Why Art Therapists Are Under-Earning & How to Earn More
Why Art Therapists Are Under-Earning & How to Earn More
Today we'll talk about art therapists, money, earning an income, and being underpaid.
(*keep in mind, this is focused on self-employed art therapists; being employed by agency or other organizations is a whole other can of worms…we can talk about that on another post).
Actually, under-earning is a very common thing in this field.
But first, you might be wondering what is under-earning? For our purpose here, I define under-earning as when you are making less than what you need or desire even when you want to or have tried to earn more.
One question to ask yourself to help see if you are under-earning is: does what I make actually cover what I need and want?
One of the ways to find out whether we are really under-earning or not, is to actually calculate our REAL INCOME. Funny thing is a lot of us aren't really aware of how much we REALLY earn. Our Real Income is when we take out the time/effort and money we put into our work from our paychecks/income.
Let’s say you earn $50k/year. That is just the gross total and it really doesn't show you what you're earning per hour when you take out everything that goes into delivering your services.
So I've actually come up with a way to calculate your REAL earning, based on my own personal experience and what I’ve learned in my own financial journey.
Calculate how much you REALLY earn
Here is how you can calculate how much you REALLY earn per hour: Take what you earn per month minus your expenses, divided by how many REAL hours you put into your work.
To do this calculation, you need to know your Real Expenses and your Real Work Hours.
Real (monthly) expenses include:
Office rent
Art supplies, office supplies (computer, printer, paper, pen, etc)
Gas price or commuting costs
Clothes, makeup, hair supplies you buy for work especially
Phone bill, internet bill
Conferences, CEU (break down & calculate per month, per week)
Lunch (if you eat out during a full day of work)
Apps and softwares (CRM, email marketing platform, Gsuite, HIPAA compliant video call app)
Contractors, employees, assistants you pay
CEU, maintaining your license/certification, conferences
Medical bill (if you got sick from work)
Child care for when you are at work
REAL (monthly) work hours include:
Session hours (providing direct service)
Commute each day of the week
Documentation or paper work time (for insurance, maintaining case, invoicing, etc)
Time Buying supplies
Time Marketing and networking
Time buying clothes, makeup, hair supplies which you use to be presentable/professional for work
Hours you put into managing the software or apps you use for work/practice
Time maintaining your ‘office’ (cleaning, paying bills)
Supervision time
CEU time
Back-end client service (free consultation calls or intake session time, emails/calls with clients, processing payment, communicating with insurance, etc)
(Calculate these by the month, or per week).
Take a piece of paper and jot everything down. Really calculate this. I am not kidding when I say I was just SHOCKED to see the results when I tried this years ago.... it’s shocking. Because you think you’re earning $30-40/hr at that full-time job, or maybe $120/hr in your practice...but the REAL per hour rate can be SO different.
Here, I’m not even calculating the lost time you could’ve spent with your friends or family because you were too tired or stressed from work, the time you could’ve spent at vacations but because of demand at work that was impossible, and all the other opportunity costs.
AND also we didn’t even take tax into account...(which you can do at the beginning of the calculation when you put in the total you earn).
Here is a sample calculation.
Employee:
$50,000/year = $961.54/week
Expenses = ($10+$2+$30+$10+$6 = from lunch, conferences, supervision, work clothes, commuting etc) $48/week
Time = 206 hours/month or 51.5 hrs/week (2-hr commute/day, full-time 40 hr work, ceu hours)
Take the total income per week ($961.54) minus weekly expenses ($48) and then divide the whole thing by the weekly work time (51.5 hours).
Total REAL wage = $17.70 /hr
So with this, you’ll realize that you may be under-earning like real time.
You might be thinking, I have to work so many hours to earn a living at this rate! But the thing is there is a limit to how many hours you can work per week. We all have 24 hours a day. And we all have to rest, eat, live our life too.
So just working more and more hours doesn’t work, especially if you’re already working the max 40-50 hours per week that most people can handle.
So the only other way to earn a living and be financially okay is to increase your per hour rate. Increase your salary, or your fees.
And now we’ve come to the real juicy part. The place where we don’t talk about, don’t want to think about, where we feel discomfort or feel mixed emotions, or feel resistant to. The place where a lot of us feel blocked: charging more.
