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Happy, Healthy, & Wealthy Therapists | Ep 55: Stop Charging Your Worth, Start Charging Your Needs

September 4, 2026

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Released: 9/4/2026

Show Notes:

The advice to “charge your worth” is everywhere in therapist spaces, and Amanda has some real problems with it. Not because the intent is wrong, but because for most therapists with complex trauma and a complicated relationship with self-worth, it’s not actually useful guidance. She makes the case for a different frame: charging what you need, and not just for right now. That means thinking beyond your current bills and debts and actually accounting for future you, including retirement, which most therapists are either ignoring or treating as a nice-to-have. She also gets personal about her own numbers, what her accountant told her about her projected 2026 tax liability, and why she finally started maxing out her retirement contributions this year.

3 Key Takeaways:

  1. “Charge your worth” is complicated advice for therapists with complex trauma who already struggle with feeling worthy, and a more useful frame is charging what you need, which includes not just current bills and debt but future you, retirement, and the life you want to stop having to work so hard for someday.
  2. Saving for retirement is not a nice-to-have that you tackle after paying off debt; it is both a genuine financial need and a tax strategy that lowers your liability, and most therapists are dramatically underprioritizing it while focused entirely on short term survival.
  3. The goal of building a profitable therapy practice or coaching business is not just to solve your money problems right now but to create enough financial stability that future you has real options, and that requires intentional planning, not just a higher fee.

Connect with Amanda:

  • Follow on Instagram: @amandakbcoaching
  • Check out the Amanda KB

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Transcript:

Amanda Buduris (00:00)
Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Happy Healthy and Wealthy Therapist Podcast. I am recording to you from my hotel room in Portland, Maine. I just wrapped up being both an attendee and a sponsor of the I think it’s the third annual Doubt Yourself and Do It Anyway Summit that’s led by my friends Patrick Cassal and Jennifer A. G. And

It was so funny, there were there was a talk today that actually emphasized a point that I was literally making a social media post about last night. I just haven’t posted it because sometimes I get into really creative bursts in terms of creating my content. But I start it in like a carousel, for example, and I get the first like three slides done. I’m like, nah, and I’ll do the rest later. I still gotta think about the caption, I gotta think about scheduling them out, et cetera, et cetera. So those don’t always get done on time. But

The thing that I have been thinking about, it’s something that I’ve said before, and then again it came up in one of the presentations on money mindset today, is this aspect of charge your worth, right? We hear that a lot. If you are a therapist, if you are whether you’re a graduate student, I know I’ve got some graduate students listening to this. Hello, you are so welcome. I am so glad that there are people who are being intentional, thinking about

you know, essentially what’s gonna come after grad school, because I definitely wasn’t thinking about that. So whether you are a graduate student, whether you’re early in private practice, whether you’ve been in practice for a while, you have probably seen if you are in one of the I think it happens a lot more in therapist Facebook groups than it does in like on Instagram, for example. I’ve still seen some things on Instagram about it in terms of like charge your worth, charge your worth. And I get

where that is coming from, like truly and genuinely it has a really good intent, I think, of you know, you want to charge the number that reflects your your value in terms of your years of education and your certifications and all of those different things. But charger worth is such a complicated piece of advice or guidance or whatever you want to call it because

Number one, most therapists I know have complex trauma. And so we already struggle with, am I worthy? Am I valuable? Am I enough? I know that’s a lot of what into what went into my thinking about setting my fee. I was like, I’ll price myself against my competitors and I hope other people will see it’s worth it. But I was never

really thinking about it in terms of charge my worth. Number one, because I had that piece of complex trauma that I’m trying to recover and, you know, work through. But number two, because I never really saw it as

charge my worth. Like, yes, I am a licensed psychologist. No, I do not think that makes me any more worthy than a master’s level clinician. I say all the time, I honestly think there are a lot of master’s level clinicians that are way better therapists than a lot of, especially PhD level psychologists that I know. And I think a lot of others agree with me on this aspect of

I spent so much time in graduate school learning about how to read and interpret papers and to look at data and research and things like that. And that specifically doesn’t make me a better therapist compared to the therapist who instead got more classes on working with kids, working with teens, working with specific diagnoses or presentations, or like there’s just not I obviously got a lot of clinical like

practicum education, but my clinical focused classes, you know, they were different. And so I never inherently came out of my

university counseling job and was like, I am more worthy than someone. So I’m going to charge this high rate. I was like, no, I am leaving my job. I’m leaving my job permanently because of burnout, because I don’t feel valued in the way that I want to feel valued and seen and appreciated. And so I need to charge what I need to make to earn a living, right? Like that was I didn’t

