth into something a little more substantial, I have a free mini training called The Secret to Getting Unstuck in Your Finances. This mini training includes a series of videos that walk you in little bite sized steps through looking at your relationship with money. If you find that you have a lot of anxiety around money, so you just avoid it. If you always feel like you’re just kind of getting by with money, but that’s it. And you know you should be saving for the future, but you’re just not. Or if you always feel like you have just enough money, no matter how many clients you see, you still feel like you’re getting by. This mini training is for you. It’s going to guide you in really starting to understand what your emotional relationship is with money, what your stories are around money, and what I have learned from doing this work with therapists over the last five years is that that is the starting place, right? Once we can identify the stories and the feelings that come up and where they’re coming from. Then we can start to make space for the learning and do the kind of working through that Amanda and I just did together, Right. Which is like digging in and using our skills to create great clarity and create systems. But that mindset work is foundational, and working on your relationship with money is foundational. To be able to learn how to get money working for you because you’re thinking brain needs to be available. So if you are interested in that mini training, I’m going to put a link to it in the show notes. It is the secret to getting unstuck in your finances. Thanks for listening today. 

David [00:00:01] Give yourself permission to have feelings. Give yourself permission to show up and get intimidated and just, like, avoid it for a week. Don’t expect yourself to come to anything new, right, including money and finance, and be like, okay, I’m just going to sit down. I’m going to nail it. I’m going to do it all perfectly from the get go and it’s going to be done. It’s an emotional roller coaster at times of like, things are going great. Things aren’t going so great. 

Linzy [00:00:28] Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So today’s guest is David Frank. David is a financial planner who focuses specifically on therapists through the firm that he’s founded, Turning Point Financial Life. He helps therapists navigate all the elements of their financial life from understanding profit and loss to building a personal budget, to managing student loan debt and investing for retirement and everything in between. But he says, don’t let his love of tax code and spreadsheets scare you off. You’re just as likely to find him with his nose buried in one of Pema Chodron’s books as reading up on the latest financial planning techniques. And I think you’re really going to notice that balance in my conversation with David today. Today, we get into talking about, first of all, emotions and financial planning. What is the relationship between those things? And we talked about how people, at the end of the day, we are emotional. And so really working with that when we are planning for our financial future goes a long way. Being connected with our values. Really helpful insights from him. And he talks about some research that supports that. We talk about what to do if you feel like you’re behind, you know, which is something that I hear a lot from folks coming into Money Skills for Therapists when it comes to saving for retirement that they feel behind, they need to catch up. David and I talk about that story and what to do if you find yourself in that place and how to get started with investing. Good investment strategy. David suggests a really concrete investing strategy to use, whether you’re already investing or just getting started. David gives some very specific advice on how to go about picking what to invest in. Here’s my conversation with David Frank. So, David, welcome to the podcast. 

David [00:02:40] Thank you. I’m excited to be here. 

Linzy [00:02:42] Yeah, I’m excited to have you here. So, David, you are a financial planner who specifically serves therapists. 

David [00:02:51] It’s true. Yep, exactly right. 

Linzy [00:02:53] So for folks who are listening right now, I notice sometimes it can be hard sometimes to identify the terms like difference, like financial planner versus financial advisor versus like investment advisor. Can you tell folks a little bit about what you do specifically? 

David [00:03:06] Yeah, that’s a great point. And it’s such a point of confusion in terms of understanding titles in the financial services industry. And unlike the world of therapy, there is really no standards and there’s not a lot of regulation around who can use what term. So when I say I’m a financial planner, what that means to me is sort of it’s in the name really. It’s like it’s creating a plan for your finances and that incorporates everything from understanding and planning for the finances of your practice as well as your personal finances, and making sure that the whole piece, everything works together. And investing and planning for retirement and using retirement plans is definitely part of financial planning, but it’s not the exclusive focus of financial planning. So when you would compare a financial planner to maybe something like a wealth manager or an investment advisor or a financial advisor, typically financial planners are going to be a little bit more holistic and want to look at things beyond just your investment account, where more traditionally the financial services industry has been just about investments. So very narrowly focused on just that one thing and helping you just do that one thing. 

Linzy [00:04:19] Right. So you’re looking at the whole picture more when you’re looking at some of the financial health and financial future. 

David [00:04:26] Yeah, exactly. And actually, there’s a- I also wrote a blog piece a couple months back talking about some of these different titles and how to determine what type of help you might need. There’s even things like financial therapists or financial coaches out there. So they all- we all sort of like do different things and the titles are very fluid. So I think you really, when you see someone that you might consider working with, I think looking at their website, just understand what they talk about and what their focus is and even maybe have a conversation with them to really understand. Okay, I understand this is the title that you’re using a financial planner, a financial coach or whatever. But tell me like, what is it that you actually do and like, what does the process look like? And that will be a lot more informative than just relying on the title alone because people use the titles inconsistently. 

Linzy [00:05:12] Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And I think also, you know, asking what they do is good to know in general as you think about what you need. Right. Like I know a few years ago, my partner and I were looking to work with an out-of-pocket financial planner and we sat down with someone and he’s like, Well, I’ll just put your numbers in the computer. And I was like, Sorry, what? That’s what you do. Like not a great sales pitch. Hopefully he did more than that. But I realized, like he’s just going to do financial modeling and it’s like, Well, I could do financial modeling. I could see that this person wasn’t going to give me any kind of like strategy or guidance that I needed. And so that was also helpful to realize, like, okay, what you do is actually your approach is not the approach I’m looking for. Yeah. Move on to the next person who is going to meet you more where you need to be. 

David [00:05:53] Yeah. And on that note, I would also say, this stuff is intimidating. Like money and finance. Like it’s intimidating. Yes. And so I think for a lot of us, I include myself in this. I’m reluctant to ask a question sometimes because I don’t want to look like I don’t know what I’m talking about. Yeah. And I think like that is- don’t be afraid to ask questions. And they’re literally like the expression says, like there is no such thing as a stupid question. Feel free. Like ask questions. Ask- especially important when working with financial folks is understanding how you pay them or how are they compensated. So you really just like understand, like feel. Don’t let yourself be intimidated. Let yourself ask questions and be, you know, make sure that you’re that you’re comfortable with the person that you’re talking to. 

Linzy [00:06:40] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I do think what I noticed with therapists and health practitioners is sometimes we can be intimidated because we’re used to being good at things. So when we’re not good at something, you’re kind of like, I don’t want to ask the question that makes me look stupid because I’m not used to being stupid. I’m used to being very good at things. Yeah. And so it can be easy to defer and not speak up, which can lead to a really disempowering relationship with somebody who’s trying to help you or should be trying to help you. 

David [00:07:06] Yeah. And I’d also say just sort of progress rather than perfection here. Like, if you find yourself intimidated and you didn’t ask the question that you really wanted to ask in the meeting, just follow up with an email. No big deal. Yeah, you know, but yeah, just like keep coming back to it. But I totally agree. And I think one of the best life skills is to get comfortable feeling just being a non-expert. So being a beginner and just getting comfortable with like, whoa, this is something I don’t know anything about. This is a little intimidating. And you know what? Especially for those for all the mental health professionals out there listening, like you can tell yourself. I’ve gone to graduate school or maybe beyond. I’ve passed licensing exams. Like I am smart, I can figure things out. There’s tons of evidence to support that. And this finance and money stuff, it’s intimidating and sure, there are nuances to figure out, but it isn’t rocket science like you absolutely can figure this out. It’s just going to take a little bit of time and effort. 

Linzy [00:08:00] Yeah, well, and that comes into a piece that, you know, I think about when it comes to financial planning is like that’s an example, I think, of emotions coming up as part of our expenses of even trying to get help, which is like having that shame come up or defeat or, you know, being very self-critical. So I’m curious, you know, what have you noticed about that role of emotions when it comes to financial planning, the work that you’re doing with people? 

David [00:08:23] Yeah. So, I mean, it really all comes back to emotions. Like I think like when I saw my first therapist years and years ago, like as a client or as a patient, you know, he sort of walked me through. It is like, well, what else beyond emotion is there? Like, we take actions with the hope of achieving a certain, like emotional state, right? And like, that was like a really I was like, wait, I can’t be that. It can’t just be all emotions. But it is. Like that’s what being alive and being a human being is. And I think there’s often a tendency, mostly by folks in my profession, the financial services profession, to be like, this is money. It is about spreadsheets and numbers and investment accounts and emotions like that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about. But in fact, emotions are everywhere in money, you know, just like fear, like pride, like status, like there’s so many things tied up there, like everything comes up. And so I think there’s a number of ways in which emotions are important when it comes to financial planning. But I think first and foremost, while there’s a number of stories I can tell there, but I think first and foremost is just accepting it and just being willing to hold space and just give yourself permission to have feelings, give yourself permission to show up and get intimidated and just like avoid it for a week. Like, that’s okay. You know, like, don’t expect yourself to come to something, anything new, right, including money and finance, and be like, Okay, I’m just going to sit down. I’m going to nail it. I’m going to do it all perfectly from the get-go. And it’s just going to be, it’s going to be done. Like it is- it’s an emotional roller coaster at times of like, things are going great, things aren’t going so great. And I think the practice is making a wider variety or wider range of emotional experiences around money be okay. I think that’s super, super empowering. 

Linzy [00:10:07] Absolutely. I mean, there’s so many pieces there. I’m like, want to pull out so many pieces of what you just said. But you know, that piece around emotion and money is really powerful because I do think that, yeah, it’s easy to take in the message. That emotion when it comes to money is a liability or a distraction or it’s like you need to get past your feelings right in order to really understand money. But as you say, like, what else is there in life, right? Like, what are we seeking as humans? You know, we’re seeking to have experiences of enjoying being alive. And what is that experience? It’s having positive emotions, right? Or having emotions of growth and those kinds of things. And so- but that’s a really helpful grounding as we’re thinking about this, because it is so true. I think so often what therapists and health practitioners and just kind of more emotionally oriented people, what we tend to experience sometimes when you sit down across from somebody who’s so in that logical brain and so in that spreadsheet is like, not only do you not understand what they’re saying, but it doesn’t mean anything. Right? Like there’s no richness to it or depth. And like, this is something that, you know, the more over the years that I’ve been supporting therapists around money, I’ve started talking about this more and more of like, that’s kind of the point, right? Like, the point is to generate meaning in your life or generate connection or like, go after- give yourself more of what you want. And money’s a tool to do that. But when you just look at black and white numbers, you know, if you don’t have a vision for what those numbers actually mean or understanding what those numbers can do, yes, they are meaningless. And that’s not very motivating. Right. Like, it’s not very motivating to put aside a thousand bucks a month for retirement when you’re like, okay, so then I’ll have that number. Okay.

David [00:11:42] Yeah. So what. 

Linzy [00:11:44] What’s the difference between that number and this other number? So there is a flatness that can happen when we don’t think about the emotional part. 

David [00:11:50] Yeah. So, So yeah, you’re right on. And I want to share this. It’s a story, but it’s a study that was done. And it was a study that was written up in the Journal of Financial Planning, which is a thing. And it was about helping folks save more for whatever. For their future retirement or other future plans. And so what they did is they recruited a bunch of people that wanted to save more money. I think they did a couple hundred people were in the study and then they split them into two groups and one group they just gave a bunch of financial education, just like the cold, hard facts. Like here’s what the different account types, like, here’s how interest rates work, here’s how money grows over time, just to like hear all the tactical tools here, like the technical pieces you need to understand to save more. So that was group one was just financial education. Group number two, they didn’t get any financial education at all. And in fact, they were told to bring in a sentimental object, like some object that has sentimental meaning to them. And then what they did in the group is like they were asked to reflect on what values that like why was that sentimental object so important to them? What values were behind that? What did it say about them as a person? And then they tied their savings goals, their desire to say, let’s say, save $1,000 per month for retirement. They connected those saving goals to their values and to what was important to them as a person. Yeah. And then they even literally kind of made a vision because they kind of like drew like graphical representations of what that goal looked like. And so now you’ve got something, you’ve got sort of a tangible financial goal of $1,000 of savings per month connected not only to sort of what your goal looks like, but also how it connects back to the values and what’s really important to you. But again, keep in mind, this group didn’t get any guidance whatsoever on the technical skills of money. And so then they said, okay, great. So they set the two groups on their way, and then I forget how long the time period they looked at, but maybe was like six months or a year or something. They looked at the two groups and saw how their savings behavior changed and both groups saved more money, which was great. But one group saved dramatically more, in fact, three times more than the other group. If you want to guess which group was which, you already know. Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, it was the sentimental. 

Linzy [00:14:03] The sentimental. Yeah. Their values. 

David [00:14:05] Yeah. Like, so connecting all those pieces because like, when you’re that connected and sort of when the goals are not just dry numbers on a spreadsheet or on a page, but it’s really connected to what’s important to you. Then you just sort of, you figure it out, right? Like they didn’t get the financial education piece but like, Man, this is important to me. And I understand. I’ve been really clear about why this is important to me. So now I’m going to make the thing happen. And I mean, three times more. I mean, this isn’t a small effect like this is pretty dramatic. But I think it makes sense because all of this stuff, like it’s work. Like, Yes, you know, like it’s not easy. It’s uncomfortable. It’s extra work. Extra work. But it’s just, you know, it’s it’s hard. Yeah. And, you know, it’s- I think there’s a lot of analogies we can sort of draw between diet and exercise and personal finance or even taking care of the finances of your practice. Like, it’s just tough. There’s going to be times where you just don’t feel like doing it. 

Linzy [00:15:00] Yes. 

