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The Doula Darcy Podcast
Doula Finances 101: How to Pay Yourself, Save for Taxes & Retire Right
00:22:52
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- [00:05]
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Welcome to the Doula Darcy podcast. I'm your host, Darcy, a business coach for doulas. And I love helping my fellow doulas master the art of marketing so that they can grow their businesses and help more families. On the podcast, I combine my decade of experience in Advertising with 14 years as a doula to empower other doulas with the marketing strategies and mindset shift they need to attract more clients and create successful, fulfilling doula careers. Whether you're just starting out as a doula or you're looking to take your doula business to the next level, you're in the right place. Let's go.
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Hey, party people. Doula Darcy here. And we are in that weird week between Christmas and New Year's when you just, you don't know what day it is. You've eaten too much cheese, or I have eaten too much cheese. And anyway, starting to dream into the new year and the past few years this week I've just kind of been like, whatever, New Year, who cares? It's why set resolutions and why plan? Blah, blah, blah. I don't know. This year I'm like, yes, bring it on, New Year. Let's get focused. I'm just in the mood to get focused and organized. And one of the things I want to do and why I'm telling you this is, is I want to help you all get focused and organized around your finances. So I don't talk about this much, but I love finances. I love geeking out to the Dave Ramsey podcast. I love my. I am blessed in that when I was probably 22 or 23, my parents signed me up for a financial planning course. And I learned so much. And I learned about compounding interest and saving for retirement and starting as soon as possible and all that. And it just kicked off. Like, I love looking at the numbers and I know a lot of doulas don't. And I just, it hit me the other day, I was like, I need to bring that more of my, like, financial love and literacy into what I'm doing for you guys. And as a doula business coach. And one of the main reasons I want to do that is another passion of mine is sustainability. I need you all to be doulas for as long as you can. And, you know, a lot of people are talking about that, avoiding doula burnout and all that, which is great, fantastic. But what I don't think anyone is talking about is that. Paying attention to your finances is self care. Paying yourself well is self care. Setting yourself up so that the tax bill isn't a stressor is self care. And these are the kind of things, these are the kind of self care.
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That.
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In increases the sustainability, increases the longevity of you being a doula. So that is the lens or the direction I'm coming at this with. So let's talk about what you need to earn as a doula, what you need to pay yourself as a doula, and what you need to. Here's the most important thing. What you need to be paying attention to, finance wise, is as a doula. In fact, I think that's going to be the title of this episode. So what you need to be paying attention to is a lot. And I'm going to go through the four major things and hopefully explain it in a way that doesn't sound scary or complicated. So when we're going to reverse engineer this in terms of figuring out what we need to pay ourselves and all that. So the first thing you need to do is figure out what you need to pay yourself. And this is not like, oh, I want to make a million dollars, so I need to pay myself this. Well, you could do it that way. But here's what I'm suggesting. Look at your household expenses. Whether you are single and you're the head of the household and you're responsible for all the bills, or whether you're married, partner and you're responsible for 40%, 50%, whatever it is, that doesn't. But please go make a list and figure out what you, as a person need to earn every month. Add up those household expenses. This is what you need to, you need to pay yourself every month. And this is the number that if you were applying for a job and the job was like, oh, you know, you're going to make $10,000 a week, well, yeah, that makes sense because that more than covers my household bills. If you're applying for a job and they say you're going to make $75 this week, you can look at that and say, that does not come close to what I owe, what I need to live. I am not going to accept this job. So what is the number that you need to pay yourself to pay your bills, to keep yourself fed, clothed, housed, car running, all that. And then maybe some of you are looking at this number for the first time and thinking, oh, my doula business isn't earning that much, so you gotta. I'm gonna say this so many times on this episode. The math has to math. Maybe this is the moment you look and realize, ooh, I need to raise My rates or, ooh, I need to. I do. I need to take, do take more clients. Ooh, I need to figure something else because there's a gap here. So fix that. Fix that gap. Step 2. After figuring out what you need to earn, pay yourself on a weekly monthly basis. Step two is to figure out what you're going to owe in taxes so you can look back at what you've paid the past couple of years as a business for your taxes. And if you have that data, if you've been in business for a while, you've been paying taxes. Look at that. Take the high. Here's what I would say. Take the highest amount you've owed, divide that by 52. There's 52 weeks in a year and start every Friday. This is what Doula Darcy does. Every Friday, I take what I owed in taxes last year, divided by 52. And that is just. Ow. Automatically. I set this up at the beginning of the year. It's automatically transferred every week into a separate bank account I have that's just called taxes. And this has been a game changer for me. And I want to tell you that I got this idea from reading the book Profit First. But I'm just going to tell you everything you need to know. You don't even need to go read the book, but it's an excellent book. You should read it. And I really like the way I should have looked up who the author is. I'll put it in the show notes. He has a way of