Recently I did a survey of all the students who had purchased my blueprint course. And one of the questions was what three words or phrases describe your feelings about money. The responses were overwhelmingly negative. There were themes, including stress, shame, scarcity, guilt, insecurity. One person even used the word abuse.
And I know from conversations I've had over time that since I teach about how to price and sell your work, and since I come from in person sales, and I talk about the fact that my photo business routinely makes six figures, people seem to assume that things like money and sales and charging higher prices all
come easily to me. The reality is that although these days, I feel pretty confident when it comes to money, and all the things surrounding it, including earning it, saving it, and spending it, it definitely has not always been that way. So today, I want to share a bit about my own journey when it comes to money, where I have been in the past where I am now, and how I got there. Welcome to this can't be that hard. My name is Annemie Tonken. And I help photographers run profitable, sustainable
businesses that they love. Each week on the podcast, I cover simple, actionable strategies and systems that photographers at every level of experience can use to earn more money in a more sustainable way. Running a photography business doesn't have to be that hard. You can do it. And I can show you how. Growing up, my family didn't really talk about money. We did not have any money when I was little. My parents were quite
young when they had me. And I think that it was probably a pretty significant struggle for the first at least decade of my life while they navigated their 20s. But by the time I was aware of money as a construct, we sort of had enough that my parents didn't need to constantly talk about it. And they didn't. They definitely modeled some really good behavior they would spend within their means. They talked about the importance of not going into debt except for things like you know, a home
purchase or a school loan. And they talked pretty routinely about the fact that you don't need money to be happy. In fact, in some ways they went overboard into the territory of like money can be corruptive. "Corruptive" is that even a word? Money can corrupt people. And there was sort of this overarching, if unspoken lesson of if you have money, you're not supposed to talk about it or show it off.
The high school that I went to was also pretty unremarkable in terms of the population of people there when it came to money. There were a range of people who - I went to a small
Catholic school. And because we all wear uniforms, and you know, it wasn't anything fancy, there wasn't a lot of there wasn't a lot of comparison I guess, that I think a lot of people in high school had so in some ways that shielded me from the concerns that a lot of teenagers have some of the stuff that I see my own kids seeing and dealing with I was pretty sheltered from. But then I went off to college and where I went to school, it was a private school, it was
expensive. And there were a lot of kids there with a lot of money that came from families that were quite wealthy. You know, I showed up my freshman year, hardly able to dress myself, given that I had gone to Catholic school and worn a uniform my whole life. And there were kids there who you know, clearly had their parents credit card and the ability to go use that with abandon, a lot of them had not only cars, but fancy cars, I didn't have any car at
all. And so in many ways, that was my first experience with money being kind of a differentiating factor for people, I often sort of felt like a fish out of water. But I definitely wasn't like confident enough in myself at that point to feel like well, this doesn't matter. So it was definitely an issue. But you know, you get through that sort of thing. And after school, I moved to New York City, because I wanted very badly to live there. I had visited once I thought it
was amazing. And I had it in my head that that would be a great place to live in my early 20s. And it was. I got a job. My undergraduate degree. My original undergraduate degree was in cultural anthropology. So it wasn't like I was set up for
some specific career track. But knowing that I wanted to move to New York, I applied for jobs with places like investment banks, which makes me laugh now and consulting firms, and that was sort of like a, you know, you don't have to have any particular skill set other than a willingness to work. And I figured those places tended to be pretty high paying. And I figured that that would afford me the ability to live in what I had come to understand was a
super expensive city. So I moved there in May after graduation. And that was 2001. And I got a job waiting tables, because that's what I knew how to do. And I was just going to sort of wait tables to meet people and have enough money to live for the summer until my job was supposed to start in October. And then 9/11 happened and my consulting job offer
disappeared. Well, actually, it was just put on hold, but it was gone for months and months, while they were sort of navigating the post 9/11 waters, hard to believe that's 20 years ago now. And so I was just sort of waiting tables, like with this newfound, you know, well, what do I do next? Do I wait for this job to start, but at that point, I had been in New York long enough that I sort of had a sense, you know, I was making pretty good money waiting
tables. And I was like, Oh, I guess I don't need to make the most money here in order to live. So what do I actually want to do? And all of that sort of, over a period of time, got me to this idea that I was going to go back and go to nursing school. So I took out a loan, a loan that I just recently paid off, actually so. So that was kind of funny. But I took out a loan applied and went to get a second bachelor's degree in nursing. And in the meantime, I met the man that I would marry a couple