David [00:15:00] And that’s going to come sooner or later or it’s something that’s going to go kind of quote unquote, wrong or a little off track. There’s going to be a challenge. And I think the more we can connect back to what really matters to us as a human being, the better suited we are to overcome those obstacles that inevitably will show up 100%. 

Linzy [00:15:20] Yeah, and that’s a topic that I’ve also found more and more organically as I work with folks comes up is is values, right? Like what actually matters to you? And I’m not surprised that the emotional group saved more. Of course, that’s also my like you know, therapist in there. But of course, of course, you know, it’s that deeper stuff that makes the difference. But part of what I think about, too, is there is also for savings, for instance, what can be experienced as sacrifice. Right. You have to make a decision like, I’m going to do this. And because I’m doing this, I can’t do this other thing. So it has to be worth it. There has to be a reason that it’s worth it to, you know, put aside that thousand dollars for that instead of buying some flashy thing that you like would give you that really lovely dopamine hit, you know, four times, actually. Yeah. Just knowing intellectually, like, oh, well, because of the interest rates, this money will grow to this much by the time I’m 60. Like, that doesn’t really mean a lot. And I think a lot of us, too, don’t necessarily- we can’t make a strong connection with that future self as much as we want to. Right? Like I know one of my colleagues, Annie Wright, has a course, a mini course inside my course, where she talks about being able to think about your future self, and especially for people who come from like trauma backgrounds where you didn’t have that sense of solidity, where every day was survival. It’s really hard to think about your future self. And she has folks do the exercise of like doing one of those face aging things. Yeah, you could actually see yourself as you’re older, and I know especially too for people with ADHD, I’ve heard them share that it’s really hard to conceptualize your future self. Right. Like to believe in that future, but it really does have that long-term impact. So I can see how staying connected to now, why is this not just important in the future? Why is this important now? Like, how does this reflect who I am would be a powerful motivator to stay on track rather than an abstract number. That doesn’t really mean anything. 

David [00:17:04] Yeah, man, it’s so. I mean, you hit on a key point, which is like it’s difficult to think about our future self. And I think I think I’ve read some research that just like the default way of thinking about your future self is as a stranger. 

Linzy [00:17:15] Yes. 

David [00:17:16] So it’s just like, why would I, why would I give my money away to a stranger? That doesn’t sound like a smart thing to do, right? 

Linzy [00:17:22] Don’t even know them. 

David [00:17:23] I love the like the A.I. tool to like age yourself. For some reason, like, those visual cues are super powerful. Yeah. So like, yeah, creating even like, a vision board for what you want your retirement to look like. Maybe include that aged AI image of yourself just to really connect with the person that you’re going to be in the future. Yes. And just like realize you want to take care of that person, too. 

Linzy [00:17:45] Mm hmm. Because something that makes me think about, too, is also making sure that you are giving yourself positive experiences, nurturing experiences, fun experiences now, too. Yeah, right. Because that’s also something about retirement. And, you know, I’m sure you probably have stories that can come to mind. I know. I certainly do. Where sometimes people work so hard, they work so hard. They save so hard because it’s like when we retire, we’re going to live the dream. We’re going to spend half the year in Florida and like, you know, people who really often like from working class backgrounds where they sacrificed so much during their life and then they die six months after retirement or die even before they retire. Right. And I can think of many stories like that where you don’t get to have the happy ending that you’ve sacrificed so much to have. Yeah, right. And so, you know, I think about that, too, in terms of when we think about financial planning and at retirement in the future is like I think so often people think that it has to be all or nothing like that. They have to sacrifice everything today to live till tomorrow or they tell themself a story, you know, of like everything’s going to be better tomorrow. And when I think about what you’re talking about of like values, connecting with what’s really important to you, letting that guide your savings, I also think like how powerful, but also let your money do those things for you today. Yeah, because we don’t know. We don’t know what the future is going to bring. But you know what’s important to you today, right? 

David [00:19:01] Yeah. Like so many things in life, the saving stuff is is about balancing. It’s not all or nothing. And it’s so easy for so many of us. I include myself in this. But to fall into all-or-nothing thinking, total black and white, super binary. I don’t know why I like that. Maybe that’s just easy for our brain to like understand and just like, Oh, I get it. It’s this. It’s in this box. Yes. And yes, it’s about balancing. It’s about, you know, saving up for like a trip or something in the next six months or 12 months and saving for retirement at the same time. Yes, it gets tricky. But you’re right. I mean, yeah, I mean, there’s like a number of sad stories that come to mind that, you know, it’s just like people that worked so hard to get to retirement and then they never got there. And again, like that is unlikely to happen, but it can happen. So, yeah, just sort of eyes wide open and balancing. 

Linzy [00:19:49] Yes. Yeah, I think about it like, you know, a therapy term we would use for that is like a both and. It’s a both and. Like it’s important both to enjoy your money today, let it do great things for today. And to save for your future. Right. For that that future version of you who might be hard to connect with, but who’s- they’re going to be you, just older, right? And so trying to connect with why it’s really important to be saving this money, what you want to give that person. And with this, David, like, you know something that you do and that you help folks with, which I do not do at all, is investing. Right. And what I notice is as folks build a better relation with money, like when they do the work that they do with me, which is building out that foundation, getting money working, being like, okay, this is my regular paycheck amount. Taxes are covered. Often folks start saving up money for retirement, feeling like they’re also making up for lost time. Right? So I work with lots of folks who feel like they’re making up for lost time. It’s like, I should have done this when I was 22. Now I’m 41. Shit. Okay, here we go. And getting into the investing world, it can be very intimidating, right? Yeah. For folks who are stepping into that, maybe for the first time, what’s the best way to start with investing? 

David [00:20:59] Yeah, so I think the world of investing is overwhelming and there is just so much, frankly, garbage information that is out there in terms of what to do with your money, whether it’s investing in the latest cryptocurrency or like the next new, you know, hot stock or hot tech company or whatever. There’s always so many people out there like throwing these these ideas. And, you know, it’s not to say that you can’t make a lot of money by investing in the right, you know, investing in Bitcoin at the right time, like ten years ago. Yeah, that that was a great outcome. But it’s very difficult and you might even say impossible. It’s just sort of predict what the next big thing is going to be. And there is a ton of academic research about around this like finances, its own academic discipline. And there’s a lot of really smart people, certainly smarter than me, that have been looking at, well, how do you invest prudently? Like what is the right thing to do? You know, this has been going on for decades. And the research is really is very clear that picking individual stocks or picking individual cryptocurrencies or, you know, investing in wine or art, all of these things are very unlikely to achieve big, you know, good outcomes over the long term. They might do okay for- you might get one pick, right? It might do okay for a couple of years, but especially when we think about saving for things like retirement, which for most of us is, you know, decades away, we need our investments to consistently increase over time. And so the best way to do that is to have a portfolio. And portfolio is just a fancy word for the investments that you have, invest in a highly diversified and kind of what I would call a passive way. And that means – and we’ll talk about tactically how to do this in a second – but what it means is that you’re not picking individual stocks, you’re not buying Bitcoin, you’re not day trading or any stuff like that. You’re just buying consistently over time. Like every time you issue that paycheck to yourself or however you run your finances. You say like, okay, I’m going to take a percentage of this. I’m going to put it in that mutual fund, which is highly diversified and passively managed. And I know because it is those things, it’s going to have low internal costs and it means that so I know I’m not giving my money to the managers of that fund. I’m giving some money, but not a lot of money to them. And costs like that matter a lot when you’re investing over the long term and you know that what’s going to happen is that you’re basically you hold the market as a whole kind of so you’ve basically invested in the entire stock market. And what’s going to happen is that there’s going to be some companies that, you know, kill it, like knock it out of the park that become, you know, the Googles and whatever. All those big tech companies you’re going to own that’s going to be in your portfolio. And when those 10x, 100x in value, you’re going to see some of that. There’s also going to be a lot of companies that go bankrupt or do really poorly. But overall, it’s going to be okay because you’re highly diversified and the market is going to do what the market does, which is – at least over the last 100-plus years – there’s a lot of ups and downs, like a lot of ups and downs. So be ready for that. Like, that is going to happen. It will not consistently increase in value each time, but when you kind of zoom out and look at decades, you’ll see that while there’s a lot of zigzags, a lot of ups and downs, what tends to happen is that the market goes up over time. And so when the market goes up over time, when you’ve invested in sort of a passive low-cost, highly diversified way, you participate in the overall growth of the market. And I think that’s what yields the best outcomes. 

Linzy [00:24:29] Yeah. And it’s very- it’s really not sexy. 

David [00:24:32] It is not. 

Linzy [00:24:33] Just to be like, I’m just going to put my money into literally everything. Just see how everything does. Yeah. And this is where I think, you know, sometimes people will fall into this thing of, you know, trying to outsmart the market. Right? Like trying to pick something, pick the next winner. Right. Is like, I can see why, you know, from almost like a control perspective of feeling like we can be effective. Yeah. We want to be able to do better than average, right? We want to be able to do something that has a big impact. And I do think with investing like business, there can be this get-rich-quick mentality that we can fall into thinking that we can do the right thing and everything’s going to be different. We’re going to like have it made. We’re going to be able to retire at 40 years old because we made one good choice. And as you say, statistically, that’s not how it works. Yeah, right. It might work like that for people who picked Bitcoin, but for every Bitcoin there’s, you know, 100 cryptocurrencies that went nowhere. Exactly. Or that people just lost all their money, you know, with all these markets, like so that kind of highly speculative investment, it has to be money that you, you don’t actually need. Yeah, right. You’re basically gambling at that point. 

David [00:25:38] Yeah it is. I think there is a distinction between gambling and investing, and gambling is like putting it all in red and just like spinning the wheel and seeing what happens. 

Linzy [00:25:45] Yes. 

David [00:25:45] And I think a lot of people think that’s what investing is. And I think you’re you’re right. It’s not sexy. It’s almost counterintuitive. I think Warren Buffett, who’s, you know, this famous investor, I think he said that I think he said this someone smart said this, that we sort of practice benign neglect, which is just like you invest in a diversified way. And then when the market drops, you know, it’s like, oh, the market drops like what’s the right thing to do? The right thing is nothing. 

Linzy [00:26:10] Nothing. 

David [00:26:10] And that’s so difficult because it just feels like things change and we’re like, I’ve got to do something right. Like there’s something I got to do. Yes. And what I always say is, like, therapists should make some of the best investors in the world. And the reason I say that is because the work of investing is not picking winners like you mentioned. It’s rather sitting with your emotions and getting comfortable with a range of emotional experiences around what your portfolio is doing and then doing nothing like this. 99 times out of 100, something happens and the right action is nothing. And you know, I also want to say just like that, that concept of making up for lost time, that’s something that I hear a lot and it sometimes is connected to the question of what should I invest in? Like I hear people say sometimes, like I hear you diversified investing, using target date funds from someone like Vanguard. I hear you that that kind of makes sense. But I mean, I really have to I have to make up for lost time. So, like, I, you know, I need to do something different. 

Linzy [00:27:09] Mm hmm. 

David [00:27:09] And for better or for worse, at least in my opinion. And I think my opinion is backed up by, like, tons of academic research. There isn’t anything. There isn’t anything you can do. I mean, you can kind of pull some levers in terms of like, how much risk you’re willing to take. What sort of the blend of like stock market or equity investing versus fixed income. Yeah. Like all that. But it’s- you can’t really make up for lost time. It’s sort of a philosophical statement almost. But, you know, Yeah, I think trying to make up for lost time can hurt people sometimes because they absolutely there’s like this piece of like desperation almost. It’s like, oh, I got to do this. And yeah, that oftentimes doesn’t work out very well. 

Linzy [00:27:50] No. And it’s a painful story, too, is what I notice when often people are carrying this story of making up for lost time is it’s like in that story there’s like, I failed. I didn’t do it right. And then, as you say, like, that’s where we can become desperate. Or I find, you know, in the work that I help people do, that’s where people can become really hard on themselves and they want to like they’re like, well, I didn’t get to my finances all year, so now I need to sit down for 6 hours and do my finances. Like they’re basically punishing themselves. 

David [00:28:18] Exactly. 

Linzy [00:28:18] That’s not actually how building a sustainable relationship works, right? And what I’m thinking with investing too, it’s like there can be grief totally for the fact that you lost some gains, right? That you didn’t invest when you were 20 and maybe the money, the interest you could have made between 20 and 35 would have been great. But you don’t have it, right. So as you say, like there’s that piece of like sitting with the emotion being like, that really sucks. I wish that I’d been different. Right? You know, like, we’re allowed to feel that way. But the solution isn’t to do something drastic. The solution, I think, is to be even steadier. Right. And even more committed to like, okay, you know, this is my my target. This is why it’s important to me. Like that value piece you talked about earlier, you know, and that’s, you know, something I’m curious about. If people do find themselves in the position where they work with a financial planner and they realize that to get where they need to be for retirement, they’re going to have to put aside quite a lot of money. Yeah, you know, what do you see? You know, thinking back to that values example used earlier, what are some of the ways that you’ve seen people really be able to succeed, maybe using some of that kind of like emotional piece we talked about earlier, the meaning or the values? 

