[00:00:00] Ashton Hayes: Hello, and welcome back to this week’s Collaboration between the Becoming in A-M-H-S-W podcast with me, Ashton Hayes, and the Inside Social Work Podcast with me, Marie Vakakis. So this week we are going to be talking about the thing that we should never talk about. And that’s money. 

[00:00:25] Marie Vakakis: Oh, not politics and 

[00:00:26] Ashton Hayes: sex.

[00:00:28] Ashton Hayes: Let’s throw those in the mix. I was grabbing out the thing that we were always told in polite society, never talk about money. And I guess one of the things that comes up quite a lot for social workers is feeling guilty about charging money for services. What has been your experience around that, Marie?

[00:00:48] Marie Vakakis: It is really interesting and a lot of the resistance I see comes from other people not charging. Okay. Or bulk billing. So [00:01:00] it’s a very complicated one. I do think we need more funding for mental health care. Mm-hmm. And I do think we have a lot of room to improve. Our supposed universal healthcare system, and I need to make money to pay my bills and expenses.

[00:01:18] Marie Vakakis: I didn’t take a vow of poverty being a social worker, and I’ve been very motivated by money because I want to do stuff. Mm-hmm. I want to live and travel and have a car and do all of those things, so I’ve always been very focused on making sure I’m getting paid what I’m worth. And I have been appalled by how poor our industry pays compared to some people with a similar qualification, but in a different industry.

[00:01:47] Marie Vakakis: Mm-hmm. My first salary was like $37,000 a year. Yeah, that’s bad. That was absolute crap. That was following two degrees and experience and dealing with some [00:02:00] significantly confronting and challenging things. Mm-hmm. It was terrible. And we are made to feel like we should just do it because we care. Mm-hmm.

[00:02:09] Marie Vakakis: Or we get salary packaging or some I new muffins somewhere. And I just think it’s such crap to think we’re already doing hard work. We are qualified professionals. Mm-hmm. And we’re working with some of the. Difficult or complex environments or systems, and then just do it because we care. And I think it’s absolute crap.

[00:02:32] Marie Vakakis: So moving into private practice was definitely a different mind set shift and it evolved. My prices went up and a lot of that work had to come from coaching, understanding finances. Overheads expenses because it’s not simply like, oh, 38 hours a week at know the rebate of $82. Mm-hmm. That’s heaps of money that I’ve ever earned.

[00:02:53] Marie Vakakis: Mm-hmm. You don’t see 38 clients. You can’t, then you have sick days, annual leave, public [00:03:00] holidays. Every day that you do a professional development, you’re not getting paid for. You pay for your training, you pay for your supervision. You don’t get paid to attend supervision. There’s so many overheads. So I started to have to think of it from.

[00:03:13] Marie Vakakis: The cost of doing business. 

[00:03:15] Ashton Hayes: Mm-hmm. 

[00:03:16] Marie Vakakis: Mm-hmm. And like with food, there are some gourmet restaurants and chef’s, hat restaurants, and there’s people that advocate for food security and there’s a space for all of that. Yeah. So it’s, it’s hard. It’s still something I grapple with. But How about you? What do you hear with money?

[00:03:33] Ashton Hayes: I think that one of the things about being a social worker is this concept around it being a caring profession, which of course it absolutely is, but I think that the caring element of it is very much caught up within the gendered concept as caring. Being an integral part of being [00:04:00] female, and that social work tends to be a female dominated industry.

[00:04:05] Ashton Hayes: And so there’s almost this, sometimes there’s this idea of a race to the bottom where being a martyr in terms of, you know, sitting in places of low pay and poverty somehow speaks to. How good of a person you are, how good of a social worker you are, because you are not doing it for the money. And I’ve never met a social worker in my entire career who said, yeah, I decided to be a social worker.

[00:04:36] Ashton Hayes: So I thought I would make lots of money. But when I think about the idea of social workers, particularly those in private practice being. Sometimes accused of being not true to social work ethics and values because of the fact that they charge a fee for service. I often wonder whether [00:05:00] there are social workers out there who would tell their client, in order to be a really good person, you really shouldn’t ask to be paid what you’re worth.