explaining this that makes it fun. He's funny, he's very realistic. But his whole point is that if you're a business owner, the whole point is that you're making a profit. And instead of running your business in. In terms of like paying your. Your household bills, paying your business bills first, and then just like living off the scraps of what's left. The scraps of what left are. What are left. P.S. are your profit. He talks about focusing on your profit first. So the other thing I do every week is I put 5% of my gross revenue every. Any money that came into my business account that week, I add that up roughly and take, manually take 5% of that amount, and I put that into a separate account called profit. I just got sidetracked. I was talking about taxes. So you want to set yourself up so that you have enough money saved so that when your tax bill comes or when you go to send in your estimated quarterly taxes, the money's just sitting there in the account and it's not Stressful, because you have planned ahead and saved it up and you just send the money in, no big whoop. And for me, this has been like just a game changer. I don't stress about taxes anymore. I just, the money's there in the account. It's another cost of doing business. And I just pay it. It's where it used to be. Like, oh my God, I gotta rush, ruffle up this thousand dollars, whatever for my quarterly taxes that are due in two weeks. Oh my God. Rushing around, stressing, being mad about it. Like, I just, I have none of those emotions or stress or brain space taken up by this anymore. And that's huge. That's brain space and time and energy that I can use to pour into my clients, to pour into my kids, to pour into myself. So if you are a newer doula and you're not quite sure what you're going to owe in taxes, a great rule of thumb, a great way to set this up is to take 30% of what you earn. So the same way I say every week, what comes in 5% goes to profit every week what comes in for you as a doula, if you take 30% of that and put that in a separate tax account, you'll be all set and you'll probably have a little bit left over. And if you're in my doula village, you're learning from me all the tax strategies about write offs and things you can do to reduce what you owe in taxes. And then you'll have a little bonus at the end of the year if you've saved more for taxes than what you need to pay. But this will set you up really, really well. So again, if you can set this up as an auto transfer, then it's just not on your mind anymore. It's automatically every Friday a certain amount, whatever you need is taken from your doula business account over to the tax account. And ps, set up an auto transfer also for what you're going to need to pay yourself every week. So every Friday, whatever you need to be earning to pay your household bills, that's just automatically transferred from your doula business account over to your personal account. It's done. Brain space not taken up. Okay, step three, we're halfway through. You're doing great. Step three is to make a list of your business expenses. You did this for your household, now do it for your business. And we are so lucky as doulas like you can really run your doula business without a lot of expenses. You need to pay whatever fees for Your training, recertification, doula membership, that kind of thing. You need to pay for liability insurance. You need to have a cell phone, you need to have Internet. You need to have what else? Some software, maybe whatever you're using to run your doula business. Shout out to Edula Biz. That's what I use. It's especially helpful for running my agency. And if you mention my name, there's no coupon code, but you can, like in the chat box as you're signing up, you can say you heard about Edula Biz from the doula Darcy. You'll save 20% on your first year. So anyway, like, what I pay for Edula is a business expense. Quickbooks, Honeybook, whatever you're else you're using, those are your business expenses. So add up what you pay for all of that for the year, divide that by 12 months in a year or 52 weeks in a year. By the way, you, my friend, are the first business expense. You are your salary, your payment every week, your paycheck every week is the first business expense. So figure out what you the expenses are for your business. And then what I add, what no one else there is talking about is start to save for your retirement. I don't care if you're 61, I don't care if you're 21, if you. It is never too early and it is never too late to start up an IRA retirement account. Get yourself a financial planner and get this set up. Because if we're talking about sustainability, you need to do this work for the long haul as a doula and then you need to be able to retire comfortably and not just be stuck. I can't even believe we. I think it was. Oh, it was, it was two years ago at the birth worker retreat. Jodi and I were there and she said something about saving for retirement. And we could just hear this like murmur in the audience and we were like, okay, raise your hand if you're saving for retirement. And no one raised their hand. So the next year, last year we had a wonderful speaker about that. We doulas. This is like we are grown ups, okay? And we are grown up business owners. And if you are not saving for your retirement, get on that now, please. And if you're in my doula village, go watch the module on retirement for doulas. I had my financial planner, Todd, shout out to Todd. We went to college together. He's been managing my money for 20 something years. He's the best. And he was the first male ever guest expert speaker inside my doula village and taught us all about how to start that whole process of saving for retirement. Okay, so let's review. As you've been reverse engineering this, you have one, figured out what you need to earn to pay your household bills so that you're not homeless or starving. You've also figured out what you're going to owe each week or each month for taxes and you're setting that aside. You've also figured out what the business expenses are for your business, including number one, what you need to pay you as the owner and the doula. And then four, you are going to start saving for retirement. If you're already saving for retirement, maybe look at these numbers and increase it in 2026, boost that up a little bit and I, I'm on this new kick. Like this is