David [00:29:23] I think connecting with values is really important. And I take folks through what I call a life planning process where we get. Really, we paint this vision of your near-term future, not just retirement, but the near-term future of what you’re wanting to create. So like looking into that, you know, connecting into those values, doing things like a vision board or like just having statements that you literally put somewhere like on the fridge door or on the bathroom mirror where you’re just like, continue to remind yourself of what you’re moving towards and why it’s important for you. And the other thing sort of links back to something that you said that this is about developing the relationship. It’s not about fixing everything overnight. It’s about I mean, I think there’s a piece of, you know, like the book Radical acceptance of just like accepting things, how they are like and just accepting that, like, the past can’t be any other way. Like the past is the past and just sort of like letting go of that and accepting that and then sort of you don’t need to like, quote unquote, fix everything overnight. Like if you’re spending too much money, it’s like, okay, well, let’s just like develop a practice of like coming back to it. Like, I sort of talk about having money dates with your software, like every week or so. You’ve got a scheduled time. It’s on the calendar. That you treat it with as much respect as you get sort of a client appointment. You’re just like, This is my time to sit down at money and look at things and then just begin to think like, okay, how can we change things? And, you know, sometimes there are, you know, painful changes that need to be made. And like, like that’s tough, you know, maybe the mortgage is really actually unaffordable. Like, you know, like, I think that’s like the biggest one that I see. Like, sometimes it’s like the housing the housing that we’re in actually doesn’t work with our overall financial plan. And so we need to change that. And that’s painful or can be. But also don’t don’t jump into action like too soon, don’t catastrophize, just sort of be like, okay, let’s just keep back and revisit, keep revisiting it and thinking like, okay, here’s what my numbers are. I kind of know what needs to happen. I need to keep moving in this direction. Doesn’t need to happen overnight because nothing really happens overnight anyway. So just like how do I keep moving myself closer and closer and Yeah, and just. And just have someone like a financial planner in your life. Or maybe it’s, you know, or a friend or an accountability buddy or something like that. Like having someone else in the conversation with you I think is really powerful. That’s why I have my own financial planner because like, yeah, I could do it myself, but like I need someone who doesn’t live between my two years to be like in this conversation because it be like I get emotional about this stuff too, and sometimes I catastrophize, you know, things happen and it’s like having an outside party who is not as hooked into the emotions, who can be like, okay, we’re going to take a deep breath, look at the reality of the situation and think about what we can do to get closer to where we want to be. 

Linzy [00:32:02] Yeah, like I’m hearing, you know, a kind of a sustained being with, you’re talking about like, yeah, it’s building of that tolerance to keep being with it. It’s not about being with the problem once and making some drastic move and then it’s fixed and you don’t have to do it again. Like, Yes, you know, our relationship with money is an ongoing relationship. Yes. And so it’s that like, yeah, coming back to it, being curious like something curiosity is something I always encourage because I was a trauma therapist, is the type of therapy I used to do. And so curiosity can be really good at disarming anxiety and getting our problem-solving brain back online. Right. And being curious is like, okay, well, like what if this, what if that, how can that get me closer to where I want to be? What if I did sell my house? What if we did move into a condo? Would actually be a relief in some ways. Yeah, right. And again, I feel like that grief piece comes up again of like, sometimes we do have to grieve. Grieve that like our situation is unsustainable. Grieve that we have to make a certain decision to create more sustainability. That means we have to let something go. But therapists are good at that. Yeah, we do the feelings professionally. So what I’m hearing from you is like we have the capacity to do that. 

David [00:33:06] Absolutely. Yeah. What I always say is like finances, both in your practice and your personal finances. It’s not a project to complete, like it’s a practice to develop because it like it’s never for better or for worse. Like it never it never ends. Yes. It’s just something that we have to incorporate as part of our lives. 

Linzy [00:33:22] Absolutely. Yeah. David, for folks who want to get more into your world or learn more about you, where can they find you? 

David [00:33:29] Yeah, the best place to find me is just on my website. The name of my firm is Turning Point, so the website is turningpointHQ.com. So HQ like abbreviation for headquarters, TurningpointHQ.com. I’ve got like a bunch of blogs, free resources and guides on there. And more information about what working with me one-on-one would look like. 

Linzy [00:33:46] Wonderful. Thank you so much. I really I really enjoyed this conversation today and I think our listeners are really going to appreciate it. 

David [00:33:51] This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. 

Linzy [00:34:06] Feel like David was really speaking my language. In terms of just the value of being able to be with your money. Feel the feelings like let that happen and then come back to it and keep working on it. That emotional piece, as you mentioned, is unavoidable, right? Inevitably, we’re going to have emotions about our money. And I really loved his point that at the end of the day, humans are emotional. Like, why do we do the things that we do to have certain emotional experiences? Right. So that is part of our relationship with money. So being connected to that and noticing, okay, your money right now is giving you negative hard feelings, maybe. What are the emotions you want your money to give you and how can your money support you? And like, living those values that gives you certain emotional experiences is a very clarifying and grounding way to think about what our money can do for us. You can follow me on Instagram @moneynutsandbolts. If you want more from me and if you want some support from a free resource for me with the emotional part of money which David and I talked about today quite a bit, you can check out my free mini training, The Secret to Getting Unstuck in Your Finances. This is a mini course that supports you in being with your emotions around money, identifying what’s there for you, and looking at how to start to shift your emotional relationship to money. This is really the first step I find with being able to learn financial skills is work on the emotional piece. See what’s there. Start to shift your emotions around money. So that’s secret to getting unstuck in your finances money training. I will put the link to it in the show notes, but you can find it at workshops.Moneyskillsfortherapists.com/gettingunstuck. Or click on the link to show notes to get that getting unstuck in your finances mini training today. Thanks for listening. 

Omolara [00:00:01] How do we make sure that these practices that we have, how do we really make sure that they become not only impactful to patients but impactful to populations? Right. And the way to do that, a lot of times, the easier way to do that is through these partnerships, because it’s just so much slower to try and get one by one by one by one to make the impact that I think a lot of your listeners really want to make. 

Linzy [00:00:28] Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So today’s guest is Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo. She is a pediatrician and professor turned health equity entrepreneur and funding consultant who helps mission driven health practitioners, like the folks who are listening to this podcast, connect with funding to be able to do the work that we do. Today we get into how to partner with nonprofits to be able to serve the folks that you love to serve. This episode is going to be so great for folks if you serve a population who typically cannot pay very much for therapy, if it’s really hard for you to serve the folks that you love to serve and that you’re passionate about serving while also getting paid enough to be okay, to have that financial stability that we talk about on this practice. Dr. Omolara brings this really interesting solution to this equation. By teaching how to partner with nonprofits and get access to grants and money that are out there, you know, that is available to serve those folks that you love to serve. And by creating these partnerships, you can have access to serving these populations that often are underserved and could really use your expertise. She gives us a rundown today on kind of the world of the contracts that are out there, what this looks like. We talked about mindset shifts for pricing contracts when you’re moving into doing contract work and bringing your expertise to organizations in this new way. And this really does strike me as a beautiful solution to maintain access for folks while also making sure that you are being paid well for your expertise and also that you’re able to increase your impact by taking the expertise that you might take for granted sitting alone in your office, just being really good at what you do and not necessarily recognizing that taking that expertise and not just being able to access funding to allow you or your team to serve folks directly like direct clinical services or therapeutic services to the folks that serve. But also you being able to go in and start to train people who work with a population that you know so much about. So like so many so many possibilities here to expand your impact through this world of contracts. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Omolara Thomas Uwemedimo. So, Dr. Omolara, welcome to the podcast. 

Omolara [00:03:28] Thank you so much. I’m super excited to be here. 

Linzy [00:03:32] I’m really excited to have you here. And we were just chatting just a little bit before we started recording that. I’m excited because what you teach, like this world that you help folks access, is a world I certainly know very little about. And I think the folks who are listening are also going to be new. So can you tell us a little bit more, just give us like that intro to these health contracts and yeah, this world that you help folks navigate? 

Omolara [00:04:01] Yeah, I think the best way to frame it is always – and this probably comes from my medical background – is a case vignette. 

Linzy [00:04:09] Beautiful. 

Omolara [00:04:10] And I can use kind of how I got into this, you know, Strong Children Wellness is my practice. And ultimately when myself and my co-founders were thinking about how do we get the initial capital to really start our practice, which I’ll share a lot about more later, we really were very, of course, hesitant about getting into debt because of course as medical doctors. Yeah, yeah, a lot of trauma there. Yeah. 

Linzy [00:04:37] Yeah. You probably have a little bit of debt already, right? Yes. Yeah. 

Omolara [00:04:40] And so ultimately, one of the things that we had all brought from our academic lens was the fact that we had really always, when we were starting programs, try to get grants. And what we found from that was that we had this opportunity, even as a for-profit, to partner with nonprofits that were serving the populations that we wanted to serve. And actually, as they would seek grants, they would bring us on as contractors to be able to deliver the services. So primarily the work that we do now is really trying to make sure that we can develop these partnerships. I like to call them for-profit nonprofit partnerships or as profitable practice partnerships where you have a target population that a nonprofit has. And now you guys can come together, but there’s this pot of funding that only the nonprofit, a lot of times, can access, right? They’re able to bring you in and develop a contract. The other way that we’ve seen this is that sometimes even if a grant is not available or there’s not a past funder, a lot of nonprofits are doing really well, but really struggle with bringing mental health services, other services in for their clientele that they know will absolutely be transformational. And so even in their own budgets, they usually will be open to being able to subcontract these practices and have retainers, which provides recurring stable revenue. That you can have and know – a lot which allows for you to diversify your income streams – Of course, from just patients to these partner organizations or income streams. That’s right. Yeah. That ability of the practice. 

Linzy [00:06:28] Well, it’s something that immediately comes to mind for me is I know a lot of folks who listen to this podcast can struggle with the question of like how you make the business work well, so that you are financially okay, right? And so you’re not living much hand-to-mouth, but also serve the folks you love to serve. And what sometimes folks end up having to do is pivot. They end up having to serve different people who can’t actually pay them what they need to be paid. But when you have like a passion for serving people who are never going to be able to pay you $200 per hour, what I’m hearing here is like, this is this beautiful opportunity because there is funding for those folks to be served. There are nonprofits already focusing on those folks that are in a position to get money to pay for services that those clients can’t necessarily pay for themselves. So it sounds like this beautiful bridge to be able to serve the folks who literally can’t pay out of pocket for services, but who might be the people that you personally, as a therapist, would love to keep serving? 

Omolara [00:07:24] Yeah, I talk about these costs like I do a math class and I’m always talking about these three costs that when you’re you aren’t able to navigate your practice by doing both profit and purpose, that there seems to be a cost that you’ll have. And the one that you mention is the access cost, right? The cost where, because I’m focused on profitability, which we need to be focused on business, we don’t because we haven’t had an expanded view of where we can get our cash flow, we aren’t able to provide that accessibility to those that maybe we were even called to serve when we entered the profession. And then you have that quality cost, which is really around the fact that you are working so hard and you’re having these really small margins of profit that you can’t- you don’t really have the bandwidth to bring in the types of services that you know would improve the quality and impact for your clientele. And so those are the things that become really difficult for our families and for a lot of the practices who want to serve that. 

Linzy [00:08:31] Yeah, absolutely. And I think that access piece ends up being a piece that some folks end up having to let go because of those other pieces you’re talking about. So this sounds like this beautiful bridge. So for folks who are listening and they’re like, okay, I’m here, I now understand that there is this like other pot of money. There’s this other avenue to be able to build your business serving folks who are not going to be out of pocket people. How can therapists start to approach, you know, this world? Like where do you start to start to be able to create these partnerships you’re talking about? 

Omolara [00:09:05] So where do you start? So I think the biggest place that we try to start is being able to start to survey who it is. I like to say the riches are in the niches. 

Linzy [00:09:16] Yes. 

Omolara [00:09:16] So, thinking about your practice, right, and thinking about where is the gap? So where is that moral tension? So what I mean by that is, you’re serving people, but there might be groups that you’re just like, I wish we could get to these people. This looks so different from many of the practices we’ve had, people who want to work with domestic violence survivors or want to work with immigrants that want to work with those different populations. There could be certain ethnic groups that aren’t getting to them, youth, other things. And so ultimately what you want to do is identify who is that population. And then what you want to do is you want to start to survey and look at who are the organizations that actually are already bought in and connected to those populations. And once you do that, then the goal is for us to be able to start to think about, okay, these are the populations, this is who I want to serve. Now, how do we get in front of the decision makers? That’s a lot of the work that we do in terms of how they put together, like the right email and elevator pitch and being able to connect with them. And once that connection is made, that allows me to have discovery and start to find out where the synergies are, Right? 

Linzy [00:10:28] Yeah. Well, it’s, you know, as you’re talking, I was down with COVID a couple weeks ago and I feel like I’m still coming back up. So I like, you know, I had a forced horizontal holiday is what my grandmother used to call them, where you’re just like, I am on the couch. This is where I live. And while I was on the couch, I read two business books, which I don’t generally advocate to do when you’re down. But my brain was looking for stimulation, and I read a book which is like an entrepreneurial book called Who Not How. And that’s coming to mind for me as you’re talking, because the premise of that book is basically if you have a problem – and in this case the problem is like, I really want to serve folks who are survivors of domestic violence, but I know that they can’t pay me what I need to get paid to live. How do I do that? The book would say, Don’t ask yourself how. Ask who? Who can help you solve this problem? And what I’m hearing is the who in this case would be these like nonprofits that already have these established relationships with funders and already are in this world. That’s like a beautiful relationship that you can form, which is going to let you serve those folks right and and access that funding by connecting people who are already in that world, who already have access to those resources, which makes so much sense. 