[00:05:09] Ashton Hayes: You should work for less. You should work for a lower salary. Don’t ask for. Appropriate remuneration because that doesn’t reflect well on you as a person. I cannot imagine any social worker saying that to their client when they’re supporting them out of, you know, poverty, out of homelessness, out of domestic and family violence that they’re saying to them in order to really achieve and get yourself out of this position that you’re in.

[00:05:38] Ashton Hayes: It’s important that you’re not paid appropriately. 

[00:05:41] Marie Vakakis: I, there’s so much, so much in that one part of me thinks they would not say that and yet there would be this tall poppy bit where charge what you are worth. But then once that worth becomes unaffordable for me as a consumer 

[00:05:56] Ashton Hayes: mm-hmm. 

[00:05:57] Marie Vakakis: I’m not okay with that.

[00:05:58] Marie Vakakis: Right. And then I think the [00:06:00] other part of working for a lower salary, I think. Some social workers can be judgy of other professionals getting their taxes done, maybe going to the dentist, working with a mortgage broker because they are not used to charging their worth. It can be quite fronting to see someone else charge what they think is fair for their work.

[00:06:24] Marie Vakakis: Yeah, and that can be anything from DIY things around the house to. E-commerce, like other parts. So I think it limits what people spend their money on. Mm. And how they view others. Maybe that links into money stories, which we’ll talk about on another day. I think it can hold us back as well and create judgment for other professionals.

[00:06:46] Ashton Hayes: I think it absolutely can, and I remember, you know, there’ve been times a few years ago now when I would run. Training for new caseworkers. Now, they weren’t all social workers, they came from [00:07:00] different disciplines, but some were social workers and some were came from counseling disciplines and so on and so forth.

[00:07:07] Ashton Hayes: And one of the questions I would always ask is, would you be prepared to do this work for free? And most of them would say yes, with the carry out of, but I would need some kind of income. So then the answer is no. You wouldn’t be prepared to do the work for free because there isn’t any other income source.

[00:07:24] Ashton Hayes: This is your income source. And so I think that we should be advocating for each other as a profession for increased income that appropriately reflects the training. The fees that we pay, the insurances supervision, the business overheads if you are in business. But oftentimes I hear of social workers, I mean all the time.

[00:07:52] Ashton Hayes: I have social workers who come to me for external supervision or see the team for external supervision and say, I wish my employer would pay for [00:08:00] this. I’m paying for this out of my own pocket, but I am being given the hour to attend. And I think that if you were supporting, say if you were employing doctors or you were employing some other profession who had to ha meet certain continuing professional development requirements that directly related to the work that they are doing and the outcomes for the people that they are serving, then it would be a no brainer to pay.

[00:08:30] Ashton Hayes: For the supervision, or I hear people say, I can’t afford to get supervision. Certainly that was my experience when I first started out. I came across some very old payslips the other day. Remember those paper payslips? No. You’re too young. No, 

[00:08:45] Marie Vakakis: no, I, I got them. I remember I used to get paid in a envelope in cash.

[00:08:52] Marie Vakakis: A little yellow packet. Yeah. It was just literally written on the front. I think my first job was like $6 an hour in a fried chicken shop, and I [00:09:00] remember payslips. Oh, good. 

[00:09:00] Ashton Hayes: Okay. I wasn’t aging myself too much. 

[00:09:04] Marie Vakakis: Now we diff we, we’ve told people we’re different generations, but not that young. 

[00:09:09] Ashton Hayes: And the payslip, I genuinely do not know.

[00:09:12] Ashton Hayes: How I was surviving on that lower salary. 

[00:09:15] Marie Vakakis: I do. I had two jobs. I had to work on weekends while working full time to make ends meet. 

[00:09:21] Ashton Hayes: Yeah, it’s that two job thing that a lot of people do need to do. They need something else, particularly at the moment in a cost of living crisis. But my question to people is.

[00:09:33] Ashton Hayes: Why would you not charge what you are worth? Where does that come from and when you are suggesting that others should. Charge less than what they see themselves being worth. Is that part of those money blocks and those money stories that come to us from all kinds of outside influences? And how do we reflect upon [00:10:00] that?

[00:10:00] Ashton Hayes: Because ultimately in doing so, what we do is we begin to see the profession as one that should be paid appropriately. And then we all lift 

[00:10:09] Marie Vakakis: each other up. I love that. So listen, stay tuned because later this week we will talk about money stories and money blocks. And tomorrow we’re going to talk about how we can actually save money when we’re starting out.