such an important piece of self care is making sure you are paid well, compensated well, and that you're taking care of yourself in the future. Being a doula is the best job in the world. It absolutely is. Right. You deserve to be compensated for that. You deserve to be compensated for the hard work that goes along with that. Living on call, going to 30 hour births, holding a mom's hand as she cries on day three and you're home and you're there overnight. Like the energy and compassion and lifestyle it takes to be a doula. You deserve to be compensated for that. Please, I hope you're not looking at these numbers and going, oh no, like I, these numbers can't be negative because these are just the math. This is just the math. This is just the money. This we're also. There's energy. You're outputting energy to be a doula. You're taking every. Here's a great quote I heard the other day. I can't even remember who said it, but every yes is a no. Every yes you say to something in your doula business is a no to something else. So the yes you say to taking the client whose due date is December 25th is a no to possibly being with your kids on Christmas morning. Every yes you say to taking on a new client is a no to something else in your life. It's a no to volunteering in your kid's classroom. It's a no to going to the gym. It's a no to taking a family vacation. Whatever. There's, there's give and take, there's energy being exchanged in both ways. So setting yourself up monetarily to kind of balance that exchange out is so important. And the more that you can just automate these transfers. And listen, I did not automate these transfers for years into my doula business, but I was paying attention to this. Cause again, like I said, I'm a nerd. I had spreadsheets tracking my taxes, tracking my expenses, tracking my mileage, all the things. And then as I got bigger, as I started to have more of a cushion in my doula business, bank account is when I could set up these automatic transfers for paying myself, paying my taxes, contributing to my IRA and automating what I had to pay for my business. That took time, but now it has made my life so much easier. I don't even have to do it. Think about it. I mean, I'm doing it saving for retirement, I'm saving for my taxes, I'm paying myself, I'm paying my bills and it's all just happening. And then I have this juicy profit account. And if you read the book Profit first he talks about like, you need this profit account. This is your. The profit is your. It's your reward for taking all these risks to be the business owner, for living your life on call, for leaving your family at the moment's notice at 3:00am, for taking the leap. If you're a doula, like, this was a leap of faith. This was, you know, following your dream, following your passion and starting a doula business when everybody thought you were crazy. And you know, do you like just, I wish we were together. Raise your hand. Like, do you have friends in your town or wherever that are. They just don't understand what you do. They just don't understand that feeling of why you have to do this, why you have to serve in this way, and why you will never go back, hopefully to a job where you're working for someone else's dream. Like, this is what we do now, you guys. And this is what I want to talk to you more about in 2026. This is what I want to help more about. We. I'm going to be doing, diving deeper into this, especially in my doula village with my members. We're doing. I haven't even told them that yet. We're going to be doing the seven day challenge in January to get their finances set up. Kind of like a deeper dive than what I've gone through here. So if you're listening to this after the fact, you absolutely could still join my doula village, get access to all the repl. Still the checklists and go through and do all the actions. For sure. It's not, It'll be awesome. Live, but you can do the replays. Where was I going with all this? Oh, the profit. So your profit account is, like, your reward for all this? The risks you've taken, the. The way you live your life. This is your, like, reward. So he says at whatever. I can't actually honestly remember in the book what he says in my head. Every three months, you can take a part of that profit account and buy yourself something fun. Something fun that you will use. That every time you use it, you're like, this is because I am a cool doula business owner. So, for instance, last year, I bought myself new skis. If you don't know, I am obsessed with skiing. It's my favorite thing to do. And I brought myself some brand new, shiny, awesome skis. And I tell you every time they're awesome. Every time I ride the lift, I look down at them, I'm like, my business bought me these. My profits bought me these. So maybe, you know, whatever, it could be a new sweater, it could be a bouquet of flowers. You know, whatever it is. The point is, you spend part of your profits on something that you really, really want and desire. Not the electric bill. So I cannot wait to hear what you guys think of this episode. DM me on Instagram, send me an email, whatever. Find me and tell me if you thought this was helpful. Tell me if you want me to go all in more talking about this kind of stuff. I just think it's really important and it's not being talked about in the doula world. So that's what we're doing. I wish you all the very best for a happy, safe, healthy, and prosperous 2026.
- [22:12]
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Thank you for tuning in to the Doula Darcy podcast.
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I hope you found this episode valuable.
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And I'd love for you to join me on the next one. Let's keep the conversation going. Shoot me a DM on Instagram Thedula Darcy. Or join my free Facebook community, the Doula Marketing Group, where we dive deeper into growing your doula business.
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If you enjoyed the episode, please take.
- [22:33]
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A moment to rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your feedback will help more doulas discover the show, which in turn helps more families find the doula support that they need. And I believe that that is how.
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We save the world.