years later. And at the beginning of our relationship, I was only 22. And I didn't have very much money to speak of, but I had saved up a little bit of money over the summer with my waiting tables job. And when I met him, he was eight years older than I was, and he had been living in New York all this time. And he had quite a lot of credit card debt that, you know, came up in the course of conversation over the first several months of our
relationship. And so between that and the fact that shortly after we got married, he had this major health issue that came up, that landed him in the hospital for a couple of weeks. And those two things ended up putting us into a fair amount of debt around the time that I was 25. So I had the student loan, we had this giant health bill, and this credit card debt that
he was trying to work off. So you know, this is pretty typical 20s stuff, like we were navigating all of this, I was working and going to school, he was in grad school. And then he finished grad school and he had a good job, but it was still like pretty entry level. And then just a year later, right before my 27th birthday, we had our first child. And so you know, I look back on all these, it was like kind of rapid changes. And I was trying to
navigate all this stuff. And it was, you know, we were paying our rent and all that sort of stuff. But we were carrying a fair amount of debt. And in 2007, after Oliver was born, we were looking to potentially buy an apartment in Brooklyn. And you know, I think back on that now, and I'm so grateful that we didn't. I think, you know, historically, there's been a fair amount of pressure like, Oh, it's you're settling down real estate is the thing to do
you have a baby. But you know it in retrospect, we know that, like the real estate bubble was at its very peak at that point. I have no doubt that if we had stretched, which was what we were going to have to do to buy an apartment, it would have been, it would have trapped us in that very small apartment for a long time with a lot of sort
of house debt. And so I'm glad that instead of doing that, I kind of pulled the plug and said, You know what, I think it's crazy that we're trying to continue living in New York things, obviously, after having a child really changed. It was you know, all of a sudden, I wasn't really taking advantage of all the stuff that New York City offered. I was feeling pretty isolated. Most people in New York don't start families intentionally when they're in
their mid 20s. And so I started saying I think we need to move I think we need to consider moving out of the city that hadn't been part of the conversation before the baby was born. But But thankfully, we were able to figure that out and we decided to move to North Carolina for you know, a host of reasons and so we moved Here to North Carolina when my son was almost
one. And then life kind of settled into a bit of a groove for a while, we both had steady jobs with steady income, I was working by that point as a nurse, and my ex husband kept his New York City job. He was working remotely. And between the lower cost of living and you know, an increase over time and his salary, we were finally at a place where we weren't coming from behind every month, we weren't stretching every dollar as far as it could possibly go, I started grad school, we had
another baby. And I think that from all outside sources, anyone would sort of look at that and say, things were trending in the right direction, I had just turned 30. And it sort of felt like things were falling into place. And after Judah was born, I took a leave of absence from my master's program to, you know, explore this crazy idea of pursuing a photography career. I was not happy with where my master's program was kind of going, I was realizing that this probably wasn't the right job
for me in the long term. And so I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do, and photography was kind of bubbling to the surface. And within a year of taking that leave of absence, I was really very actively trying to get the business to a place where I could quit my nursing job altogether and go full time on photography. But in order to do that, I knew we needed to save pretty aggressively and that ultimately became the source of a fair amount of contention. I wouldn't say that money was
the cause of my divorce. But it certainly didn't help. And I promise I'm telling you this not just to air my own dirty laundry. But but because it really does impact it was sort of foundational in the way that my money relationship evolved. Because for the last few years of our marriage, I really actively avoided looking at our credit card statements and our banking statements in this sort of ostrich-like attempt to keep
the peace. I I knew that every time that I started deep diving, those things, it ended up resulting in an argument and I was trying to not argue, I was trying to find common ground as much as possible. So that was just something that I kind of
started shying away from. But at the same time, as I'm sure many of you can probably relate to shying away from that and not knowing created this, like growing sense of dread, about money and what it meant for me and how much we had and whether we were okay, and all that sort of stuff. So up until that point in my life, I had always viewed money as sort of a necessary means to an end, it was kind of this thing that you needed to pay the bills and like, I didn't really have any big, overarching
goals about it. Now, I was always a hard worker, I have always had a job from the time that I was 15 years old probably before then. And I knew how to spend less money than I made. But I had always been pretty intimidated by what I saw as kind of the adult mystery of money. The like, the stuff that people who seem to know what they were doing knew I did not feel like I was there, the only real clue that I had about personal finance was that I had no clue about personal finance.