Omolara [00:11:36] Yes. And I think one of the things around this in particular is being able to just not be as limited. I think a lot of the times what we do as practitioners is we see what has worked for other people and it takes away our creativity. Okay, this is how you’re supposed to open a practice. This is what it’s supposed to look like. It’s supposed to either be private pay or insurance. And then, you know, we’re supposed to just build up and grow by volume by any means necessary. And what this allows for people to do, I like to say, is it allows for them to expand outside of just clinical care. Why I say that is because I think many of your listeners probably already know the term social determinants of health and know about this idea that health outcomes, whether it be mental health or physical health outcomes, only 20% is actually due to clinical care. And 80% is due to all of these other things: where they live, work, play, how they move throughout the world. And my goal is really for us to think about – if we want to make impact in our patients lives – thinking really broadly, does that include training, you know, staff at other organizations about how to address mental health? Does it include health education? Does it include consulting with these organizations to be able to help them think about how they can do maybe psychological first aid or support? So all of us have expertise that we’ve built up over this time that- clinical care is like minuscule. It’s probably the lowest hanging fruit of what we’ve accomplished and what we have to give to organizations. 

Linzy [00:13:17] I think, you know, that’s such a good reminder to have, because I think so often, too, I know, you know folks who tend to be around in my world tend to be perfectionistic and we can be hard on ourselves and we’re always thinking about the things we don’t know and that new training that we want to take or that client that we couldn’t really figure out how to help them. And we’re not necessarily owning that expertise that we’ve honed over years or decades. The things that we just live and breathe everyday that for other professionals or other folks would be a total revelation, right? Would blow their minds. 

Omolara [00:13:50] Exactly. And sometimes it’s easy in the way that we do that and think about the funding piece is starting to think about, you know, what are the populations that you’re already serving who a lot of other practices have difficulty serving or have a lot of or don’t serve. And you just always like they seem to just have great outcomes when they-[cuts out]. And then starting to break down what is it that I actually do like, What do we do differently, whether it be how we structure our practice or how we engage and start to build out what your framework is. Because once you’re in that, that becomes something that is actually sellable to other organizations, whether it be through trainings, whether it be through the education piece that you probably insert into your practice that you don’t realize. All of those things. I think the funnest part about doing this is being innovative about the contracts and like, okay, what is the service offer? What are the service offerings that we really think are going to be the highest impact for reaching these populations through these organizations? 

Linzy [00:14:57] Yeah. So, you know, as people step into this work, something that occurs to me is they’re going to have to move into thinking about contracts rather than hours. So I’m curious, like from your work of supporting folks making this shift, like what are the mindset shifts that need to happen as they start to move into pricing out a contract rather than like a clinical hour? 

Omolara [00:15:18] That is that’s a good question. I didn’t even like think about that- should but yeah and it comes up of course. I didn’t think about that. So I think one of the biggest things for our practice owners is getting used to the numbers. Numbers are big where we do contracts with organizations and they’re kind of like, someone’s going to pay this? 

Linzy [00:15:38] Yes. 

Omolara [00:15:40] That’s the first thing. I’m like, Yes, this is extremely valuable. So I think thinking one of the parts is paying like getting money for value instead of money for time, which is what we are used to as clinicians getting money for time. And so what I try to think about and help them think about is let’s do- let’s say you weren’t able to provide this, what would that organization have to do to pay someone to come in full time and do this work that you’re doing and let’s compare? And they’re like, Oh yeah, they’re going to need to hire this type of person. They’ll probably need this. And then we start to see how big that number is. And you’re like, Oh, okay, this is why this number is so big, because there’s a certain level of value not only on how much it’s going to cost, but also trying to position what is it after you do this that they’re going to be able to do? And so when we start to do that, then it starts to unravel and say, okay, value based pricing, not time based pricing is the first probably mindset shift. The other piece that we start to think about as well is thinking about not their rate as a clinician, but their rate as a consultant and starting to back into what those numbers cost. So we usually think about what is your ideal salary as a consultant? What is the number of hours that you can do this work? And we actually do the math of that into what their hourly rate is, not in a way that needs to be broadcast in the contract. But as we think about how many hours they’re contributing to the work, we’re able to now insert that in so that we can price it accordingly, make sure that they’re getting the salary they deserve, but also making sure they are able to, you know, keep that as something internal for them, but also allow for these contracts to make sure that they have the right pricing and they’re not underpriced. I often say to my clients that underpricing can actually make you lose contracts. 

Linzy [00:17:47] Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. You know, there is something about kind of the authority, right, of really owning what I’m going to do has been really valuable, you know, being rooted in, Okay if they had to do this without my help, they’d be bringing in a full-timer for a whole year and they would have to have these kinds of resources. Yeah, like you really sitting in that and putting out a price that’s a kind of respectable price. It’s so true, because if people see the cheapest, like the cheapest doesn’t have a connotation of quality to it, they don’t expect the best if you go with the cheapest. So yeah, and that values-based piece I think is so so important because something that occurs to me too, with with this opportunity, this way of expanding your practice, is it really is scalable. Right? And that’s something we kind of talk about in the business world a little bit. It’s scalable, kind of the same way that like a course is scalable where you are now doing like possibly one too many education, like you were coming in and you’re bringing your expertise that you’ve honed over the last five years and you’re training like 150 of their staff to now be able to like implement a new approach or, you know, whatever it is that you’re bringing in your expertise, you are multiplying your impact so much. And so that is worth so, so much, that organization and really recognizing that impact. 

Omolara [00:19:04] Yeah. And then I think other people don’t think about. So I like to say that our work helps improve revenue, reach, and impact. And the reach part I think is really important also in terms of thinking about making these partnerships and it becoming almost this referral ecosystem, right? That not only provides a new revenue stream through contracts, but also allows for your name to come up and be the go-to like if they do have clients that actually are able to come in to your services on their own. So I think it’s really important. And one of the things that’s happened for us is that we as a practice, I don’t think we’ve done social media marketing since like 2022 or something like that. It’s great. We have 20% monthly growth, but it’s because we- it’s not because we don’t market, but because this type of marketing, right, is just having calls with different organizations that are aligned has now allowed for us to be able to have our name in the community as the go-to for this. And so whether that be people that we access through organizations or people who access organizations and then we become the referral to come through. So I just want to point out that this also has this dual fold benefit of a new revenue stream, but also really supplying a distribution channel towards your original revenue stream as well. 

Linzy [00:20:30] Absolutely. Yeah. And you know, in my mind that’s some of the best type of marketing, which is just pure relationship building, right? Like you’ve just really you’ve built relationships that allow you to actually get in front of people and they know who you are. They have a real sense of you and your expertise like you’ve, you know, you’ve built up your expertise and your reputation by just doing what you do best, which is the actual work that you do. 

Omolara [00:20:51] Exactly. It’s been interesting because I think, you know, a lot of our work has really focused on. So I like to say our theory of change. I’m very into health justice. Our theory of change for health justice, specifically for communities of color, is increasing the presence and reach of diverse teams, diverse clinicians. And so I’m always just trying to think about how do we make sure that these practices that we have, if that’s your goal, how do we really make sure that they become not only impactful to patients but impactful to populations? Right? And the way to do that, a lot of times the easier way to do that is through these partnerships because it’s just so much slower to try and get one by one by one by one to make the impact that I think a lot of your listeners really want to make. 

Linzy [00:21:44] Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, part of what I’m hearing with this is there’s this funding that’s kind of out there that, you know, as an individual sitting in my office by myself, I don’t have access to, but by, you know, building these relationships, we then have access to these funding conversations that are already kind of happening that just right now we’re not privy to. I’m curious, like, what what is the size of these kinds of grants that exist? Like how much money are we talking about that is out there for the kind of folks we might love to serve? 

Omolara [00:22:14] Yeah, it depends, honestly. So we’ve had people who work with us for six months and they’ve gotten like $600,000 in grants and contracts. We’ve got people who worked with us for three months and have gotten $250 or, you know, I think what it looks like usually the midpoint is probably $100,000. Yeah. And what we do is we try to make sure that you’re not putting all your time and energy in one bucket. So we try to have at least a quarter in five organizations who are target organizations. And that way not only are you bringing our services to them to say, Hey, there’s an opportunity to partner, what also happens is that now that we’re on their radar, we might find two of those organizations who are like, Yeah, we have the bandwidth. We want to bring you in. We’re going to go through our budget and bring you in that way. We might have two other organizations who are like, We don’t have that funding yet, but we’re going to go to our past funder. Even though there’s not a grant available right now, we can go to a past funder and tell them this is a new opportunity. And usually those past funders, because that organization already has showed, you know, impact, they’re easily willing to actually give another 125, 150,000 to start this programing and move that forward. And what happens is, while that money is coming through, when you’re delivering those organizations, you usually are working with the development office to identify more funding for the future in order to keep you going. Because I like to say that a lot of it you can have either bigger contracts or even some smaller ones, about 50 or so that are what we call gateway contracts. And what that is. It means that you might- it might be training, it might be education for six months. What that looks like is you getting your foot in the door, them falling in love with your work. 

Linzy [00:24:08] Yes, Yes. 

Omolara [00:24:10] And then, okay, we have to we just have to find the funding to keep going. Right. 

Linzy [00:24:14] Got to keep it rolling. 

Omolara [00:24:15] So I like to say that most people from like a small contract to now having, you know, years and years. Some of our contracts right now are at the three-year mark at this point. It’s because they now can’t see their organization without the service that you provide. 

Linzy [00:24:33] Right. And I’m curious like to be really tangible about you know what these contracts are tied to, like say like a $100,000 contract. Would that be for education and training? Are we talking service contracts? Like what are some of the specific examples just to get folks like really get their wheels turning on what they can be offering these organizations? 

Omolara [00:24:52] Yeah. So if we look at the like gradation of price, basically your smallest contract is usually going to be maybe a health education contract. So what I like to say is usually we don’t price our contracts any less than, you know, take a month or something like that. And we don’t we don’t actually like to have our contracts any less than six months. You know, it depends because it always depends on the model, the modality of how you’re delivering that education. That’s always important. And what that looks like is kind of the baseline. The next here is usually training. So training staff at an organization, even training leadership at an organization that is usually next tier and garners you a lot more per month, maybe somewhere between the 20 to 30,000 or more monthly retainers. Then the next step is consultation. So leadership where you might be brought on because you’re a mental health specialist in LGBTQ mental health and they are seeing that there’s a lot more of those populations and they want to figure out kind of how to work their services to be more informed. So instead of providing services, you are talking to the leadership, giving them support on how they need to format their programs. The highest here is direct services because we know teams are needed, people are needed. So that usually starts to garner you probably the 50 K per month or more, depending on how intense that is. A lot of times what we recommend is people not directly providing the one one-on-one therapy, but that looks like dropping groups or close cohort groups where it’s like cohorts or it looks like evaluations and assessments to see where they’re at and then usually they’re funneled into your practice potentially to be able to get more ongoing psychotherapy. So that level of care. So that’s kind of the gradation that we usually see. Those numbers are very different of course, depending on what it looks like. But yeah, so as you can imagine, the cash flow piece becomes really much better tool where they’re able to know for the next 6 to 12 months. This is coming in regardless of like how many patients I see. The last thing I did want to say is that, how I always like to position these contracts is that as a solopreneur or whatever kind of practice you have or group practice, our goal is to make sure that these projects don’t rely on you. So a lot of times we insert a therapist or a staff or other staff member who will be able to deliver this, right? And so that then allows for you to make hires with the money in hand and de-risk the hiring process. 

Linzy [00:27:48] Yes. Yeah. We don’t want to just give you thousands of sessions a month to do. That’s not good. Yeah. Yeah. So also what I’m hearing too, is like helping to make sure that folks are taking on these contracts in sustainable ways. Right. And you have the right people in place to be able to fulfill the contracts without, you know, burning yourself out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Omolara [00:28:09] Very important. 

Linzy [00:28:10] Very important. So this is all very cool. It’s a lot of information, like it’s a whole other world. So for folks who are listening, if they’re curious about learning more about what you do, more about this world, where can they find you? 

Omolara [00:28:23] Yeah. So I’m- my stomping grounds are usually on LinkedIn, but we have a quick links and resources. It’s bit.ly/melaninandmedicine. Or you can just go to melanin and medicine dot co. So that’s melaninandmedicine.co. I’m on LinkedIn, on that quick resources, you can find all the places that we’re at. But yeah, I think, you know, we do masterclasses every month. We have an on-demand webinar so that you can learn about the process because like you said, it’s a lot of information, but at least there you can pause it. 

Linzy [00:29:00] Yes, Yes. 

Omolara [00:29:03] So yeah. 

Linzy [00:29:04] Awesome. Yeah. And I did. I was looking at your website this morning and you’ve got like a whole range of ways to support folks with getting into this world, which is so exciting. 

Omolara [00:29:12] And we also have a podcast too. 

Linzy [00:29:15] So we’ll put all those links in the show notes so that folks can easily find you. Thank you so much, Dr. Omolara. This was like so informative today. Really, I’m sure folks’ wheels are turning. 

Omolara [00:29:25] Thank you so much for the opportunity. I’m just trying to get this information out to so many more of us. So thank you. 

Linzy [00:29:31] Thank you. Something that really sticks out to me from this conversation is it’s easy for us as health practitioners, kind of, you know, in our own little silos, sitting in our office, to forget that there’s this whole huge world out there of funding that exists to serve the folks that we are passionate about serving. So really appreciated Dr. Omolara’s perspective today and just this world, you know, that she helps folks navigate of being able to form these relationships, These, as I named them, how I’m thinking about them is these who do not have relationships, who is already in touch with the folks that you love to serve and who already is in a position to get this funding that you can get on your own, creating those beautiful relationships so that you can bring your expertise to the folks who already are serving or interfacing with the people that you know so well, how to serve, and also bring you into contact with funding to give you stable income into your business to do what you do best. So lots of really cool possibilities out there and I hope that some folks listening today are inspired to go out and start to pursue these opportunities and and let your expertise reach more and more people who will benefit so much from what you do. You can follow me on Instagram @moneynutsandbolts. And if you’re enjoying the podcast, it really, really, really helps if you could take 2 minutes to jump over to Apple Podcasts and leave me a review. That is the best way for new folks to find us and be part of these conversations. Thanks for listening today. 