These days I do consider myself more business minded, but that wasn’t how I was thinking four, let’s call it four and a half years ago at this point. it wasn’t like me just being business savvy, it was I need to think about paying my bills. That was my primary focus. I was living in a house at the time, so I had a mortgage to pay. I, let’s see, at that point did I start making, I was probably making payments on my student loans. I

credit card debt, some personal debt because my ex-husband and I were doing a lot of home renovations on our home. So there were a lot of things that I needed to take care of financially. And so my goal at a bare minimum was I just need to make enough money to replace what I was making at my agency work. And so that was my primary goal. I wasn’t thinking about what is my time worth. I was thinking what do I need to make.

And I think that is something that a lot more therapists I wish that they thought about from the beginning. And there’s a few different levels of nuances within this too. And even if you’re not thinking about this from the beginning, I want you to, you know, if you need to and if you want to stop and think about this, whether you’ve been in practice for a year or 10 years or however long you’ve been in it, because I think it’s always worth reassessing what are we doing and are we doing it out of habit or are we doing it out of

We just don’t know another way, we haven’t seen another way. And so when I think about the again, this advice of charge your worth, I think it is much less about that, and it is more about charging what you need. So let’s talk about, for example, what you need. We have private practice costs, right? We have all of the softwares and systems we need to use. We need our EHR, we need

a HIPAA compliant phone, any email, if you do in-person work, you need an office. yeah, I hope you have an admin because even if you have a very small practice, I have a very small practice and I still have one of my virtual assistants help me with responding to voicemails and texts and emails because it is still a lot to get inquiries and to get people rescheduling and whatever it might be. So you need to pay for that admin support. what other thing might there be? If you’re doing like

Marketing, if you run ads, like you need money for that. So obviously you need to make enough money to pay for your business expenses. But then there’s current and maybe let’s say past personal expenses, right? So you might have rent, mortgage, car loan, personal loan, credit card debt. You might have other like fun things you want to do, like my monthly massages. Or I just met someone at this retreat who was like, I get weekly massages. I’m like,

Could I put weekly massages on a credit card? 100%. Do I want to do that? No. So I do monthly ones. I’m kind of out of the habit of doing it right now because I’ve been traveling for a little bit, but I gotta get back into that because I highly, highly value my body being taken care of. But if you have a gym membership, if you I do a couple of like food delivery services per month, like not just getting food delivered from my local grocery store, but like having food that is prepared for me.

So that I just pop it in the oven for like I either the oven for twelve minutes or the microwave for three minutes. Usually I’m microwaving it to be honest. So there are personal things that you might be building into that what you need number, right? Whether it’s what you need, like you need to eat, you need to take care of yourself. if you’re a solo person, you’re taking care of yourself. If you’re someone with kids, you might have to take care of them and their financial costs. If you are the breadwinner in your family, you might be

accounting for your partner making less money to whatever extent that is. If you’re a solo entrepreneur, you might be paying for health insurance. But these are all again, this is current expenses, and then these are past expenses, like any debts you’ve already taken on, any financial commitments you already made. But here’s the nuanced part. I think that’s where a lot of people stop is they’re like, okay, well I’m paying for I’ve got my rent, I’ve got my mortgage, I’ve got my car loan, I’ve got, you know

making all my payments on a credit card and student loans or whatever it is, but what about future you? Right? The number of therapists I know who haven’t contributed anything to retirement. It’s just really depressing, quite honestly, and I get it. And I think it’s all part of this bigger problem too, of like even when we say charge your worth or we talk about charge what you need, we are being short-sighted with that.

We’re talking about, well, in this moment, what are you worth? In this moment, what do you need? But we’re not talking about you probably don’t want to have to do this work for the rest of your life. I think there’s a difference between loving what you do and wanting to do it for as long as you can. But I don’t know anyone who wants to see ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five clients per week just to make their bills. I mean, if you’re like me,

You are probably also worried given the state of the government and the economy and how everything’s going. Like, are we even gonna have social security when we reach that age? Like, I’m 34, and I sure hope there’s social security. Cause you know, what have I been paying into for all my working years? But who knows if we will have that or not. So I’m not relying on that number. but that’s the thing again, like we’re focused so much on the short term.

