This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Ruth Tam.

Paco De Leon is a financial coach and bookkeeper with the Helia Group and Helia Bookkeeping.

She is the author of Finance for the People.

Me, I'm a full-time journalist, but I do a lot of work on the side, illustrating, writing, and hosting podcasts.

It can feel hard talking honestly about the money I make and how I handle it, but Paco, who is also an illustrator and a musician, got it right away.

To be totally honest, a lot of the financial scaffolding in my life has been put together with a lot of duct tape and chicken wire, and I guess there's a lot of times where I'm wondering if I'm doing the right thing.

Yeah, I happen to surround myself with creative professionals, and they have the same exact feeling. It's like a piece of band-aid and some gum, and fingers crossed, toes crossed, and they're hoping that the IRS doesn't knock on their door and say, Ruth, you're going to jail, you've been doing it all wrong. It's over for you.

So I am totally comfortable swimming in those waters with you.

On this episode of LifeKit, Finance for Creative Types. If you're running your own business or creative side hustle, and never thought you were the business type, our conversation is for you.

You write in the beginning of your book how it's basically our personal experiences that form our perceptions around money and personal finance, and I was wondering what common experiences do creatives tend to have that lead them to have common misconceptions about money?

Yeah, I would say the number one thing that I hear creative people say is that I'm not the kind of person who is good with money.

They've just felt like understanding that world and navigating the financial world fluidly and confidently was never going to happen for them.

It's really bought into that story, and it doesn't help that the industry is just not open. It seems very serious and scary, and there's all these authority figures wearing suits.

It doesn't seem fun at all, so I can see why creative people have these narratives and why they internalize them and hold on to them.

For people who still aren't convinced that thinking about finances for them, what do creators lose out on when they don't allow themselves to talk honestly about money and don't have a very good grip on their finances?

I think from a very practical perspective, you are missing out on the potential to have some peace of mind in your daily life, and when you take a step back and you address the financial side of things, it lays a foundation to really come at these decisions about who you want to work with from a place of actual clarity, of actual logic, instead of just an emotional response of kind of that dog paddling,

or I got to take what I can get kind of energy, and you really have to break through that when you're self-employed.

These are the kinds of things you're going to confront, ideas of worth and deservingness and needing to get your financial life together and connecting that to your why.

Okay, so let's say we're convinced that we need to start taking care of our finances, how do you start building it into your routine and making time for it so that nothing starts to slip through the cracks and you end up in the same place you were before?

The thing that I suggest everybody do is to set up weekly finance time, and weekly finance time is exactly what it sounds like.

It's carving out, I would say at least 20 minutes, maybe as much as an hour every week, that you can put onto your calendar as a standing meeting with yourself that is sacred.

You don't allow people to book meetings or bother you during that time, and it's your time to take a look at your bank account to pay your credit card bill to follow up on your invoices,

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