Christine [00:00:02] What people don’t always think about or don’t realize is that even if you don’t take insurance, that doesn’t mean your clients can’t use their insurance benefits to help cover part of the costs. A lot of people have what’s called out-of-network benefits, where they’re able to actually get reimbursed up to 80% of the cost of a therapy session once they meet their deductible. 

Linzy [00:00:28] Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question: How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. So today on the podcast we have Christine Li. Christine Li is not a therapist and she’s not a financial professional either. She’s the founder and CEO of Mentaya. Christine is an advocate for mental health. Growing up, she witnessed many of her friends fall victim to teen suicide and saw the impacts that mental health was having on the lives of the people around her. When she stepped out of her work at Google, she thought about becoming a therapist, but then thought maybe she could use her tech skills to support therapists who she’s always seen as making the world better. And she saw that while so many companies were spending their tech know-how to make therapy cheaper at the expense of therapists, none of them were actually doing anything that made therapists’ lives better. So she went about a mission of trying to create tech that actually improves the work that we do as therapists. And I think she’s been really successful. Today on our episode, Christine and I talked about how therapists can be very black and white in the way that they think about insurance in the United States. It’s like you’re either an insurance therapist who’s on insurance or you’re an out-of-pocket, maybe a premium fee therapist who’s not and has nothing to do with insurance. And we talked today about how there’s this huge gray area in between where we can support clients, even if you are not taking insurance, through helping them to understand and use their out-of-network. And Mentaya’s thing is making that as painless for clients and therapists as possible. We talk about the benefits that your clients may have through their out-of-network benefits that many of us don’t even know about, and that, hey, American therapists who are listening, you yourself might even have out-of-network benefits that you don’t realize that you have, that could get you reimbursed for health care that you’re accessing. And we also talk about just the benefit as private practice owners of making insurance easier for your clients. This is so often something that our clients, if they’re having to navigate insurance through like super bills and dealing with insurance companies, that’s really stressful for them as well. And we talked about how you as a private practice owner and a business owner, it’s beneficial for you and your clients when you also help them make it that part of your financial relationship easier. Here is my conversation with Christine Li. So, Christine, welcome to the podcast. 

Christine [00:03:27] Thank you so much for having me. 

Linzy [00:03:29] I’m really excited to have you here because, you know, I know part of what we’re going to chat about today is therapists and insurance. And you are someone who helps with this kind of like puzzle or challenge that therapists have with insurance. But you are not a therapist. 

Christine [00:03:44] No. 

Linzy [00:03:45] Yes, I’m excited about that because I feel like you’re going to have like a different perspective, you know, like those of us who are in the therapist’s world are so, like, soaked in certain ways of thinking about these things. But you are someone who’s kind of come from outside of the space to help us with this challenge. So I’m sure you probably have some, like different ways of looking or thinking about these things, having worked with therapists, that we might not see. 

Christine [00:04:08] No, for sure, I mean, I think it’s sometimes really useful too, because when you’re in a, you know, you’re surrounded by people who are all thinking similarly and you have been educated and trained to think in certain ways that it’s sometimes helpful to have an outside perspective, like you said. 

Linzy [00:04:21] Yeah, absolutely. So thinking then about therapists and insurance, what have you seen from the folks that you work with at Mentaya that you support at Mentaya? Why do you see therapists really grappling with insurance and if they should take insurance? What have you noticed about that relationship? 

Christine [00:04:38] I have talked to, I don’t know, hundreds, I think, up there, because at this point I wanted to become a therapist myself at some point. I still do, I think, later on. But one thing that I was really surprised by is this discomfort with money almost, where it’s almost like because you want to help people, there’s- I don’t know if it’s shame or discomfort around like wanting to pay yourself a lot and wanting to- like everyone wants to make a great living and be financially free. But also there’s this like problem of accessibility. Obviously, as a therapist, you want to be accessible to more than just people who can afford a certain rate. And so I think that’s where a lot of the difficulty of, you know, do I take insurance to try to be a little bit more accessible or do I do private pay and sort of prioritize my own needs and, you know, financial freedom for myself? And so I think that’s sort of the problem I hear a lot of therapists grappling with. 

Linzy [00:05:38] Yeah, I think, like we often see those things as like an opposition, right? It’s like I’m either helping other people, but then I’m not going to be able to make very much money. But that’s like kind of I’m mission-oriented or I have to think about my own financial needs and I’m going to have to make these tough decisions and prioritize myself instead of my clients. 

Christine [00:05:57] Yeah, I think that’s the that’s like a very prevalent way of thinking, I think from what I’ve heard from therapists. But it doesn’t it doesn’t have to be it. I mean, it sucks to have to be able to pick between like I make a great living for myself versus I’m accessible to people. And that’s a big thing of what we’re trying to bridge with Mentaya.  

Linzy [00:06:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I think people see insurance is, you know, the way for and I will say American therapist because I’m in Canada it’s different here but it is I think the way like insurance equals accessible is kind of like the, the way that, that we tend to think about it and that if you’re not on insurance then you’re not accessible. 

Christine [00:06:33] That’s yeah, that’s definitely what I’ve heard from a lot of therapists. I think what people don’t always think about or don’t realize is that even if you don’t take insurance, that doesn’t mean your clients can’t use their insurance benefits to cover part of the costs. A lot of people have what’s called out-of-network benefits, and they’re able to actually get reimbursed up to 80% of the cost of of therapy sessions once they meet their deductible. And a lot of therapists either don’t realize or they kind of know, but they’re like, oh, my clients will handle it. Yeah. So you’re really making the decision and thinking to yourself, Do I take insurance? Do I not? That’s not really factored in. And on top of that, one thing that I think I heard recently from a therapist is, oh, because I’m able to, you know, charge my full rate, I don’t take insurance. I can do a few pro-bono cases or charge very, very little for people who don’t even have insurance. And so you can serve different types of populations if you don’t take insurance as well. And I don’t think that’s something that people really think about. 

Linzy [00:07:33] Right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So this this piece, this out of networks benefits is important because I know, having worked with therapists over the last five years, teaching Money Skills for Therapists and not being American myself, it’s like I’ve kind of heard like, whispers of like, well, there’s like, out-of-network benefits and like, super bills. I’ve heard these words. I have a sense now of what they mean. But what you just said is something that is new information that I think bears repeating, that many people, if they have out-of-network benefits, you’re saying they can get reimbursed for like 80% of seeing you, even if you’re not on insurance, if they have out-of-network benefits? Can you talk like more about how common that is? Like, how much can we assume that folks have this kind of coverage? 

Christine [00:08:16] Yeah, so it really depends on the person. What we do know is most people have out-of-network benefits. They usually have to meet some sort of deductible, whether it’s $500, $1000, even a couple of thousand, which might sound high, but that’s only, you know, a dozen therapy sessions and you’re able to make it deductible. And then after that, they can actually get reimbursed up to 80%. We’ve seen, I think, as high as 90%. But sometimes it’s on average, we’ve seen closer to, you know, 60 to 70% reimbursement. But that’s still- I don’t, you know, I don’t know how much you’re charging in Canada and the U.S., I’m in San Francisco. And so it’s, first of all, impossible to find a therapist who takes insurance here because the cost of living is so high. And so most therapists charge $200, $250 a session and people are able to get over $100 back per session with their out-of-network benefits. And most people have them. Most people don’t know they have them because, you know, the US health care system is not designed to be particularly consumer friendly.  

Linzy [00:09:16] What? I have only heard good things. No. Yeah, absolutely. So it’s like it might be even that somebody that you’re talking to on the phone, like let’s say that you don’t take insurance or you don’t take a certain insurance and you’re talking to somebody on the phone. So it’s possible that a potential client might even have some coverage for you. Like what I’m hearing is once they meet their deductible, which is going to vary, they might have coverage for you that they don’t even know about because they think that they can only see a therapist who is like in their network. 

Christine [00:09:44] Yeah, because if you think about it from, you know, the average person, consumers perspective, most other services you go to like you go to your PCP or your gynecologist or whatever doctor, a lot of doctors take insurance because, you know, they’ve been able to somehow negotiate rates high enough to make that sustainable for themselves. And so it’s there is no real understanding of out of network because you’re like, okay, either they take insurance, I give them my insurance card and then I don’t really know what happens in back office for doctor’s offices. But I just get my co-pay and that’s it. So that’s people’s impression of, you know, taking insurance and that if you don’t take insurance and you say, oh, I’m cash pay, you know, you pay my full rate, people are like, okay, I either find a therapist who takes insurance, which is, you know, can be difficult to find. Or I just have to pay someone’s full cash rate. There’s not a real understanding of, oh, there’s something in between where you can pay their full cash rate and then get reimbursed afterwards. You have to submit claims to insurance. You have to understand your insurance benefits. It’s kind of complicated, which is why most people don’t know about it. 

Linzy [00:10:46] Yeah, because, like, I’m so used to hearing folks talk about this in black and white terms, unlike in in the therapy world, in our little kind of goldfish bowl. And that, you know, I occupy with some other folks. There’s a lot of debate and I think I’d like a lot kind of like black and white of like take insurance or don’t take insurance, right? Like you’re full fee or your premium, or you like, take insurance, but you’re not going to get paid well. And it’s kind of like people feel like they have to pick one of those routes. Am I going to be like service based and I get paid well, but that’s worth it? Or am I going to like, be out of pocket and only be able to serve people a certain income bracket? It’s black and white. What I’m hearing from you is there’s this like big gray area in the middle that I think most people don’t know about. 

Christine [00:11:28] Yeah, a lot of people don’t necessarily think about that because, I mean, as a therapist, I’m sure a lot of therapists have heard of the concept of super bills. I think a lot of therapists who are private pay in insurance or don’t take, you know, all insurances, they only take some they have some concept of a super bill. It’s like, Oh, I can just give you this bill. And, you know, you have to figure it out yourself. 

Linzy [00:11:49] You deal with it. Exactly. 

Christine [00:11:51] Which, you know, I guess because obviously if you’re not taking insurance, you don’t want to deal with insurance. And so you’re like, all right, here’s some bill. Hey, client, go figure it out yourself. Yeah, but the average client is not going to understand how to even see if they have these benefits, how to even submit super bills. I have so many friends since I’ve started Mentaya that I’ve been telling about, like, Hey, you have out-of-network benefits. You can submit super bills. And they’re like, What is that? Or like, I think my therapist gave me some sort of super bill, but I don’t know what to do with it. Yeah, I think there is this lack of almost education around this whole. 

Linzy [00:12:22] Yeah, absolutely. That’s what I was thinking is like there’s lack of education from consumers, like in which in our case we were call clients. Our clients don’t know about it, but also therapists don’t know about it in terms of like just how robust this benefit can be for the clients that they’re serving, even if you don’t take their insurance. 

Christine [00:12:40] Yeah. So I think the first step is just the educational component. Most people don’t even know they have out-of-network benefits. You have to call your insurance company, okay? You have to ask certain questions. You get transferred around, sometimes the call drops. And so a lot of people even don’t even get to that step, whether they don’t want to call their insurance company because it’s not pleasant for anyone. 

Linzy [00:13:00] Whatever it is, it’s calling your insurance company. Yeah. 

Christine [00:13:03] Or they try and they’re like, I’m kind of confused. Or like, I kept getting switched around and I don’t really understand it. Yeah. And so the first part is just really the educational component on helping people even understand that the insurance benefits you’re paying for or that your company’s paying or allow you to actually get reimbursed for therapy. So that’s kind of the first part of even just. Letting people know. 

Linzy [00:13:25] Yes. Right. And that’s for a consumer perspective. And I’m thinking for therapists who are listening, that’s going to apply to your clients. But it might also apply to you. Like if you are covered by a spouse’s insurance, you might even yourself have out-of-network benefits you could be using that you don’t know about. 

Christine [00:13:40] Yes, exactly. I think a lot of people just- it’s even harder, actually, if you’re covered by your spouse, to figure out what your benefits are, and all that, because it’s- you’re not the primary insurer now. 

Linzy [00:13:50] You can’t pick up the phone and call. Yeah. Now there’s a middle person and your spouse. Okay. Yeah. So there’s this education piece that, like people just don’t even know about this. So, you know, I’m hoping folks who are listening today, if this is new for you, I hope that you’re like taking it in. And I’m hearing the next step is to actually look into your individual insurance and see like, do I have this coverage? What does this coverage look like for me? 

Christine [00:14:11] Yes, And especially as a therapist, if your clients don’t know, I think a lot of therapists are like, oh, you can call your insurance. You know, I don’t know. Figure it out yourself. Yeah. Which puts the onus on the client, which is, you know, totally fair. But if you think about it from sort of a business person. 

Linzy [00:14:26] Yeah. Yeah. 

Christine [00:14:27] As a therapist, you really should be incentivized to help your clients understand if they they have these benefits. But when you say like, Hey, my fee is 200 a session, there’s going to be some clients who are like, Oh, I don’t know that’s kind of expensive, that much, you know, every week for a year is a long time. It’s a lot of money. Sure. But if you say, hey, my fee is 200, but you might have these out-of-network benefits that allow you to get reimbursed for a portion of my cost. You know, I can check it for you and tell you what they are that can help you just convert a client who otherwise might have been like, No, thank you. And then that helps you grow your business. 

