The Money Goal Nobody Talks About: Comfy Money

What if we’ve been thinking about wealth all wrong?

What if being wealthy isn’t just about how much you have, but what your money makes possible?

Feeling secure. Having options. Enjoying your life. Being prepared for the future. And not working yourself into the fucking ground to afford it.

I call that Comfy Money.

And it starts with a deceptively simple question: How much money is actually enough for you?

Because the answer may completely change what you’re working toward and the business you’re building to get there.

Welcome back to the Paid & Peaceful series. Today we’re talking about wealth, and specifically, why our conversations about wealth in entrepreneurship tend to focus almost entirely on accumulating more.

I’m not here to tell you that money doesn’t matter, because we all know it does. Like it or not, we need money and resources to navigate life under capitalism.

But I want to talk about a different kind of money goal. One that’s about what you actually want your money to make possible in your life.

One that’s a hell of a lot more relevant to most of us than fuck-you yacht money, or whatever version of obscene wealth we’re supposed to be aspiring to here in 2026. 

I call it Comfy Money.

Enough money to feel secure today and prepared for tomorrow. To have some breathing room when life gets expensive. To spend on things that make your life better without second-guessing every single dollar. To have choices about how you work, where you live and what you say yes or no to.

Not ridiculous wealth. Not endless accumulation. Enough money to build a life that feels comfortable, secure and genuinely enjoyable to you.

Comfy Money is an alternative to the way we're usually taught to think about wealth.

Instead of treating accumulation as the goal, what if the goal was having enough money to create security, choices and a life you genuinely enjoy? Moving our thinking from “how much can I possibly make?” to “how much is enough for the life I actually want?”

Online Business Has Completely Messed With Us

Before we talk about Comfy Money, we need to talk about the version of wealth we've been sold in online business.

Because online business didn't invent our cultural obsession with entrepreneurship, wealth and growth, but holy shit, did it turn up the volume.

We've sold entrepreneurship as a path to wealth, freedom, and upward mobility, with very little discussion of how much is actually enough.

This is a particularly important moment to question that.

We're in a time when the distance between having significant wealth and simply having enough financial security to live comfortably can feel enormous.

So when entrepreneurship culture tells us the goal is to accumulate more and more and more, I want to question that.

Maybe being wealthy isn't only about having an extraordinary amount of money. Maybe there's also incredible wealth in having enough.

But that's not the version of wealth we're shown in online business. Instead, we're exposed to a relentless stream of income claims.

Spend enough time in this space, and you start believing everyone is running a six-figure or even seven-figure business except you. Then whatever you’ve achieved becomes unimpressive because someone else is talking about a bigger revenue milestone or launch number they’ve hit. 

When you’re exposed to this day in, day out, it becomes incredibly easy to lose perspective on what’s actually a lot of money, what a successful business looks like and, more importantly, how much money you actually need.

That said, the fact that these outcomes are highly visible doesn’t make them typical.

The 2026 Wells Fargo Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report gives us some incredibly useful context here.

Women now own 15.7 million businesses in the United States, representing more than 40% of all U.S. businesses. But only 9% of women-owned businesses have employees.

And here's the part I really want you to hear: that 9% of employer businesses generate 82% of all revenue generated by women-owned businesses.

Think about what that means when we throw around statistics about average business revenue. A relatively small percentage of much larger businesses generates the overwhelming majority of revenue.

That’s a very different business from that of the solo consultant, copywriter, designer, strategist, accountant, fractional executive, or other expert service provider sitting at home wondering why they haven't built a $500K business yet.

I'm not sharing those numbers because I think you should make less money. Hell no, I want you to make good money; go get that comfy money, but…

I want you to also understand how profoundly online business has distorted our perception of how much money everyone else is making.

Online business has taken exceptional financial outcomes and marketed them to us as THE baseline.

When we don't meet that imaginary baseline, we assume something is wrong with us. Or that we’re playing small, we have a money block, or we simply don’t have what it takes.

It’s complete and utter bullshit.

The reality is that the numbers we've been comparing ourselves to were never a useful benchmark in the first place.

So I want to give you a different benchmark.

Instead of measuring yourself against how much someone else has made, I want you to start measuring your money against what you actually need it to do.

That's the shift at the heart of Comfy Money.

What Revenue Numbers Don’t Tell You

There’s another problem with all of these numbers we’re exposed to in online business: revenue tells you almost nothing about someone’s actual financial life.