Of like, what are my right now financial problems that we might be missing some of the potential future ones? And if this does not apply to you, if you’re like, yeah, I’m never worried about that at all, again, consider how much financial privilege you might have with that. Because most, most therapists that I’m interacting with, myself personally, I’ve got a lot of debt to pay off. I’m very worried about the future of things. I’m more and more talking about.

My gosh, should I leave the country at some point? Cause I’m okay, this is a side tangent. the amount of like food that’s getting recalled, finding fiberglass in saline bags, like, what in the fuck is happening in this country? But anyway, before I digress too much, I think it’s just that this whole not thinking of our future selves is just another one of these problems around how therapists are expected to

give and give and give and take care of others and not take care of themselves. Like even if we are talking about take care of yourself now so that you’re avoiding burnout, so that you can actually take time off, okay great. So maybe you do have a little PTO fund in your business so that you can take time off and you’re not worried about finances and that’s fantastic. But even that is short term. Even people who are saving for maternity leave, that is short term, right? That’s okay, in the next 12 months I’ll want to take some amount of time off.

But again, what about in, you know, for me, thinking about at 34 in the next three decades, when I’m in my 60s, in the next two decades, for some of you all, because I worked with some therapists who are in their 50s, you might want to at least partially retire quite soon. And so to think about what am I doing to take care of future me, how do I account for that in my current financial plan?

Right, especially in terms of my fee setting and what am I doing to diversify income if that makes things easier and more comfortable for me. So more and more this year, at the start of 2026, I met with my accountant, I think that was probably in like March, and we just did a quick look at where my numbers were all of last year in 2025, and I ended

The tax year of 2025 around $426,000. And already by the time I met with my accountant in March, I had already crossed six figures across my therapy and my coaching business. He was like, You are blowing up, and that’s great. I love that you’re doing well. We’ve got to talk about some new strategies to help you so that, you know, not only are you not gonna get screwed at tax time, because when he did projections of if you continue

Like you’re continuing with earning the amount that you are and spending the amount that you are, because there is such a thing as almost like underspending when you’re a high income earner. It’s like if you continue that way in your 2026 tax return, you might owe $90,000 to the government. And again, I have some like moral and maybe ethical objections to that, given like I know that there is some good being done in the government, and I know

I know it’s not all good, so I have some objections to giving that much money to the government. So we started talking a lot more about being intentional with my tax strategy. And a lot of that came down to he kept asking questions of like, What are you doing with your retirement? I’m like, I’m, you know, saving like three hundred to five hundred dollars a month, which is, you know, like I think on average, no, maybe that was like three hundred, five hundred per paycheck. on average, since being in business, I since twenty twenty two.

I’ve probably contributed like about ten thousand dollars a year into my retirement account. I have not been maxing it out because I was like, well, that’s that’s a future me problem, right? And I wasn’t thinking about it being a basically a need to have. I was thinking about retirement savings as a nice to have. And I was just having this conversation with someone at the summit earlier today too, of like there’s this

This tricky part for those of us who do have debts. And again, I’m talking about more than just student loan debt, because we all basically all have that. I don’t know anyone without any debt. but for those of us who have the student loan debt on top of the personal loan debt, on top of credit card debt, it is so easy to just fall into, well, I shouldn’t be saving anything because I gotta focus on paying off my debt. And I do think that that is bullshit, and I do follow quite a bit of financial advisors.

On Instagram. I just think they present it in a lot more digestible ways than I’ve seen in any book. And certainly I do not learn from cis white old men. I’m looking at people of color who are sharing their advice. And time and time again, a hundred percent of the time, I’m seeing all of them say, even if you have debt, you need to be investing in your future. You need to be saving for retirement. Open up. I have no idea what a brokerage account is, but I see people opening up brokerage accounts. I have never opened up a

C D in my life, I don’t know, I kind of know what it is, but there’s a lot I do not know. But you know, retirement accounts, simple enough, I can understand that. But again, up until earlier this year, I was like, that is a nice to have, that is not a need to have. But the more that I think about it, a lot of what we are doing when we’re thinking about our fee setting, when we’re thinking about the fact that we even went into our own businesses, it’s probably because we want to set ourself up.

For a good life. And that is both now and in the future. So yes, even though I have cumulatively across my student loan, credit card, and personal debt, I’m probably at I don’t know, like $125,000 in debt. And only about maybe like $12,000 to $15,000 is student loan debt. So most of that is personal and credit card debt. even though I have that.