Why art therapists under-earn
So many of us feel like we CAN’T increase our rates (this is specifically for self-employed & freelance art therapists). Why? Because we have lots of thoughts and beliefs that hinder us:
No one around me charges higher than x
No one will book me if I charge x; clients will leave me
Imposter syndrome (I’d feel like a fraud if I charge x; I’m a newbie I can’t charge x)
Therapists “shouldn’t” make money off of clients / you’ve heard someone shaming another therapist who earns way more per hour, so you don’t wanna be “that” therapist
“Art therapy is unknown” and there is low demand (so I must lower my price for people to signup)
I want to make my service accessible
There are so many reasons we give ourselves for not charging enough. There are lots of variations to these too, but if you boil it all down, it would come down to these 2 reasons:
I don’t wanna be that rich (i.e., selfish) therapist; making money as a therapist is bad
I can’t charge because no one will pay for that (I am not worthy)
Making money as an art therapist
Let’s explore those two reasons - and start with the first one: making money as a therapist is bad.
Ask yourself, is making money as a therapist bad? If so, let’s investigate your beliefs.
Why do you think making money is bad? What negative beliefs do you have about wealthy people? What have your parents said about money and rich people? (Perhaps they thought rich people were greedy, were predatory, selfish, morally wrong, = basically a bad person, etc)
If you have these beliefs, then of course you don’t wanna be THAT bad person. Nobody wants to be a bad person. So, in order to not be that bad person, you don’t allow yourself to earn much. You choose to not earn much. Because if you do earn more, your will fall under the category of a “bad person” or “bad therapist.”
However, rather than seeing that as fact, let’s use our creative minds as art therapists. Let’s be creative with this. What if making money wasn’t bad? What if earning enough wasn’t bad?
What if we saw making money as something that could be good - for you and for people around you?
Entertain the idea that when you make good money, you are able to support yourself as a human being, you are able to pay for your food and housing, take care of your health, keep your license/certification, keep growing professionally by educating yourself, etc.
ALSO, you are able to serve the people around you. You can feed your kids, you can provide a safe home for your family, you can support your family, you can have good time with your family and friends, and even have enough time and flexibility to volunteer for your community because you are taken care of financially.
Making money and making good enough of it can be so important in your own well-being and those around you. You can show up so much more because of it.
Now let’s explore reason #2 - I can’t charge because I’m not worthy.
Not feeling worthy as an art therapist to be paid enough
So the other reason why art therapists might not charge enough is because we don’t feel worthy to charge too much. Or we believe that others wouldn’t pay that amount to us for the service we provide as art therapists.
Here, the dilemma is that you might be wanting to charge higher / be paid more, but you feel resistant to actually charging more because your service doesn’t feel worthy of a higher price point.
First of all, know that this is not something so exclusive to art therapists. Many service providers and therapists do hold these beliefs as well and it becomes one of the major blocks to earning enough.
The root of this is the belief in your worth. It is a matter of discovering and owning your worth - as a person, a healer, but also owning the worth of art too.
As we grew up, we learned a lot of negative beliefs about the worth of art. All around us, we might have seen messages that art is not valuable, art is for kids, art is not serious, or art is not worthy in some way.
Even when we become art therapists, our subconscious may hold onto these beliefs and it can be hard to convince others AND ourselves that art-making is essential to human life, not an accessory.
Art is profound. Art is powerful. And by extension, all that art represents - the nonverbal, the non-linear, the intuition, the feminine, the spiritual - are valuable and important to us humans.
And so as art therapists we can work on really owning these facts. No matter what others say, know inside that art is powerful. Your work is powerful. Art therapy changes lives. Art and all that it represents are valuable.
In conclusion, one of the most important things we can do to start earning more and NOT fall into the trap of under-earning, is to first investigate our money beliefs and our beliefs about our worth. Start believing that money is good (or have a positive relationship with it), and believe that we are worthy of being paid well for the service we provide.
Let me know if this was helpful to you. What specific challenges or questions do you have about income and making money as art therapists? Let me know in the comments!
P.S. If you are curious about therapeutic art and want to learn how to facilitate it or incorporate it in your work, then I’ve got the ✨perfect✨ resource for you. My Therapeutic Art Facilitation School course is THE place where you can learn the foundation of nonclinical, therapeutic art work. I teach you my step by step signature method of using therapeutic art to help people, even if you’re just starting (no artist or therapist background needed). Want to learn how to do this? Check out my therapeutic art course here.
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