And given that I was at this point in my 30s and a parent of two children and someone who fancied herself, you know, generally speaking to be a responsible adult, I had a fair amount of shame and anxiety around the subject of money. When people would talk to me about money, I could, I could point to my income and I was proud of what I was making. But I wasn't necessarily able to go a whole lot deeper than that. I can sort of liken it to when I was first learning about
photography. And I lived in fear of being at like a wedding and having somebody come up to me and start grilling me about my camera settings or something like I could I could function as a photographer, I could make good photos, but I didn't at that point really understand all the ins and outs of how the camera worked and all that sort of stuff. So I kind of had this imposter syndrome around cameras in the beginning of my photography career and in my
early 30s. Actually, well into my mid 30s I think I had a fair amount of imposter syndrome about money and finance. And, you know, if you're not talking to anybody about something, you don't necessarily recognize that that's not uncommon, but when my ex and I finally separated in 2017, and we went through the you know, painful process of taking inventory of everything we owned, including our money and our you know, savings, our
retirement. I was truly at that point shocked and pretty horrified at what little we had, I felt like at that point, we probably should have had more. But again, I had been sort of head-in-the-sand about a lot of it. And I know I've told this story before some of you have
heard it. But at this point, as we were going through the accounting process with the lawyers, specifically, when we were looking at my business income and my expenses, my lawyer turned to me and asked when I was going to go back to my nursing job. And mind you were talking about five years after I had quit nursing altogether, and had been running what most people would argue was a successful photography business at that point for seven
years. So that question, which was repeated to me after my lawyer said it by several well-meaning people over the course of a bunch of months, was both humiliating and terrifying. It was like, you know, somebody, somebody's just looking deep into my soul, it was like the men with the clipboards had shown up. But at the same time, it was also hugely motivating
for me. So in some ways, I'm glad now that people were asking me that question, because it forced me to really get clear on what was going on. So faced with this kind of brick wall of reality, I basically dove headfirst into my fear. And I decided that I was going to learn everything that well, not everything there was to know. But everything I needed to know about personal finance, I was going to get myself to a level where I was comfortable with it, even if I hated it, even if it
made my eyes glaze over.Even if it made me like lose sleep at night, because I needed to. And I was going to do whatever it took to get not only my understanding of personal finance, but also my understanding of my business and how that needed to run financially, to a place where I could keep that as my career, I didn't want to have to give up this thing that I loved. And that people told me I was good at and that I took a lot of sort of personal pride and also
satisfaction in. So I had run my numbers when I was a new photographer, I think I've shared before that I took a class on setting up a business and it was really helpful for me. And that was how I ended up setting these pretty high prices right from the get go. But the fact of the matter was those original numbers had, you know, almost no bearing on my business seven years, then it was like
everything had changed. When I first ran my numbers, I was making a lot of educated guesses about expenses, I was also factoring in expenses that I no longer had, and not factoring in expenses that had come on since I originally ran my numbers. And of course, I was running all of my numbers with the baseline understanding that I had a two income household at the beginning of my career. So I needed to read, like really run those numbers all the way back to like, you know, starting from
the ground. So doing that rerunning my numbers was really scary at that point. But it did give me some clarity around the fact that I was in an untenable position, like my lawyer had a point when she asked me when I was going back to my nursing job. And the real crux of the problem was the fact that I looked at this and realized I was either going to have to significantly increase my per session average, which didn't seem feasible because I was already toward the top of my
market. Or I was going to have to figure out how to take on a lot more clients. And I literally couldn't, I did not have time in the calendar to do that, given how time consuming my process was because I was using in person sales.
And I know a lot of you know what came next I'm just going to tell it because it is part of the story but out of at this point sheer desperation I was doing the whole thing where I was like, Okay, well, let's just try and like get really creative about this and what can we change what you know, if this square peg won't fit in a round hole? How can we how can we
change the peg? So out of desperation, I developed an implemented what I now call the Simple Sales System and was able to increase my income, decrease my workflow and kind of stablize my life. My business felt like
it was way more manageable. And you know, here I am almost five years later with a thriving photo business that has allowed me to continue to provide for myself and my kids, while doing all the other things, supporting causes and charities, funding my retirement accounts, and even going in on a little cottage on the coast with my partner and our best friends this past spring, which was really fun.