Linzy [00:15:05] Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Because I see it as like it’s a way that you can extend the service that you’re offering and make it really clear to somebody like this is going to be easy by you having that information. So, so for that then, like what options do therapists have that to, like have a tool to help with this piece or outsource this piece? How as a therapist, if you are not part of an insurance company, if you’re not paneled or if your panel was, say, one insurance company, but you know, the people come with other insurances, how can you get this information? 

Christine [00:15:33] Yeah, there’s a few different ways, depending on how much work and time you want to put into this. One way, if you have a lot of time and you’re willing to deal with insurances, you can just call yourself. You can be like, Hey, give me your insurance card. Yes, I’ll for you and tell you if you have these benefits and then call insurance, loopback around with your client, be like, Hey, you actually have these benefits, here’s how to use it. That’s one option. I imagine most therapists probably don’t want to do that, and that’s part of why they don’t want to take insurance. You just don’t want to. The health insurance company. Yeah, Infuriating sometimes. Absolutely. Yeah. Another option is to you can hire a biller and have someone call for you and do that for you. And the third option is you can use an automated tool such as Mentaya. So we have this instant benefits calculator where you can just ask for the client’s name, date of birth, and member ID put it into our little widget and then within 3 seconds we’ll tell you if they have out-of-network benefits or not, what their deductible is, you know, how much they can get covered, etc., and will share that with your client so that they can just do it themselves. And you don’t even have to be involved.  

Linzy [00:16:38] Okay. Yeah. And so this dashboard then, like this is kind of this is where you’ve stepped into the therapist world as somebody who’s from outside of the world. The tool then allows me like if I’m on the phone with Sarah and Sarah’s like, I have Blue Cross, and I’m like, Well, I don’t take insurance. What you’re saying then is in the tool, like we can put in Sarah’s information and see how much coverage she actually has for out-of-network benefits. 

Christine [00:17:04] Exactly. And so this is something that has helped therapists, you know, when over a lot of these private pay clients who might otherwise be on the fence about starting therapy, because on the phone you can say, hey, my fees, you know, 200 or whatever. But I see here that you have your deductible, let’s say $1,000, meet it in about five sessions. And then every session after that, for the rest of this year, you can get 70% back roughly on their right. And then when the client does the calculations, you’re like 70% back on $200. That’s like basically paying $60 a session. That is much closer to a co-pay. 

Linzy [00:17:41] Right. Yeah. So like after those first five sessions, they’re now paying you $60 an hour, which is actually a much lower rate than I think any therapist can really afford to offer as a sliding scale. Like that’s a that’s a massive amount of coverage. 

Christine [00:17:55] And to be clear, as a therapist, you’re still getting paid for 200, you’re still getting paid your full fee, but just sort of the clients being reimbursed is closer to 60. 

Linzy [00:18:07] Yeah. Like I see this. It’s like you’re filling that education gap on the spot when you’re having conversation with a potential client. The tool means that you can look and see. Exactly. Not not in general, what the situation is, but like for that specific client, what their financial relationship with you would actually look like. And you can tell them, give them a completely informed perspective on this is exactly what it would look like if we decided to work together. And that sounds a lot better than somebody having to pay $200 out of pocket for the whole year. Exactly. 

Christine [00:18:37] And this is something that because it’s so quick, it takes a few seconds to run and then you’ll see the benefits immediately. You can keep them on the phone. It’s not like, oh, let me call insurance or let me do this and I’ll loop around with you because then you lose momentum. Then it’s like, yeah, you have to email them and that they have to make sure to respond. They have questions. It’s you can just figure it out on the spot. And a lot of times clients might be like, Oh, this sounds great. Okay, look, I’m ready to start. You know, when can I start? And so that really helps convert clients. I’m a therapist, and obviously as a client, you’re happy. You’re like, Oh, I didn’t know I had these benefits. I can save money on therapy. This is great. And so, yeah. 

Linzy [00:19:16] Yeah, it really it sounds like it. Yeah. It’s like you’ve created a tech solution for a massive problem that therapists have, which is, first of all, this, this lack of education that their clients don’t know what they have and we don’t know what they have either. There’s that lack of information. But also you have removed the need to talk to insurance companies. 

Christine [00:19:34] Yes. 

Linzy [00:19:34] Which I have to say, knowing therapists, like there are top two things that therapists hate. Number one is clinical notes. Number two is dealing with insurance companies. Clinical notes we cannot get rid of, but insurance companies is something that can cause a lot of stress. Right? So this just kind of bypasses that whole messy conversation and navigating being on the phone with a company that, you know, billers do this because therapists hate it so much that this is where billers have created a whole industry because it’s such a headache. 

Christine [00:20:01] Exactly. Exactly. And so this is this is sort of the educational component. Yeah. Well, even understand if they have these benefits, I think there’s a second part of, you know, what do you do if you do have these benefits. 

Linzy [00:20:14] Yeah. Yes. 

Christine [00:20:15] So there is a couple of options that clients have right now. I think the most common one a lot of therapists do is, okay, I’ll give you a super bill. You know, you figure it out yourself. Yeah. And I don’t think therapists sometimes realize how few of their clients actually use super bills because you’re not involved. You’re just like, Here it is. Good luck. I’m not involved in it. And so maybe you’re thinking, Oh, my clients are submitting it, they’re getting reimbursed, but you have no idea because unless you’re talking to them and asking them about it, a lot of clients are like, okay, great, I have a super bill. Like, I don’t really know what to do with it. Or maybe they try to they don’t know how to submit it or they try to submit it. And they’re like, I haven’t heard back from my insurance in like a year, like I haven’t got any money back. What’s going on? Or they submit it and it gets rejected. And it’s, you know, this jargon that most people don’t understand. It’s like, oh, this code like can’t use this code to bill. 

Linzy [00:21:05] Yes. 

Christine [00:21:06] A lot of times clients then have to hold it there because they’re like, Hey, I got rejected. Can you help me as a therapist who doesn’t want to deal with insurance. Now you’re like, I have to go look at the code or call insurance, or maybe you get some notice from the insurance company and you’re just like, I don’t know what to do with it. And so for a variety of reasons, a lot of clients don’t end up actually successfully submitting the super bills and getting reimbursed. 

Linzy [00:21:29] Right. 

Christine [00:21:30] So that’s that’s currently the most prevalent option. I think therapists have vaguely heard of the concept about network benefits and super bills and they have like a copy and paste on their website that’s like, you know, I give super bills and you can full insurance and here are the things you need to do. But for the average person, you’re like going to therapy for mental health care and then, you know, to improve your mental health and then you have to go and deal with insurance that is like the most infuriating. 

Linzy [00:21:57] And like I totally see how therapists I mean, this is what I hear. It’s like I give a super bill. It’s like a super bill. There’s a hand motion I’m making that nobody can see because this is a podcast. But for me, the super bill goes with the motion, which is the like, Get it out of here, like passing it off motion, right? So when we do this and our clients end up with these super bills, like, you know, I’m hearing that it can be really stressful for them. Like, what do you, what have you heard is the impact of kind of this practice that we have of just kind of sloughing off the super bill on people? What does that do to our clients? And like, why is that maybe not good for us? 

Christine [00:22:29] So, I mean, I don’t want to speak for every client and there is just a few things that I’ve heard are sometimes clients can feel overwhelmed because you’re like, I go to therapy. And then on top of having to, you know, pre-pay a private pay fee and then I get this like bill that I have to figure out how to submit and deal with insurance and I have all these phone calls with insurance and it’s just this huge mess and I feel overwhelmed by the idea of having to do that. So I think that’s something that clients sometimes say. Other clients will just be really frustrated out of it. They’re just like, Oh, I thought I was supposed to get money back, but like, why am I not getting money back? Yeah, so why is it getting rejected? Like, what is wrong with the code? And then, Hey, therapist, can you help fix this? Like, why are the codes you’re giving me wrong? And then there are just clients who are just like, all right, Like, I’m not even going to try, like the idea of this just sounds insane to me. And they just they say, screw it. I’m just going to, you know, pay the full fee and not even try to get reimbursed. But what that ends up doing to them is that they might end up in a point where they’re, you know, financially little strained and they’re like, oh, I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this. Like, can I go to see, you know, every other week, every other week, and then once a month and they kind of slowly stop going to therapy. You’re going less frequently because they just can’t afford it versus if you could get reimbursement more quickly and be able to then reinvest that money, you get reimbursed back into therapy. That would really change things. 

Linzy [00:23:57] Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s like that stress on the client. And if they give up, then eventually they are carrying the weight of paying your sessions in full. And yeah, I can see how like if someone is paying $200 a session out of pocket and they would have the opportunity to be on the remaining 60. But that’s not working because these super bills, you know, yeah, when something has to go financially, therapy is going to be a pretty appealing way to save 800 bucks a month immediately. Yes. 

Christine [00:24:21] Yes. And you know, to be clear, it’s not every single client has this issue. There are obviously some clients who do submit their super bill. It just depends so much on the insurance company, insurance plan. A lot of insurance companies make you mail in or fax in some form, usually have to fill out the form. And most clients are like, I don’t really know how to fill out the form. And so if as a client, you had again, like as a therapist, if you had a bunch of time and you really dug into it and you really did your research, you could figure it out. It’s just that most people don’t have the time or energy to be able to do this right. And insurance companies are only, you know, open during work hours. And you have to carve out time outside of work during work hours to be able to call your insurance company and figure out what’s going on. Right. 

Linzy [00:25:04] Right. Okay. So for this, then, I know that meant you folks have been working on this part of the problem, too. So tell me, like, what is the solution that you’ve figured out to to ease this issue for for therapists and their clients? 

Christine [00:25:19] Yeah. So entire we our goal is to completely shield therapists and clients from ever having to deal directly with insurance. We have experienced that, so we know how frustrating. But we built out this automated claim submission tool for therapists and clients where all you have to do is sign up for an account and after every session will automatically submit claims to the insurance company in their preferred format and exactly what format they mean and right so that it just goes through immediately and is successful on the first try. 

Linzy [00:25:54] That is pretty sweet. 

Christine [00:25:57] It’s really easy. We just need to know, you know, when the sessions have happened. And as we know that and obviously as a therapist, you pre-fill like diagnosis. There is a little bit of setup, but it takes a couple of minutes to set up. And then every week all we have to know is, you know, when the sessions have happened right, if they happen will automatically submit a claim the same day immediately to the insurance company and we generally get clients reimbursed on average. It varies a lot, but on average in 17 days. And so it’s less than a month. 

Linzy [00:26:30] That’s pretty good. Yeah, that’s faster than a lot of therapists get reimbursed. 

Christine [00:26:34] And yes, it depends a lot like obviously some clients get reimbursed in less than a week. Hmm. Some clients, it does take, you know, 3 to 4 weeks, but we submit it as soon as we can so that it’s processed as quickly as it possibly can be processed. 

Linzy [00:26:48] And so what I’m hearing is like for the client, then once they’ve, like given the original information and their information and like there’s actually nothing for the client to do after session. 

Christine [00:26:57] Exactly. 

Linzy [00:26:58] And for the therapist, like, what did they actually have to do to get the information to Mentaya to say, yeah, the session happened and this is how long it was or whatever. 

Christine [00:27:08] That’s a really good question. So you’re right, the client signs up, you know, they don’t have to do anything after that. As a therapist, you sign up, you set up each client’s profile, so you put in, you know, their diagnosis, CPT code as sort of the default values, and your fee and things like that. Yeah. And once you set that up per client on a recurring basis, the only thing we need from you is just confirmation if a session has happened. So for example, if you sync your calendar, we will send you a HIPPA-compliant text after every session. Just saying, can you text back ‘yes’ to just confirm the session has happened? because we we can’t have you know, we can’t just presume the sessions happened. 

Linzy [00:27:44] Yeah. No, no, no shows. 

Christine [00:27:45] They’re rescheduled. We just need this confirmation to make sure that the sessions happen and then that’s pretty much all we need from a therapist. You just let us know like you text back. Yes. And we will automatically submit the claim. You know, take the proper information from your profile, your client’s profile, the session details, and put it all together and submit it to insurance. 

Linzy [00:28:05] Okay. And then I think the question that’s going to be on everybody’s mind who’s listening is how do you get paid? Like you being Mentaya. 

Christine [00:28:14] Yes. So we have- so as a therapist, the only thing that you would pay for is the first thing I mentioned, sort of our instant benefits calculator. The thing that helps generally convert more clients. Yes. And that is that is optional. So you can submit claims for free. And we have clients pay for the claims or for the therapist, you can pay $29 a month per practice to have this benefits calculator you can use with your clients, you can put on your website, etc. and that is $29 a month. That’s month to month. You can cancel any time. And it’s fully optional. It’s, you know, if it’s helpful for your practice, you’re getting all these new clients who might be interested. You can use it if you’re like, I’m super full and I don’t have any clients benefits. Yeah, that you don’t have to use it. So we’re pretty flexible on that. And then on the client side, we charge clients a 5% fee per client. So if your session fee is 200, we charge clients $10 and on average we get clients, you know, 60 to 70% back on therapy. And so for most clients, you’re like, I’m paying a 5% fee. And then on average I’m getting, you know, 60 to 70% back, which is like a no-brainer for a lot of clients who just don’t want to deal with super bills or don’t understand how. 

Linzy [00:29:26] Yeah, right. Because for them, it’s like they’re paying 5% and they’re having to do literally nothing in order for these claims to be processed. 