[00:10:22] Marie Vakakis: Mm-hmm. And we’re gonna share some of our best money purchases, money wins, and biggest blunders, things that we’ve spent money on that we probably shouldn’t have. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow. Thanks.

[00:10:38] Speaker 4: Hello, and welcome back to this week’s Collaboration between the Becoming in A-M-H-S-W podcast with me, Ashton Hayes, and the Inside Social Work Podcast with me, Marie Vakakis. So this week we are going to be [00:11:00] talking about the thing that we should never talk about. And that’s money. Oh, not politics and sex.

[00:11:07] Speaker 4: Let’s throw those in the mix. I was grabbing out the thing that we were always told in polite society, never talk about money. And I guess one of the things that comes up quite a lot for social workers is feeling guilty about charging money for services. What has been your experience around that, Marie?

[00:11:27] Speaker 5: It is really interesting and a lot of the resistance I see comes from other people not charging. Okay. Or bulk billing. So it’s a very complicated one. I do think we need more funding for mental health care. Mm-hmm. And I do think we have a lot of room to improve. Our supposed universal healthcare system, and I need to make money to pay my bills and expenses.

[00:11:57] Speaker 5: I didn’t take a vow of poverty being a [00:12:00] social worker, and I’ve been very motivated by money because I want to do stuff. Mm-hmm. I want to live and travel and have a car and do all of those things, so I’ve always been very focused on making sure I’m getting paid what I’m worth. And I have been appalled by how poor our industry pays compared to some people with a similar qualification, but in a different industry.

[00:12:26] Speaker 5: Mm-hmm. My first salary was like $37,000 a year. Yeah, that’s bad. That was absolute crap. That was following two degrees and experience and dealing with some significantly confronting and challenging things. Mm-hmm. It was terrible. And we are made to feel like we should just do it because we care. Mm-hmm.

[00:12:48] Speaker 5: Or we get salary packaging or some I new muffins somewhere. And I just think it’s such crap to think we’re already doing hard work. We are qualified [00:13:00] professionals. Mm-hmm. And we’re working with some of the. Difficult or complex environments or systems, and then just do it because we care. And I think it’s absolute crap.

[00:13:11] Speaker 5: So moving into private practice was definitely a different mind set shift and it evolved. My prices went up and a lot of that work had to come from coaching, understanding finances. Overheads expenses because it’s not simply like, oh, 38 hours a week at know the rebate of $82. Mm-hmm. That’s heaps of money that I’ve ever earned.

[00:13:32] Speaker 5: Mm-hmm. You don’t see 38 clients. You can’t, then you have sick days, annual leave, public holidays. Every day that you do a professional development, you’re not getting paid for. You pay for your training, you pay for your supervision. You don’t get paid to attend supervision. There’s so many overheads. So I started to have to think of it from.

[00:13:52] Speaker 5: The cost of doing business. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And like with food, there are some gourmet restaurants and chef’s, [00:14:00] hat restaurants, and there’s people that advocate for food security and there’s a space for all of that. Yeah. So it’s, it’s hard. It’s still something I grapple with. But How about you? What do you hear with money?

[00:14:12] Speaker 4: I think that one of the things about being a social worker is this concept around it being a caring profession, which of course it absolutely is, but I think that the caring element of it is very much caught up within the gendered concept as caring. Being an integral part of being female, and that social work tends to be a female dominated industry.

[00:14:44] Speaker 4: And so there’s almost this, sometimes there’s this idea of a race to the bottom where being a martyr in terms of, you know, sitting in places of low pay and poverty [00:15:00] somehow speaks to. How good of a person you are, how good of a social worker you are, because you are not doing it for the money. And I’ve never met a social worker in my entire career who said, yeah, I decided to be a social worker.

[00:15:15] Speaker 4: So I thought I would make lots of money. But when I think about the idea of social workers, particularly those in private practice being. Sometimes accused of being not true to social work ethics and values because of the fact that they charge a fee for service. I often wonder whether there are social workers out there who would tell their client, in order to be a really good person, you really shouldn’t ask to be paid what you’re worth.