I am right now focused on in 2026. I am maxing out my retirement accounts of both my employee contribution and my employer contribution. And obviously I am both. I am the employee, I am the employer. So that has been in some ways stressful for me because I’ve never saved that much for retirement in one year. And at this point, I don’t remember if I just said this here in the podcast or I just filmed a reel about this.

but at this point I have about a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in my retirement account, which is way more than the national average for someone in their mid-thirties, which, you know, my high achiever says, like, go me, I’m a boss bitch. And it it’s so interesting how that still doesn’t feel like it’s gonna be enough, even as much as I’ve like seen ways to project of like how I’m gonna be fine. be way more than fine, but it is like in the back of my mind.

There is that little voice that says, but you don’t need to do that. You should be paying down your credit card debt. But at the same time, maxing out my retirement accounts is also a tax strategy. Right? It is lowering my tax liability by helping me to, you know, your pre-tax, your pre-tax retirement contributions, they are a write-off. They are a deduction. So they lower how much you owe to the government. And like again, like I said, that’s my goal. I will.

Pay what I have to, but I do not want to pay a cent more than that. So in a lot of ways it does feel really good that of course I am taking care of my current needs right now. And I’m also taking care of future me. Like I know I probably still have 25 to 30 years of work left and I also want to enjoy life now. So that’s a lot of my balance. It’s honestly a lot of reasons that I have.

Credit card debt to begin with is that I do go on trips and I don’t always wait till I have the money saved for it. And everyone’s money is everyone’s money, and all of that is fine. But to bring it back to this point of charging your worth. Again, I think that just is such a such a complicated thing. And I really wish more people spoke to charging your need and speaking to the nuances of it.

It is not just about your current need, your current debts, but it is also thinking about the fact that you don’t want to work forever. You don’t want to have to work forever. And so, in order to do that, your current fee and practice and business setup, they have to account for future you too. Even if you have some mixed feelings about saving for retirement, even if you have mixed feelings about

Should I be saving if I have debt? Even if you have mixed feelings about, you know, retirement and capitalism and whatever it is, there are many, many, many, many good reasons to be more intentional when you think about money generally, and especially in 2026, and especially with you know who knows how things are gonna continue to go politically and economically. So really and truly like take this.

Episode, take away from this episode, whatever is helpful for you. In some ways, maybe I was just a little ranty. I’m trying to do more of these podcast episodes without strict scripts, just kind of some bullet points, because I think it’s going to show more of my personality. which, you know, some of you might like that more, some of you may not like that so much, but that’s okay. But really just thinking about like taking care of yourself, and a lot of that comes with.

slowing down generally and and zooming out and seeing big picture because taking care of yourself is not just taking care of current you, it is taking care of future you too. I am super excited about the fact it feels like such a a weird win, but a fun win to say how much money I have saved for retirement and to know that everything I’m doing across my businesses is both wildly fulfilling and it does take care of me and the life that I want to live right now as well as as well as setting me up for

you know, me and the future and the things that I want to do and it gives me something to look forward to. And I think what I don’t want more entrepreneurial therapists to do is just create like a new problem or get into a new tunnel from themselves. Because yes, the more you make money, that is super exciting. And you also have to think about what to do with more of the money that you’re making. It should not all just go to paying down your

Debts again, obviously, you do you, it’s your life, but think about future you too. So I hope that that was helpful. And let me know your thoughts on what would a lot of you, a lot of you are my coaching clients, a lot of you follow me on Instagram. Let me know your thoughts on if it would be helpful to do more like financial education or even like a financial education series on the podcast. Again, I know.

I know what I know. I do not know everything, but I have a lot of friends who know a lot of things when it comes to financial literacy. So if it’d be helpful to have more guests on the podcast about that, I mean, this whole concept of happy, healthy, and wealthy therapists, part of that is about the money, right? Financial wealth, but it is also about the, you know, your health wealth, your social wealth, your everything else when it comes to.

Abundance in life that is not financial. So, yes, obviously, if you want to hear more about the financial stuff, let me know. Give me some feedback on that. But again, it’s all for the purpose of what are you doing with the money that you’re making. And it is all for the purpose of living a life that you love, right? We all deserve that. We all deserve to create what happiness we can get, especially when the world is the way that it is. So thank you so much for listening today, and I will tune in with you next week.

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