Christine [00:29:32] Exactly. And you’re never paying 5% to get a bunch more money back. Essentially, you don’t have to do anything for that. 

Linzy [00:29:37] Yeah. You know, something that I appreciate and I think it’s a helpful thing for a therapist to be thinking about is I do think that so many therapists, you know, when when they decide to opt out of insurance, they truly opt out of insurance. They’re like, I don’t think about insurance. I don’t talk about insurance. I will not call insurance. I hate insurance. But what I’m hearing is like, it’s so valuable to our clients for them to get some help from us in navigating the system, because the system is frustrating for us and it’s also frustrating for them. Right. And not only is it frustrating for them, but it’s like if they’re coming to you because they’re under stress or their marriage is in duress, or they have a child with high needs and like, you know, they’re probably coming to you because like life is a bit challenging. And so what I’m hearing and what I’m thinking about is like by therapists helping out with this piece, like not and I don’t know, it’s like, are they taking responsibility for it? I don’t know how to like, think about that piece, but it’s like you’re you’re offering this tool to make it easy to just take that part out off the client’s plate, both in terms of them being able to make an informed decision of what it’s actually going to cost them to work with you. Right. And maybe getting information that they didn’t have to realize, like, oh, once I pay $1,000, like I actually have 70% coverage, that that is the financial information that changes everything. So it’s like you’re you’re giving them the information to make an informed decision up front. But you are also taking this kind of like headache off of their plate or giving them a tool that can help them take the headache off their plate so that, yeah, like the experience of therapy just becomes a lot easier because all that admin stuff is just taken care of. 

Christine [00:31:02] Exactly. And I know I, I think you made a, you touched on something that I think is important. Some therapists are like, Well, I don’t want to take insurance, so I don’t necessarily want the responsibility now, you know, feeling without even if it’s out-of-network insurance. Yeah. And what we encourage therapists to do is tell their clients like we have a whole script a therapist can share with clients. Which is, Hey, I’ve partnered with a service commentator that can help you see if you have out-of-network benefits and get reimbursed for therapy. If you do, you know, you can use, like I’ll work with them to submit these claims and actually get you your money back. But, you know, as a therapist, like, I don’t benefit in any way directly from your involvement. It’s completely optional. And if you have questions, you can email them directly. Like, we don’t want to necessarily force therapists to be sort of the middleman between their clients and us, and we want them to feel comfortable saying, Hey, Mentaya is going to take care of it. Like I’ll work with them to make sure it works, but it’s really on us that entire to make sure that the claims getting submitted and all that stuff so that it doesn’t affect your only positively affects your relationship with clients. So if they have any questions, any issues that come directly. 

Linzy [00:32:14] Oh, okay. Right. Because like you would the therapist have to be involved though, in setting up the initial like billing codes and stuff like would that kind of that that seems like a part that might not be able to be skippable. 

Christine [00:32:25] Yeah, so that part, I think what I’m talking about is more the framing to your clients because as a therapist you don’t portray or like you don’t feel like you’re taking on this new responsibility of dealing with insurance. Because with Mentaya we are the ones taking on that responsibility. We just need you to be involved to some extent because we can’t make up, you know, CPT codes and diagnoses for like we need to hear that from you. Yeah. And we need confirmation from you that those sessions happen. But aside from that, all the claim submission, if there’s any questions that there are any issues, we take care of all that on our own and we try not to involve you at all unless they’re like, we need, you know, whatever, more information. But usually they don’t do that. And so for pretty much it’s just smooth sailing. Once you sign up, get your clients on, you give us a little information you confirm the sessions have happened, and we’ll take care of everything else. And I think just like letting clients know that if they have questions, they come to us. If they have issues, they come to us. If they’re not hearing back from their insurance, they come to us, so that you don’t have to be involved in like, Oh, my client came into line. My client was asking me this, you know, So. 

Linzy [00:33:34] Yes. It’s kind of like you’re not getting back in bed with insurance by, you know, having this service bill to your clients. Like this is a relationship between your clients and Mentaya that you need to kind of kickstart. But then it’s off your plate. 

Christine [00:33:49] Exactly. 

Linzy [00:33:50] Yeah. Cool. This is very exciting. I appreciate that you kind of come in to solve this problem for us. You know, in terms of, you know, speaking for therapists as a whole, which I have no authority to do whatsoever, just so you know. But I do like- I think so often in terms of like tech in the therapy space, the therapist can feel threatened because there’s a lot of tech in the therapy space that is a bit about devaluing the work that we do. And it’s like, you know, like platforms that are like, you can go work for this platform and you’re going to get paid $25 an hour to serve people. But because they can get you clients easily, like so much of tech coming into the therapy space has been a bit of a threat to the wellbeing of therapists. And so I appreciate that. I think you’re using your powers for good. 

Christine [00:34:34] Thank you. Yeah, that’s something that was definitely really important to me when I started Mentaya. I wanted to do something that, you know, we want to make mental health care more accessible, but in a way that’s sustainable for therapists because, you know, if it’s not sustainable for therapists, if you play it out, you know, ten years, 15 years, 20 years down the line, we’re going to have no therapists left. And then so obviously, like the people who are working their hardest to try to help others in these times of stress, we want to be able to support therapists by helping therapists, you know, put on their oxygen masks first before being able to help their clients. And I think it also translates to better therapy for clients when therapists are not overworked or burnt out or like needing to work insane hours just to make a living. 

Linzy [00:35:20] 100%. Yeah. Like, I mean, like, this is a phrase that just came to my head for the first time. But I think in some ways we’re seeing like the, you know, like Uber eats ing of therapy, you know, when we’re like when therapists are turned into basically gig workers, you know, who like, work for not very much money, but it’s like flexible and easy. But you have no rights. And like in a lot of ways, therapists have the risk of being exploited. And what I’m hearing is the solution you come up with Mentaya is kind of like the opposite. It’s like therapists, you know, can make the decisions that are right for them financially. They can like think about their needs and like set up a practice that’s sustainable for them. And this is a tool that eases that transition and like makes it easy for clients to still access like this big, complicated system that might give them significant coverage without the therapist having to carry that. Exactly. Yeah, I appreciate that. So, Christine, folks who are curious and learning more about Mentaya, where can they find more information? 

Christine [00:36:13] You can go to our website. It’s mentaya.com. And we have information for therapists, for clients. We have information our pricing. And feel free to check it out. And I’d encourage everyone to sign up and try it out. It is you can sign up risk-free. I know we have a promo code as well for our listeners, LINZY, so that if you sign up and you put on your promo code, you can try out our benefits calculator for free. You can already submit claims for free. So you can essentially try out our entire platform for free for 30 days. And then if you like, the benefits calculator, you can subscribe. And if you don’t, that’s okay too. You can just use the claims submission tool as well. 

Linzy [00:36:57] So. So it’s Mentaya.com And you can use promo code LINZY.  It’s funny, I changed my name when I was a child and I have to spell it for people a lot. So when it’s a promo code. I’m like okay it’s LINZY, no D. And that gives them the benefits calculator free for the first month. Just like try it out and see how it works for them. Exactly. Awesome. Thank you so much, Christine. It was great having you on the podcast today. 

Christine [00:37:20] Thank you so much, Linzy. 

Linzy [00:37:35] I talk a lot about money being a tool that’s kind of a a philosophy about money that I’ve been increasingly leaning into in the last couple of years. And this conversation with Christine today also gets me thinking about how just having the right tools as clinicians, as business owners, as private practice owners, makes our lives so much easier and makes our clients lives so much easier. Something that I see often is that therapists can be reluctant to invest in tech and tools. Sometimes folks don’t even want to have like an EHR electronic health records because they don’t want to pay for the cost of having it. But having the right tool at your fingertips, that takes something that can be difficult and makes it easy is just so valuable in terms of recouping your time and energy to do the stuff that you’re good at and you care about. I’m really appreciative, actually, of Christine of coming in and creating a tool to make this a part of therapist relationships with our clients easier, because it means that then therapists can be spending their time being good at therapy. Clients can spend their time applying the things they’re learning in therapy and enjoying their life. It’s taking this insurance piece pretty much out of the equation, which, based on what I’ve heard with dealing with American insurance companies, is where it should be so appreciative to Christine for coming in to create a tool to make something easier for therapists so that we can focus on the stuff we love to do instead. If you are enjoying the podcast, you can check me out on Instagram @moneynutsandbolts, and I would still appreciate if you could leave a review on Apple Podcasts about the podcast. Maybe you can share about your favorite episode or what you particularly appreciate or any little things that we’ve talked about on the podcast that have stuck out and made an impact for you. Leaving a review on Apple Podcasts is the best way for other therapists and health practitioners to find the podcast. Thanks for listening today. 

Nicole [00:00:01] Look for the bottlenecks. What does that actually mean? I want you to go into your online booking and be a client for a second. Click on the button and see: can I get an appointment within 48 hours? Oh, no. That means I need more availability and maybe I need to hire or I need to shift things around. You probably are wasting money on marketing if you’re not allowing the people to book. They literally want to book with you, but you’re making them wait. 

Linzy [00:00:28] Welcome to the Money Skills for Therapists podcast, where we answer this question: How can therapists and health practitioners go from money shame and confusion, to feeling calm and confident about their finances and get money really working for them in both their private practice and their lives? I’m your host, Linzy Bonham, therapist turned money coach and creator of the course Money Skills for Therapists. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. Today’s guest is Nicole McCance. Nicole McCance is a fellow Canadian. She is a psychologist who’s now retired, turned business coach, who helps therapists with their group practices, helping them make more money, help more people, and have more freedom. She’s also the host of the business savvy therapist, and this is probably going to be the most concise, I think, episode of the Money Skills for Therapists podcast that we’ve had so far. Concise is usually not the word that I would give for myself or the guests that we tend to have. But Nicole is so clear-thinking. Such actionable steps that she shares today about how good practice owners can increase their income without marketing. She gives them like really specific specific steps that folks can take to increase money coming in to the practice today, while also being able to help clients faster and talking to you about how group practice owners – who I have learned from experience tend to be some of the busiest humans that I know – can manage to get everything done. Some really good tips for group practice owners. Even if you’re not a group practice owner, there’s going be so much that Nicole mentions today that also can be applied to solo practice. Just some really good business practices, really clear thinking. Here is my conversation with Nicole McCance. So, Nicole, welcome to the podcast. 

Nicole [00:02:21] Happy to be here. 

Linzy [00:02:22] Yeah, I’m happy to have you. So I mean, something that’s always kind of nice and novel for me is you are actually like down the road from me. We’re going to use that term generously. But in the scope of online business, you’re basically my next door neighbor. 

Nicole [00:02:34] My Canadian friend. I know. Totally. 

Linzy [00:02:36] It’s very nice. And so your niche, you know, what we’re going to dig into today is group practice, right? So you came up through solo practice, built a great group practice, now you help folks with group practice. So I do also want to just like plant a little seed here for folks who are listening today, who are not group practice owners. A lot of what we’re going to talk about still is going to apply to solo practitioners today. Is that fair to say? 

Nicole [00:02:59] Totally, yeah. 

Linzy [00:03:00] They’re like general business principles. So they might not be scalable. When you have a group practice you’ve scaled and everything you do has scaled impact. 

Nicole [00:03:08] Yes. Yeah. 

Linzy [00:03:09] But a lot of these things are going to apply today. So if you’re a solo practice owner still listen, there’s going to be great stuff. 

Nicole [00:03:13] You guys are going to love this. 

Linzy [00:03:15] Some seeds for the future. If one day you do decide that you want to bring on other clinicians or practitioners. Yes. 

Nicole [00:03:20] Can I just speak to that? Because I never knew guys that I would have a group practice ever. 

Linzy [00:03:27] Wasn’t your plan. 

Nicole [00:03:27] I just- it was when I was pregnant with twins. And I find a lot of people – I think your story is similar – once you become a parent, priorities change. And I really did it because I just couldn’t work the evenings and weekends anymore and was able to scale it really quickly and sell it. So here I am to tell you all the things. 

Linzy [00:03:45] It’s so true. And I think that’s one of the beautiful things about business is you don’t necessarily need to know what your path is to still end up on these amazing paths that make sense for your life. Like you get to make your business suit your life. 

Nicole [00:03:55] Isn’t that beautiful. We’re so lucky. 

Linzy [00:03:57] It is so beautiful. We are so lucky. Okay, so let’s let’s start then, on like a practical note, when you are a group practice owner, like a lot of folks that I see in group practice, like they spend a lot of time thinking about marketing, obviously because they have like a suite of clinicians, maybe two, maybe ten, maybe 20 clinicians that they need to think about attracting folks. What are other ways to increase your income without marketing, if people feel like they’ve already hit the marketing wall or that’s not where they want to start. 

Nicole [00:04:26] Yes, guys, please listen up. I think that some people listening have a bit of a leaky bucket, so they’re doing the marketing, but they have the bottlenecks and the clients aren’t sticking. So there’s three things. The first one might scare people because I’m saying the word sales. Reduce your sales cycle. What does that actually mean? If I go on your online booking right now, therapist’s listening, I want you to pay attention to: can I book within a few days? Most people, that’s not the case, right? If I, let’s say, to book a free consult takes me five days and then to actually see you for therapy takes me me another six days to get in. But here’s the thing, we know that human beings wait way too long to get the help that they need by the time they’re clicking book. Now, for that free consult, it’s like past their, you know, way past their need. And a lot of you, you want to grow, but you’re not allowing your practice to help that person, but you’re also not allowing that income to flow in. So can you imagine to take a 12 day sales cycle? So what I mean by that is how long it takes for them to click book. Now, book a consult and actually see you and have that money hit the bank. Let’s see. It takes 12 days, right, if you can. And I highly suggest allowing them to book within two days, get them the help they need. Now they are suffering and distressed. And guess what? You help more people, but you literally double your income because you went from a 12 day flow of income to a two day flow of income. 

