Improve your Money Mindset with 6 Money Mindset Tips for Creative Artists
If you’re a creative, improving your money mindset is one of the best ways to create healthy money habits and build financial literacy.
What’s difficult however, is getting past all the “stereotypical” ideas of creatives and artists that sound like…
The “starving artist” trope…
The… “I can’t sell my art for a lot of money because I’m not like Van Gogh” trope…
And even the… “You can’t make money being a creative artist” claim that so many people throw at us.
And yet, a lot of these stories and beliefs from other people start creeping into OUR stories and beliefs about ourselves, how we do business, and what our creativity and art can do for us. We’re pretty sure you got into this business of creativity and art because you BELIEVED you could make money with it before someone else made you doubt yourself 👀
But when everyone is repeating the same thoughts and beliefs about “artists and creatives” struggling, sometimes we end up adopting a money mindset that doesn’t serve our greater vision. Instead it keeps us in…
Survival mode
Feast and famine mode
Charging pennies for our work mode
Or, trying to give our work and time away (for free) because we think earning money from our creativity, art, and passion is not allowed.
But here’s the thing about us creatives and artists - we move cultures, we shape cultures, and we bring the culture to life. THAT is pretty damn powerful stuff, which means we think we should get paid for that work and labor!
When our money mindset isn’t serving us and keeps us in survival mode, it takes away a lot of our headspace and energy for our art.
If you’re finding yourself struggling with money mindset around what to charge for your services or programs, asking to be paid a fair price, or your taxes - this blog post will walk you through 6 money mindset tips to help you improve your relationship with money.
What is a money mindset?
In an article by Ramsey Solutions, they define money mindset as “your unique set of beliefs and your attitude about money. It drives the decisions you make about saving, spending, and handling money.”
There are two types of “money mindsets” that we usually adopt (disclaimer here that these mindsets are fluid and can change depending on our current situation, the money habits and patterns we saw growing up, generational trauma/wealth, capitalism, etc.):
Scarcity mindset
Abundance mindset
Most of the time, when we have a scarcity mindset we approach situations or decisions about money with a sense of “lack” and “urgency”. This usually looks like hanging onto a bad client who doesn’t pay you enough but your fear that more clients won’t come, so you keep this bad client around.
On the opposite side, an abundance mindset means that you approach situations or decisions about money with a sense that there is enough for everyone, including yourself, and that there will always be more. Continuing with the example above, a person with an abundance mindset might decide to let go of this terrible client who underpays and negotiates every single rate, trusting that someone else will come along that will pay the rates they know they deserve.
A lot of things affect our money mindset, some of them could be:
Money trauma (ie: chronic worry or fear around money, regardless of your income level)
Generational trauma (or healing)
Parental or adult patterns we saw around money that are repeating themselves
And systems of oppression (ie: classism, capitalism, the patriarchy, etc.)
All of those patterns, beliefs, ideas, or stories we saw growing up make up our money mindset - WILD. Now we want to be clear that “mindset” won’t help you alone, this is not your “woo-woo”, toxic positivity type of post.
Mindset won’t help alone because we still operate under oppressive systems BUT mindset can help us to start being more self aware and conscious of the beliefs and stories we have around money, so that we can start helping ourselves to help the community.
So now that you know more about money mindset and what contributes to it - if you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh shit, I need to improve my money mindset”, here are 6 practical tips that we think can help!
6 Tips to Improve Your Money Mindset
01. Money is a tool, not a goal
Ever scroll on Instagram to see people make wild claims about how much money they’re earning?
$10K months!
$5K in one day!
6-figures in 6 months!
While we’re all for celebrating people building wealth and making money, many of these types of posts frame money as a “goal to be reached” on your way to success, rather than an actual TOOL to be used to help you thrive.
The money mindset shift: Money is a tool, not a goal to be reached. Money helps us do the things we love, take care of our basic needs, giveback to our community, and treat ourselves! This is why knowing how much you need and where your money goes towards is so important, instead of trying to reach solely flashy numbers without understanding where money flows to and from.
02. Abundance isn’t only in cash (even though we live under capitalism)
Like we said before, money is a tool but it’s not “the only” tool we have!
This is why You Belong Here believes so much in community care, mutual aid, and equitable pricing for folx because there are other great ways to count our abundance. Cash is great because we do live under a capitalist system that requires us to pay for things with either credit or debit, but let’s expand our idea of abundance OUTSIDE of cash and get creative.
Abundance could look like:
Trading services with another creative business owner to help each other out if you both don’t have the “cash” to pay
Exchanging your time with someone to help pay for services or programs (ie: offering to assist a photographer for a shoot they have without pay, for an exchanged mini photoshoot)
There are A LOT of creative ways to “pay” for things if you don’t have cash that can actually open doors to opportunities and more work!
The money mindset shift: If you don’t always have the “cash” to pay for something, ask if you’re able to have a trade of services or exchanging your time for something else. Community care and mutual aid are ways that abundance can be shared and spread in different networks. (Disclaimer: Let’s be good humans and not try to take advantage of folx and use our best judgment when it comes to asking for these things!)
03. Give yourself permission to make money
A huge money mindset block that we see most creative artists struggle with is that they actually won’t allow themselves to make money - a little of it, a fair amount, and definitely not a lot of it.