If someone tells you they have a $500K business, you know exactly one thing: their business generated $500K in revenue.

You don't know what it cost them to make that money. You don't know their profit or how much they actually paid themselves.

You don't know if they have $200,000 sitting in investments or $80,000 sitting on a credit card.

You don't know if their spouse earns $300K and provides all the household benefits. If they have family money. If they're supporting three kids or aging parents. If their house is paid off or their mortgage is enormous.

And you definitely don't know whether making that $500K requires them to work 80 hours a week and makes them fucking miserable.

The number has zero context.

Yet we're constantly encouraged to compare our entire financial reality to someone else's revenue number.

So, for the purposes of this conversation, I want to separate three things:

• Revenue is what your business generates.
• Income is what you personally earn.
• Wealth is what you build and accumulate over time.

Those things aren’t interchangeable, because a business can have impressive revenue without creating wealth for its owner.

A Different Way to Think About Wealth

When I talk about Comfy Money, I'm talking about a different way of thinking about wealth.

One that's not primarily concerned with maximizing what you can accumulate, but with having enough money to create a life that feels genuinely comfortable to you.

Where you can:

• Pay for your housing and your bills.
• Buy food without feeling stressed every time you walk into the grocery store.
• Work on paying down debt.
• Save some money toward retirement and your future.
• Have reliable transportation.
• Travel if travel matters to you; have hobbies or fun in your life.
• Deal with an average unexpected expense without it becoming a five-alarm financial emergency.

In other words, enough to enjoy your life now, take care of future you and have some breathing room when shit happens.

It’s not fuck-you-yacht money, but for a lot of people it would be absolutely fucking life-changing money.

And interestingly, this idea isn't particularly far away from how researchers think about financial well-being.

The U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau defines financial well-being around four things: having control over your day-to-day finances, being able to absorb a financial shock, being on track to meet your financial goals, and having enough financial freedom to make choices that allow you to enjoy your life.

I love this because notice what's not in that definition? A magical income number.

There isn't a point where it’s like, “Congratulations, you have achieved financial well-being because you make $72K a year.”

The number is intensely personal.

Your Comfy Money Number Is Yours

I need you to resist the urge to turn Comfy Money into another arbitrary benchmark. I'm not going to tell you Comfy Money is $50K, $75K or $150K.

That would completely defeat the point.

Your number depends on your life because there are countless factors involved:

• Where in the world you live.
• Whether you're the sole income earner in your household.
• Whether you have a partner with an income, benefits or a pension.
• Your housing costs.
• The debt you’ve accumulated.
• Kids or other family obligations.
• Your health and healthcare costs.
• What you want to do for fun.
• What you want retirement to look like.
• Your personal financial goals.

I can’t overstate how much the household and family piece matters here, and yet it’s almost completely absent from the way we talk about money goals in business.

We set revenue goals and talk about what our businesses “should” be paying us as if we exist in a financial vacuum. But we don’t.

What your business needs to provide depends on the household it supports or contributes to. Whether there’s another income. Whether you have kids. Whether you’re supporting aging parents. Whether you have access to benefits through a partner. Whether you’re carrying debt. Whether you’re responsible for the rent or mortgage or splitting it with someone else.

And we have to acknowledge the stability and, frankly, the privilege that can come with having another reliable income in your household. If someone else’s paycheque can cover the mortgage, provide benefits or simply make sure the lights stay on during a slow month, your business doesn’t have to carry the same financial weight as it does for someone whose income is supporting an entire household.

That doesn’t diminish what anyone has built. But it absolutely changes the financial reality they’re building it in. Two people can want the exact same quality of life and need wildly different amounts of money from their businesses to create it.

That context matters.

Finally, keep in mind that your Comfy Money number may change over time.

There have been seasons in my life when I needed my money to do different things than I need it to do today. For years, saving and then paying for my kid's university was part of the equation. He’s graduated now, so it’s not something I’m funding anymore, and my numbers and goals have changed.

Comfy Money is a reflection of what you want and need from your money in this season of your life.

Your Salary Is Only Part of the Equation

There’s another piece of the equation that’s really easy to underestimate when you’re figuring out your Comfy Money number: being self-employed changes the math..

With traditional employment, a salary isn't necessarily the entirety of someone's compensation.