Linzy [00:06:02] Right. Right. So that new money comes in the door way, way faster. 

Nicole [00:06:06] Yes. And then that makes base like it’s always flowing in way faster. 

Linzy [00:06:10] Yes. Right. Because something else that occurs to me, too, is like you are reducing an emotional or a decision friction that people are going to have where if they need help now and they’re like, Oh, I can’t do a consult call with this person until next Wednesday. But that other person I looked at could talk to me Thursday and I’m like really suffering. You are also, you’re not as competitive. Like you’re not as appealing to somebody who feels like they need help. They needed help like three months ago. Let’s be real.

Nicole [00:06:35]  Exactly. And their no show rate increases every day you make them wait. Know why? Because it’s sunny today and I’m actually fine. I’m just going to cancel or you made me wait long enough. Exactly what you just said. I actually found someone who can see me right now and solve my problems. Right? 

Linzy [00:06:52] Right. So not only does it mean that that relationship starts faster, you know, the money starts coming to your practice faster from that good fit client. But also you’re going to convert more folks because. 

Nicole [00:07:02] They’re going to show up. 

Linzy [00:07:03] They’re not having to wait. There’s less time for them to change their mind. 

Nicole [00:07:06] Yes, I think we’re in such a unique industry because our clients are suffering. I think that’s a big thing that people don’t realize. And there’s this sense of urgency and then other industries that they really need that appointment now and just a double check, because I’ll tell you a lot of group practice owners specifically that I work with, they’re too busy. They actually don’t know that that’s a bottleneck in their online booking. And then they go in like, Oh my gosh, here I am. All this marketing is going in and these people are- I can’t- I’m not allowing them to book. 

Linzy [00:07:39] So true. Yes. Yes. So if you are listing now, I mean this would also apply to solo practitioners, but like go look at your website from like a potential client perspective. Like, I really need to see you. I’m having like perinatal mental health issues now. I just found out my partner’s having an affair. Now, how long do I have to wait to even talk to you to see if we could possibly be a good fit? 

Nicole [00:08:02] Exactly. Yes. So that’s number one. There’s two more. Number two is reduce your no show rate. How do you reduce your no show rate? I’ll tell you this, your highest amount of no shows will be on your consult call. I suggest offering a free consult call. Think it’s so important in our industry. They need to talk to you. It’s about connection, right? They do. But your no show rate is going to be high on that because I think people didn’t- they haven’t met you yet. So they don’t really care to cancel. You know, they haven’t paid, they haven’t signed a consent form, you haven’t gone through the cancellation policy. So how to reduce your no show rate is allowing them to book within two days to reducing the sales cycle is going to help. But also having a follow up system. Maybe they felt okay so let’s say I booked three days ago and – a consult – and it’s today, but I’m actually feeling okay today. I actually had a pretty good sleep last night. I don’t need it. I’m going to cancel. If you don’t follow up with me, you’re not going to catch my cycle of moods. I didn’t deal with my problem. My problem is still there, and it’s going to pop up in probably another week. So you follow up. 

Linzy [00:09:11] Right and like that follow up. What would that look like? 

Nicole [00:09:14] Yeah. Oh, gosh. I teach people this. 

Linzy [00:09:16] Yeah. You know, the bite size version. 

Nicole [00:09:19] Yeah, I would, because the question is how quickly do you follow up and how do you even know? I love Jane App, because I can easily pull the metrics from Jane App practice management system. I would get your admin to follow up within a day. Now, that may seem like a lot, but I just canceled. I’m very warm in my buying process. I know, guys, this this feels weird because we’re talking about like sales and buying, but just hear me out. And so the fact that you reach out a day later, I’m going to be like, yes, okay, you know, let’s rebook. I will email, send them an email. No one answers the phones because of all the scams we get. Just send them an email. Within a day. 

Linzy [00:09:57] Yeah, Because they’re still thinking about you. They haven’t forgotten about you yet. They just canceled, like, yesterday afternoon. 

Nicole [00:10:02] You got it. Yes, you’ve got it. And maybe today’s not such a great day. So the probability that I book is high. 

Linzy [00:10:08] Right. Which also I think, again, thinking about it from a potential client perspective, like they might be embarrassed that they canceled. And then feel crappy again the next day. So you’re also just normalizing like, hey, you know, noticed that you didn’t, you know, had to cancel yesterday. You just let us know if you need to rebook. We’d be so happy to talk with you. You’re also normalizing for them, like, Oh, okay. It’s totally fine that I canceled. It’s totally fine if I book another consult call. 

Nicole [00:10:32] And we got you. You know what I mean? We’re here. You’re not alone. 

Linzy [00:10:35] Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that. Okay. And I know you have a third one. Yeah. 

Nicole [00:10:39] Yes. Number three, increase your contact call conversion rate. So, number one, do you know it? Most people are like my what?

Linzy [00:10:47] Yeah. Yeah. 

Nicole [00:10:48] And you can easily track how many calls, consult calls, you had this week, even in solo practice. For the group practice owners, I would have all my therapists in a sheet, just write down, Here’s all the consults and here’s the ones that didn’t book and then give them a process to help more people. There’s so many therapists that do not book on the consult. They feel weird about it, so they basically provide them value. Yeah, that person’s motivated, but they don’t say, Let’s book, right. I have Tuesday available and I actually suggest that they book four sessions. Here’s why. I think you’re setting up the stage that therapy is not a one-and-done at all ever. And at least I would explain it like, you know what, a treatment plan can vary. Let’s book at least the first month. Here’s why: my schedule is actually quite busy and you get 2:00 at two. Yes. And they just love that. They’re like, oh, my gosh, okay, they’re more likely to show up. And that commitment level to that, they’re like, okay, I’m in it. I’m excited. I’m going to get results. 

Linzy [00:11:53] That’s so great. I really love that point about you’re setting an expectation from the beginning. You’re helping them understand, like, I’m not going to see you next Tuesday, and then you’re going to be like, I’m better. This is great. You are setting that stage for like, okay, now we’re going to start our work together. So let’s like plan out some of that work together. And I will say the regular schedule thing, the Tuesdays at two. People love that. Like when I did that, I- obviously there’s folks who sometimes like work shift work like there’s going to be exceptions always. Yes. But when I switched to a regular schedule in my in my own practice when I was solo and I said like, okay, your spot is Tuesday at two, we also had a cancellation policy that went with that. So there were boundaries around that. I had clients who were like literally elated, like so excited, like, I get to see you every Tuesday. Actually, that’s my spot. Yeah. You’re taking away that like stress too of them not knowing if they’re going to get in to see you next week. And like, you know, there is stress for our clients and our patients when they’re on an irregular schedule with us.  

Nicole [00:12:51] And I also think it’s in a world that’s not predictable or consistent when you have young kids, let me tell you. Yeah. That it’s like, oh, I know one thing in my life that’s gonna happen. 

Linzy [00:12:58] That’s right. Predictably, which like it’s such a beautiful thing because therapy, you know, as you talked about, what’s different about what we do is like folks are suffering right? And you’re giving them an anchor in their week to know, like no matter what happens, I’m going to see Nicole on Tuesday at two. It doesn’t matter what happens with my spouse between now and then. I’m going to get to talk about it on Tuesday. 

Nicole [00:13:17] You got it. And I had some clients say, okay, three more days, three more days. And they would start planning all the things I know I’m going to tell. 

Linzy [00:13:23] They already had multiple sessions with you in their head is anticipating that time together. Oh, I love that. That’s so good. So, I mean, with this, like, I know some of the group practice owners who are listening or are thinking about this, and they’re also thinking about 100 other things because something I’ve noticed also teaching group practice owners, like you do, in my course is group practice owners are some of the busiest humans. They are. They truly are. How do they do that? How do proprietors, owners, how do they pull it all off? 

Nicole [00:13:54] Yeah. Thank you for bringing this up. I want to talk about this because some of them are like, That sounds really great, but I’m very busy. Yeah. Write this down, everybody. My favorite background music in my life. Create and delegate. Create and delegate. You probably have a little bit more freedom in your life, hopefully because you’re working a bit less because you’ve got other people seeing the clients. Yeah, I highly suggest that group practice owners. Yeah, they have to set it up once. Set up a tracking system for your no shows. A follow up system. Yes, that could take an hour of your day, but then you delegate it. It’s such a beautiful thing. Hopefully you have an admin that will change your life. So that will be worth every penny. And you’re not doing this because your hour obviously is worth way more. 

Linzy [00:14:42] Yes. Oh, I love it. It rhymes. It rhymes. So it’s true. Create and delegate. But yeah, I love that piece too about, you know, an admin who changes. Like it’s something else that I’ve noticed. And I don’t know if you’ve also noticed this. The folks you support. Is you do also need to let an admin change your life. Like you need to let go. You can’t be the best at everything and the only person who does everything you need to create and then truly let somebody else own it. 

Nicole [00:15:09] Yes. So in my program, one of the things I help them with is hiring, having really good interview questions, reference letters, giving them a personality test, because I think that trust has to happen first. Yeah, I was and still am, a recovering control freak, so that was hard on me. And so I get it. We’re type A, but once you find your unicorn, your life truly changes. 

Linzy [00:15:31] Yeah, it’s true. Yeah, I 100% agree. So for people listening then, like what is the first thing they should focus on if they’re listening give they’re like all these things. There’s all your great ideas. There’s always so many great things you can do for your business. What’s one? What should they focus on first? Yeah, what’s one? 

Nicole [00:15:48] Take a peek. Even if it means that you’re getting up an hour earlier. I know that doesn’t seem great, but it’s really my magic morning routine. I get up before my kids do. 

Linzy [00:15:57] Yes. 

Nicole [00:15:58] And go in there with fresh eyes and look. You know what? You’re looking for One thing and one thing only. Bottlenecks. Look for the bottlenecks. What does that actually mean? I want you to go into your online booking. Please use online booking. It’ll streamline so much for you. And be a client for a second. Click on the button and see. Can I get an appointment within 48 hours? Oh no. That means I need more availability and maybe I need to hire or I need to shift things around. But you probably are wasting money on marketing if you’re not allowing the people to book, they literally want to book with you, so you’re making them wait. 

Linzy [00:16:34] Oh, that’s brilliant. Yeah. And the leaky, leaky bucket. Before I go back to that for a second, I think is so, so helpful because we hear about marketing all the time. Yeah. I feel like, you know, so many folks who have come on to the podcast or want to come on the podcast. Everybody talks about marketing. 

Nicole [00:16:47] It’s the hot topic keyword. Totally. 

Linzy [00:16:50] There’s so many ways to market. Marketing’s so exciting, it’s so sexy, so fun, So, so people think it’s not my fave, but it’s like that is seen as the one solution. And what I’m hearing is like, you could be spending tons of money on marketing, but you’re losing folks before they’re even getting in the door. In this case, you’ve got it. 

Nicole [00:17:05] And you know what I love, Linzy, about everything we just talked about? It’s free. Yeah, totally free, right? Marketing is not free. Everything: reducing your sales cycle, reducing your no show rate, and increasing your consult conversion rate – Free, free, and free. 

Linzy [00:17:18] Mm. Beautiful. Beautiful. Very affordable. Thank you. So, Nicole, for folks who want to get further into your world, where can they find you and follow you? 

Nicole [00:17:27] Yes. If you love podcasts, I have one is about the business savvy therapist. Every Tuesday new episodes release and I have a starter kit for you. Expand your practice starter kit the first three steps because some people, even if you’re in group practice, are wondering, I’m feeling lost. Or maybe it’s time to take the leap into group practice and the link. I’ll give you the link. It will be in the show notes and you can get the starter kit. 

Linzy [00:17:51] Wonderful. Well, thank you so much, Nicole, for coming in today. This is like really great actionable stuff. So I hope folks who are listening, if this applies to you and your practice group practice, even solo practitioners, take those helpful pieces, go do the things. That’s going to make a big difference. 

Nicole [00:18:04] Amazing. Thanks for having me. 

Linzy [00:18:18] Something that sticks out to me from my conversation with Nicole is just we can’t assume that everything is working the way that we want it to. It’s so helpful to stop and just take a look at things. You know, she suggests that early morning, if you have kids, I can definitely see the benefit of that before the chaos of the day starts. Just look at your website. Look at that intake process. Like one is a contact call available. With those fresh eyes from the perspective of a potential client. Right. What is it like for them to try to get a hold of you and you might discover that it’s not the experience you want to be giving them. So really, really helpful, actionable piece there around making sure that folks can get in to see you sooner because clinically that’s helpful. And from a business perspective, that’s also really helpful. So great advice from Nicole. Group practice owners who are listening. I also want to give you a heads up that we’re going to be opening the doors again for Money Skills for Group Practice Owners, which is my course that’s all about taking you from feeling like an overworked, stressed, and underpaid group practice owner to being the confident and empowered financial leader of your group practice. To hear about the doors when they open for that course, you should get on the waitlist. There’s a link in the show notes. Get on the waitlist for Money Skills for Group Practice Owners so you hear about it when we start our next program, which is going to be running in January. If you enjoyed the podcast, you can follow me on Instagram at @moneynutsandbolts. And as always, if you are enjoying the podcast, I would so appreciate a review on Apple Podcasts. It’ll take you 2 minutes, maybe three. It is the best way for other therapist health practitioners to find us. Thanks for listening today.