This sometimes ties back to a few factors being:
Beliefs that artists or creatives “don’t make a lot of money” (or that they “can’t”)
Money trauma (ie: having a parent or partner use money to control and manipulate you)
Or generational patterns that have been unconsciously passed down (ie: your grandparents didn’t trust or believe in banks, so now you are cautious of banking and hide your money around your home)
Or sometimes believing that we are “bad” people and “part of the system” (aka capitalism) if we do make a lot of money and keep it - so we end up giving it away or spending it.
The problem with this type of mindset is that it keeps us in feast and famine mode, struggling, and living paycheck to paycheck - just how capitalism likes us, so we can work harder (but to what end?!)
The money mindset shift: When you catch yourself thinking that you “aren’t allowed” to make a lot of money or have it, ask yourself where that belief came from and when/why it’s showing up now. When you catch yourself thinking that you’re a “bad person” if you do make a lot of money (and keep it), ask yourself where THAT belief came from and when/why it’s showing up now. And when you’re ready - test out this belief and push its boundaries a bit! Give yourself permission to make a little more money than the last time you sent out an invoice and save a little more of it in your bank account, before giving it all away. What happens when you do that?
Creative working on their laptop and reviewing financial statements
04. You do not need to struggle to earn your money
Have you ever heard the phrase “Money doesn’t grow on trees!” growing up?
In my case, this was usually said by my parents, immigrants and refugees, who came to the United States. Thinking about it, I understand their intentions trying to instill this belief/warning in me…
That I shouldn’t spend an obscene amount of money
That I should be grateful for what we have, when we have it
That the money they earned was made through hard work
And while those things were probably true in THEIR time, it’s not necessarily true in my current stage of life.
Now, I’m no money psychologist or therapist, but I’m going to make a big claim that the phrase “Money doesn’t grow on trees” actually carries a lot of money trauma with it - especially around scarcity (considering my parents were born after war).
With that phrase and the belief that we need to “work hard” for our money, that we need to show our value/worth to make money, and that we need to ‘EARN’ it is a clear sign that capitalism is feeding us those beliefs so that we continue to work hard, produce more, and stay in cycles of instability - stuck within the system.
The money mindset shift: Instead of believing that money needed to be “earned” or that it was difficult, hard, and a lot of work to make money - what if we switched that mindset into believing that making money can easily be made by doing things we love, that bring us joy, that spark creativity, and share our passion. There are other people doing it already, why not you?
05. Money is not “hard”, systems of oppression make it that way
The next tip to improve your money mindset is changing the belief that money is “hard”. Money isn’t hard because it’s just a “tool” (ahem - first tip for money mindset that we shared). If money is simply a tool, it can’t be hard or easy, it just is.
The SYSTEMS around money - especially systems of oppression - make us believe that money is hard, but they’re designed to be that way to keep the rich, rich… and well the poor, poor (or the strugglers, strugglin’).
Let’s take for example a hammer. A hammer isn’t a “hard” concept to understand, it’s just a tool that we use to build things. Sometimes the systems that a hammer works in can be confusing (ie: furniture instructions). This doesn’t mean that we don’t understand the hammer, what we need to learn is how to use the hammer in that situation. The same thing goes with money.
The money mindset shift: Instead of viewing money as “hard”, shift your mindset to believe that money is just that - money. Learning about the systems and ways people use money as a tool is where we’ll start to see a change in how we view and use money! Financial literacy, y’all!
06. Money’s purpose is to flow
In the current systems we live in, money is used as a tool and flows in and out. Money’s purpose is to FLOW, which means our mindset around it also needs to flow!
Money’s purpose is not to “sit” because we need to use it to buy supplies, pay for rent, pay for gas, treat ourselves to something nice, go on vacation, invest in education, donate to our communities, etc.
So if money comes in and out because that’s what it’s supposed to do, our job is to learn how to read those “flows” so that we can better understand how to use money as a tool.
The money mindset shift: Take the time to learn about Profit & Loss statements, forecasting, investing, and the other ways that money flows in and out through business. Having an understanding of this builds our financial literacy to be able to make sound decisions when it comes to our businesses, as well as, how we can better support our communities with financial resources.
Creative business owner reading the book “Profit First” in their living room
Wrapping up how to improve your money mindset
Money mindset influences us whether we are aware of it or not!
It draws on a lot of our past experiences, beliefs, stories, and patterns to create the reality that we currently operate in when it comes to making money, saving money, and spending it.
Learning financial literacy skills can help creatives and artists, especially BIPOC creatives and artists, to thrive under capitalism. The more in control we are of our money, the more we understand how these systems work, the better prepared we are to thrive instead of simply surviving.
If you’re thinking to yourself, I definitely need to improve my money mindset - here are the 6 tips we mentioned:
Money is a tool, not a goal
Abundance isn’t only in cash
Give yourself permission to make money
You do not need to struggle to make money
Money isn’t “hard”, systems of oppression make it that way
Money’s purpose is to flow
We also shared about what a money mindset is and the two different types of money mindsets we often see:
Scarcity mindset
Abundance mindset
What other mindset tips have helped you improve your mindset around money? Let us know in the comments below!
Looking for a community space that can help share resources and provide workshops and support from financial experts and professionals? Check out You Belong Here SD and our membership to join a workshop!