In March 2026, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed wages and salaries represented about 70% of total compensation for private-industry employees. Benefits accounted for the other 30%, including paid leave, insurance, retirement and savings contributions and legally required benefits.

I'm not suggesting you add exactly 30% to whatever salary you want and call it a day. Your situation will be different, depending on where you live and what benefits you need.

I want you to remember that you’re also your employer, so the amount your business needs to generate may be higher than you initially think.

A few things to consider:

• Covering time off.
• Health or disability insurance.
• Retirement savings.
• Accounting for sick days.

On top of that, you ideally need some money sitting in your business so every unexpected wobble doesn't immediately become a personal financial emergency.

Price Out the Life You Actually Want

Before you decide how much money you need, I want you to question what you're pricing out.

We're not immune to the same aspirational marketing that's messed with our revenue goals. Maybe you genuinely want the giant house, designer handbag or business-class flights.

Cool. But do you actually want those things?

Or have you consumed so much content about what a successful person's life supposedly looks like that you've started wanting things you don't actually give a shit about?

Everything you add to the life you're trying to fund ultimately has to be paid for with money you earned using some combination of your time, energy and expertise.

Don’t get me wrong, I like nice things, but I also don't particularly want to work more so I can pay for a fancy handbag.

But I will absolutely buy fancy cheese. To me, feels like luxury. My 12-year-old Canadian cheddar is always worth it. 

And I'm being a little ridiculous with the cheese example, but the underlying question is serious:

What’s worth working for? 

A study of more than 6,000 people across the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands found that people who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction.

In an experiment, working adults also reported greater happiness after a time-saving purchase than after a material purchase.

Again, this doesn't mean you're doing money wrong if you buy a handbag.

It simply illustrates how your money can do different jobs. It can buy things, experiences, time, security and options. And I want you to decide which of those jobs actually matter to you.

When Comfy Money Gets Seriously Uncomfortable 

You’re probably thinking about your Comfy Money number right now, and it may feel a little—or a lot—uncomfortable.

One of the things that I loathe about money conversations in online business is the complete lack of nuance.

Everything is either mindset or math: 

If it's mindset, you apparently need to stop playing small, release your scarcity, charge your worth and expand your capacity to receive.

If it's math, here's your spreadsheet. Raise your prices. Increase your margins. Sell more. More, problem solved.

➡️ Money is way more complicated than either of those things.

You can’t mindset your way out of bad math. And a spreadsheet can’t tell you what your version of a good life looks like.

This is something I care deeply about, and it's also why I became a Trauma of Money Method Certified Practitioner. 

That training has reinforced for me just how much history, experience, identity, culture, class, family, and social conditioning can show up in the way we think about and interact with money.

Research on financial socialization supports the idea that our financial beliefs and behaviours don't develop in a vacuum. Studies have found significant relationships between family financial socialization and later financial literacy, behaviour and well-being.

So I want to validate that you learned your beliefs about money somewhere, including how you think about entrepreneurship.

I see the impact of those stories all the time, and there are two things I hear from experienced business owners over and over again:

I should be making more money by now.

and:

I should know how to handle my money better by now.

Underneath both of those statements, there’s a lot of shame about where you think you should be by now. What other people appear to be making. What you’ve saved or haven’t. Decisions you wish you’d made differently.

Understandably, that shame can turn into avoidance. Research on financial shame found that it can actually contribute to financial hardship by causing people to withdraw and disengage from their financial situation. 

If looking at your money makes you feel like shit, of course you don't want to look at it. But, as a business owner, if you don’t have the financial information you need to make better decisions, the situation doesn’t improve, and you get stuck in a cycle.

So if you're listening to this thinking, I should have figured this out years ago, I want you to hear this:

You can't correct for the past. But you can take control of what happens next.

Taking control doesn't mean punishing yourself for everything you didn't do; it’s a matter of making different decisions in your business now to support your personal financial goals going forward. 

Your Comfy Money Number Gives You Somewhere to Go

Now, let’s get practical. I want you to start thinking about your own Comfy Money number.

What does your life actually cost? What would make it more comfortable? What do you want to save, pay down or plan for? What do you want to be able to spend on travel, hobbies, food and the things that make your life enjoyable?

Think about your household. Think about future-you. Think about what you need to provide for yourself because you’re self-employed. Think about how much breathing room would make money feel less precarious.