[00:15:48] Speaker 4: You should work for less. You should work for a lower salary. Don’t ask for. Appropriate remuneration because that doesn’t reflect well on you as a [00:16:00] person. I cannot imagine any social worker saying that to their client when they’re supporting them out of, you know, poverty, out of homelessness, out of domestic and family violence that they’re saying to them in order to really achieve and get yourself out of this position that you’re in.

[00:16:17] Speaker 4: It’s important that you’re not paid appropriately. I, there’s so much, so much in that one part of me thinks they would not say that and yet there would be this tall poppy bit where charge what you are worth. But then once that worth becomes unaffordable for me as a consumer mm-hmm. I’m not okay with that.

[00:16:37] Speaker 5: Right. And then I think the other part of working for a lower salary, I think. Some social workers can be judgy of other professionals getting their taxes done, maybe going to the dentist, working with a mortgage broker because they are not used to charging their worth. It can be quite fronting to [00:17:00] see someone else charge what they think is fair for their work.

[00:17:03] Speaker 5: Yeah, and that can be anything from DIY things around the house to. E-commerce, like other parts. So I think it limits what people spend their money on. Mm. And how they view others. Maybe that links into money stories, which we’ll talk about on another day. I think it can hold us back as well and create judgment for other professionals.

[00:17:25] Speaker 4: I think it absolutely can, and I remember, you know, there’ve been times a few years ago now when I would run. Training for new caseworkers. Now, they weren’t all social workers, they came from different disciplines, but some were social workers and some were came from counseling disciplines and so on and so forth.

[00:17:46] Speaker 4: And one of the questions I would always ask is, would you be prepared to do this work for free? And most of them would say yes, with the carry out of, but I would need some kind of income. So then the answer is no. You [00:18:00] wouldn’t be prepared to do the work for free because there isn’t any other income source.

[00:18:03] Speaker 4: This is your income source. And so I think that we should be advocating for each other as a profession for increased income that appropriately reflects the training. The fees that we pay, the insurances supervision, the business overheads if you are in business. But oftentimes I hear of social workers, I mean all the time.

[00:18:31] Speaker 4: I have social workers who come to me for external supervision or see the team for external supervision and say, I wish my employer would pay for this. I’m paying for this out of my own pocket, but I am being given the hour to attend. And I think that if you were supporting, say if you were employing doctors or you were employing some other profession who had to ha meet certain continuing professional development requirements [00:19:00] that directly related to the work that they are doing and the outcomes for the people that they are serving, then it would be a no brainer to pay.

[00:19:09] Speaker 4: For the supervision, or I hear people say, I can’t afford to get supervision. Certainly that was my experience when I first started out. I came across some very old payslips the other day. Remember those paper payslips? No. You’re too young. No, no, I, I got them. I remember I used to get paid in a envelope in cash.

[00:19:31] Speaker 5: A little yellow packet. Yeah. It was just literally written on the front. I think my first job was like $6 an hour in a fried chicken shop, and I remember payslips. Oh, good. Okay. I wasn’t aging myself too much. Now we diff we, we’ve told people we’re different generations, but not that young. And the payslip, I genuinely do not know.

[00:19:51] Speaker 4: How I was surviving on that lower salary. I do. I had two jobs. I had to work on weekends while working full time to make ends [00:20:00] meet. Yeah, it’s that two job thing that a lot of people do need to do. They need something else, particularly at the moment in a cost of living crisis. But my question to people is.

[00:20:12] Speaker 4: Why would you not charge what you are worth? Where does that come from and when you are suggesting that others should. Charge less than what they see themselves being worth. Is that part of those money blocks and those money stories that come to us from all kinds of outside influences? And how do we reflect upon that?

[00:20:39] Speaker 4: Because ultimately in doing so, what we do is we begin to see the profession as one that should be paid appropriately. And then we all lift each other up. I love that. So listen, stay tuned because later this week we will talk about money stories and money blocks. And tomorrow we’re going to talk about how we can actually [00:21:00] save money when we’re starting out.

[00:21:01] Speaker 5: Mm-hmm. And we’re gonna share some of our best money purchases, money wins, and biggest blunders, things that we’ve spent money on that we probably shouldn’t have. Thanks for listening, and we’ll be back tomorrow. Thanks.