You’re SO expensive!

That’s expensive!

Why does that cost SO much?

I try to be patient listening to someone’s contracted concerns about money because let’s face it, we all have a number that sends us into needless panic.

I say needless, after a lot of work on my beliefs about money and my money story, because I know that most of the women I work with are chronic underearners. Even the ones earning high six-figure incomes (million-dollar revenue) still have their own income cap, the number beyond which they think they cannot go, and the situations that send them into money panic.

In my work with designers, I’ve seen all sorts of tangled beliefs when it comes to money.

Designers who are so worried about the “tax man” that they stop themselves from earning more.

Designers who are so afraid to ask for the client’s budget—everybody has a number—that they cheat themselves out of appropriate fees.

Designers who know they need help, that getting help will bring results but who are afraid to commit to the investment in getting help for themselves and their business because it’s expensive. So they end up spending infinitely more time and even more money, ultimately earning less.

As the saying goes, nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity. You don’t know what you don’t know and unfortunately, your limiting beliefs won’t let you break the cycle.

I’ve written before about El Cheapo, or people who boast they don’t pay for marketing, and the cost those wreck on a business, but people who won’t invest in themselves because it’s too expensive leave me the most sad.

I can’t afford it is a choice to give up on yourself before you’ve even started. One of the things that is so hard to explain to designers locked into a system of limiting beliefs is that those beliefs aren’t actually the truth, that there are unlimited possibilities, and that earning more, while being supported can be your truth, easily.

Value is subjective and money only has value because you’ve assigned it. Why have you made this inanimate tool that is supposed to be for your use and good worth more than the support of your soul? You are worth an expensive investment, especially if your intuition is telling you this will work.

Sacrifice, burden, instability, or all of the other reasons you’ve decided investing in yourself is too expensive are choices you’ve made and they come with energy. When you decide that working with someone expensive is not for you, from an energetic standpoint you also send out a message that you are not a match for people who like expensive things and I’m guessing those people are the clients you’d like to work with?

Every investment you make is forward motion and when you invest in yourself with the intention of making that investment work, especially the expensive ones, you’re paying for time, space, and freedom.

As James Baldwin wrote, “Anyone who has ever struggled with poverty knows how expensive it is to be poor.”

Stop struggling.