Then ask yourself: What would I eventually like my business to be able to pay me to support all of that?

Maybe that number feels completely achievable right now. Maybe it feels wildly out of reach.

Either way, your Comfy Money number isn't a deadline. It's a direction.

Let’s say you eventually want your business to pay you $120,000 a year, and right now you’re paying yourself $70,000.

That $50,000 gap isn't an emergency you need to close by December 31st.

Maybe the next goal is $80,000. Then $90,000.

Now you have something useful to make decisions against. Would raising your rates help? Do you need better margins? Does your offer mix need to change? Do you need different clients? Could you make more without adding more work?

You can start making decisions, step by step, that move you closer to the life you want without turning your financial goals into another reason to run yourself into the ground.

This is why I’ve talked for years about Reverse Salary Goals.

Instead of picking a revenue goal and hoping it somehow gives you the life you want, start with what you actually need your business to pay you and work backwards from there.

Your personal financial goals should inform the decisions you make in your business. Not the other way around.

It’s also why Salary is one of the six pillars in my Staying Solo Framework.

What you need your business to pay you affects what you charge, what you sell, how much you need to work and how you design the business around your life.

Salary isn't just what's left after you've made all your business decisions. It should be helping you make those decisions in the first place.

There’s No Prize for Always Wanting More

This is where Comfy Money asks something very different of us than traditional ideas of wealth do.

Accumulation says: Great. What's next?

Comfy Money lets you ask, Do I actually need more?

Maybe the answer is yes. There may be things you still want to do, people you want to support or security you want to build.

But the answer can also be no.

You're allowed to reach a point where you have enough and decide that the next thing you want more of isn't money.

That can be surprisingly hard to do.

In Western culture, we’ve been taught to see accumulation and achievement as evidence that we’re ambitious, successful and serious about what we do. There’s always supposed to be another goal, another level, another number to chase.

But what if there isn’t?

(We’re going to talk much more about ambition in the next episode in this series.)

Enough doesn't have to be a temporary stop on the way to more.

Knowing what’s enough (and letting it actually be enough) might be one of the most radical steps you can take toward becoming not just paid, but peaceful.

What’s Your Comfy Money Number?

I want to leave you with the same question we started with:

How much money would actually be enough to fund a life that feels comfortable, secure and enjoyable to me, and how is my business going to help me get there?

If answering that question feels harder than you expected, that’s okay.

You’ve been running your business for a while, and it may be a shift in how you’ve been thinking about your money.

You may have spent years making decisions based on the goals you thought you were supposed to have. This is exactly the kind of thing that's hard to question when you're sitting alone inside your own business.

One of the things I want to normalize in this entire Paid & Peaceful series is the need for help at this stage of business.

Especially when you're an experienced service business owner. 

There's this weird expectation that because you've been doing this for years, you should know exactly what you want, exactly how to get there and exactly which of your assumptions need to be questioned.

But sometimes the hardest beliefs to see are the ones you've been operating under for years.

That's a huge part of the work I do with clients inside the Paid & Peaceful Mastermind, which starts in October. (Formerly known as the BS-Free Service Business Mastermind.) 

This is a year-long mastermind for experienced service business owners who are already good at what they do, but want support figuring out what the next version of their business actually needs to look like.

We're going to start with what you actually want your business to do for your life.

Then we'll look at your salary, capacity, positioning, offers, pricing, clients, and workload, and make decisions based on where you're actually trying to go.

• Maybe you do need to make more money.
• Maybe you need to make the money you're already making more predictable.
• Maybe you need better margins or more money sitting in the bank.
• Maybe you need to pay yourself more consistently.
• Or maybe you realize you're already making enough, and the real opportunity is to redesign the business so it takes less from you.

When you've been doing this for years, it's really easy to keep making decisions based on assumptions you've never stopped to question.

About how much you should make. How much you should work. What you should sell. What growth is supposed to look like. What someone at your stage of business should have figured out by now.

You don't need someone handing you another BS blueprint.

Sometimes you need smart people around you who can help you question the blueprint you've been following.

That's the work we're going to do together inside Paid & Peaceful, and I’d love to have you join us.

Whether you join us or not, I want you to leave this episode with a fresh perspective on your money goals.

Remember, the goal is to build a business that earns enough to support the life you actually want and lets you be human while you build it.

That's Comfy Money. And that's a version of wealth worth working toward.