And I will pause really quickly here to say that if you don't know about my Simple Sales System, if you don't know how that works, I want you to sign up for my free masterclass, where I walk you through the six steps that have allowed me to turn these lessons that I learned in those seven years of in person sales into an automated system that creates guaranteed profit and a great client experience. Without pushy selling or this time consuming
process of in person sales. It is even if it's not right for you, it is a system that is working for people all over the world, I think it's worth learning about. So if this money conversation resonates for you, and you don't know about Simple Sales, I want you to go do that it's you can find the link in the show notes or you can go to
//www.thiscantbethathard.com/simple to sign up, it is free. But back to the story. How did I get from where I was to where I am now? Right? I would say that the biggest shift is that I would say that the biggest shift is really one having to do with mindset. I no longer regard money as an adversary or something to be afraid of, or an anchor that's like weighing me down. Now I see it for what I believe it really is, which is a reality in our lives, that is necessary to a certain degree.
And beyond that level of necessity, it becomes a tool that when used properly, can really be leveraged to create a rich life. And when I say a rich life, I am not walking around dripping in diamonds or you know, I'm still driving my 2002 Camry for those of you who have followed my car story for a long time. You know, I generally am pretty, like frugal and I I live in a relatively low impact kind
of way. But I do spend many money on things that are important to me, I like I'm able to take opportunities that I'm excited to take be they trips to Iceland or anything else. I think that it you know, I tried to be really intentional, intentional about not only the way that I earn money, but also the way that I spend it. And what I also think I've learned is that the worst thing that you can do when it comes to money is to try and ignore it altogether. That was at least my biggest
mistake. I think at best ignoring money will mean missing opportunities to live that more intentional life or to be able to say yes to things. And at worst, and possibly more likely, if you're really ignoring it as that that act of ignoring it can end in disaster. So, you know, I never hit what anyone would call rock bottom, I had shelter and food and medical insurance and the freedom to make choices about my career and a whole lot
more. So don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to paint this as some sort of like hero's journey. But we all know that when you're in the midst of a situation, it can feel really dire, even if it's not dire by sort of objective standards. And if you had talked to me in the spring or summer of 2017 between this money situation, and then just going through a divorce in general, I certainly felt like I was at rock bottom, I was scared,
uncertain, I was ashamed. Really all the negative things that I listed at the beginning in that, you know, of these survey responses that my students filled out, I was feeling those I was I was in a place of a lot of scarcity and fear. And now I am so grateful looking back. I'm grateful to myself really for being willing to turn and look that fear in the eye. And then I had a couple of good friends who were also major sources of encouragement and education when it came to money.
And so I'm grateful for that as well. And what I have learned has not only helped me gain financial freedom, it's also helped me shed an enormous amount of stress and fear that were related to the unknowns that I had around money. It's like, before I was that little kid in the dark room who was like, getting more and more panicked about the monsters in the shadows. And, you know, then somebody came in and flipped on a light, or I decided to get up out of bed and flip on the light
myself. And, sure, you know, there's always a chance that there's going to be a monster in the corner. But at least with the light on you can, you know, see it and kill it I, I definitely had, if not full blown monsters, I had what we're developing into some monsters, and I did it took a fair amount of work to get to a place where I didn't feel that but now lights are on and I feel good about it. But if you are in that dark place, I promise, I totally get it. That's why I wanted to tell
this story today. And I am 100% here to cheer you on. If you decide and as you decide to make that decision to turn on the light. There is no shame in starting a business without fully understanding the monetary side of it. My guess is that that's like 90% of the people that are out there running businesses, even the people that you think are have it all under control, I promise you, most of them don't, they are probably in
exactly the same situation. But although there is no shame in starting a business or running a business without understanding that money thing, there definitely is risk. So I hope you decide to turn on the light. I hope you decide to build a business that you and the people that you provide for can absolutely rely on because it's a place in your life and in your mind that my own experience tells me feels a lot better. Anyway, thanks for listening to my story. I hope you guys have a great week.
Well, that's it for this week's episode of this can't be that hard. I'll be back Same time, same place next week. In the meantime, you can find more information about this episode along with all the relevant links, notes and downloads at this can't be that hard.com slash learn. If you like the podcast, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Even better, share the love by leaving a review in iTunes. And as always, thanks so much for joining me. I hope you have a fantastic week.