Our attorney sat across the table from us and asked one question. “Are you paying yourself what you’re really worth?”

Brandon and I looked at each other, then looked down.

We weren’t paying ourselves minimum wage from our own business, the one we’d moved five people into a three-bedroom apartment to fund, opened on credit cards with a negative net worth, and poured seven years of our lives into. We were profitable on paper. We were broke in real life.

The worst part wasn’t the money. The worst part was that we thought we were doing it right.

The business paid its bills on time, never missed payroll, and was slowly climbing out of debt. By every measure we’d been told to watch, we were fine. What those measures didn’t show was that Brandon had been to the doctor for chest pains bad enough to scare him. The doctor said anxiety, not his heart. He was told to reduce his stress. He ran a coffee shop.

The business was fine. The owners were not.

The advice we’d absorbed wasn’t from one book or one person. It was more like a consensus. Everyone seemed to hold it without anyone having to name it: the business comes first, reinvest everything, pay yourself last. It sounds like discipline. What it actually is is advice written for someone with investors, a line of credit, and a buffer between themselves and the downside. We didn’t have any of that. Every unpaid owner’s draw was a loan we made to our own company with no terms, no interest, and no guaranteed repayment.

We weren’t sacrificing now to build for later. We were just sacrificing.

In this episode: the belief system underneath “pay yourself last” and who it was actually written for ... what breaks when you run that belief long enough ... and the question that changed how we built everything after.

What belief about paying yourself have you inherited without questioning? Tell me in the comments.

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