Money as Medicine: Why Your Pricing Is a Healing Act for Nurse Entrepreneurs
What if your price tag wasn't just a number — but a declaration?
Not a marketing tactic. Not a reflection of how many certifications you've collected. But an actual act of healing. For you, for your clients, and for the broader ecosystem you're trying to build.
That's the question Edgar Villanueva planted in my mind when I first read his work — and it hasn't left me since.
If you're a nurse entrepreneur who's ever felt guilty charging for your expertise, stayed up at night wondering if your rates are "too high," or quietly discounted the moment a client hesitated — this is for you.
Meet Edgar Villanueva and the Decolonizing Wealth Framework
Edgar Villanueva is the author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, an activist, philanthropist, and the founder and principal of the Decolonizing Wealth Project and Liberated Capital. His work lives at the intersection of racial justice, healing, and the economy — and it will shift the way you think about money.
His core argument is this: money has been weaponized. Under colonial systems, money became a tool to divide, control, and extract — especially from Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color. Villanueva calls this the "colonizer virus." It doesn't just live in policy. It lives in our minds, our organizations, and our relationships with wealth.
But he goes further. He asks a more generative question: what if money could be medicine instead?
"How can we use money for the sacred purpose of restoring balance, of healing our communities, our families, businesses, and cities?"
— Edgar Villanueva
That question isn't rhetorical. It's an invitation to reimagine your entire relationship with money — including how you price your work.
The Next Economy MBA: A Framework Built for This Moment
Villanueva's work forms the foreword to The Next Economy MBA, a book by LIFT Economy that offers one of the most practical, values-rooted frameworks for building a business aligned with justice, healing, and regeneration.
The Next Economy isn't just one movement. Regenerative economy. Solidarity economy. Circular economy. They're not all identical, but they all point to the same vision: that people can meet their needs in ways that support conditions for all life to thrive.
The Next Economy MBA lays out ten core principles for building this kind of business. A few that apply directly to how we think about pricing and money as nurse entrepreneurs:
Meet Basic Needs — including your own. You cannot give from an empty cup, and a business that can't sustain you is not a just business.
Democratize Governance — shifting away from top-down, extractive power structures toward shared decision-making and equity.
Regenerate Systems — replacing extraction with restoration, in your finances, your community, and your practice.
Develop People — education and growth as part of what you offer, not just a product you sell.
The book also draws a vision of what a Next Economy world looks like. One where basic needs — food, shelter, healthcare, education — are universally met. One where leadership comes from BIPOC communities, women, and other historically marginalized groups. One where differences in wealth and health outcomes no longer correlate with race or identity.
That vision sounds big. And it is. But it starts with the choices you make in your business today — including what you charge.
The Colonizer Virus in Nursing: When Serving Becomes Suffering
Here's the part no one in nursing school talks about.
Nursing was built on a particular story: that caring for others is its own reward. That selflessness is the highest virtue. That if you really loved your patients — if you were truly called to this work — you wouldn't need much in return.
This is the colonizer virus in nursing scrubs.
The healthcare system has historically extracted enormous value from nurses — particularly nurses of color, who make up a significant portion of the profession — while keeping wages compressed, limiting autonomy, and embedding a culture where "serving = suffering" is treated as noble rather than harmful. Research consistently shows nursing has among the highest burnout rates of any profession, and nurses of color face compounded systemic burdens on top of that.
When you leave clinical work to build your own practice, you carry that conditioning with you. You're still operating from the servant identity. You still hear that voice that says: charging too much is greedy. Healers shouldn't focus on money. If I really care, I should make it affordable.
That voice isn't your intuition. It's the virus.
And here's what I want you to sit with: when you chronically undercharge, you're not being selfless. You're being complicit with the same extractive system you left. Because a business that pays you $50 an hour while your expertise, training, and emotional labor are worth multiples of that — that's not healing. That's replicating the very dynamic that burned you out in the first place.
As the market positioning research in my own coaching work shows, nurses charge $50–$150 per session when they know they should charge more. They discount the moment a client hesitates. They filter pricing through a servant identity that frames profit as a betrayal of healing.
That's not humility. That's harm. And it's worth calling it that.
Why Undercharging Is Complicity with Extractive Healthcare
Let's get concrete about this.
The healthcare system makes billions of dollars on the back of nursing labor. Hospital systems, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical giants extract enormous value from the healthcare ecosystem — including from the expertise nurses carry — and distribute very little of it back to the nurses themselves, or to the patients they serve.
When you leave that system and build something new, you have an opportunity to do it differently. To be, as the Next Economy MBA calls it, a "midwife" to a new way — modeling what a just, regenerative, values-aligned practice actually looks like.
Undercharging doesn't serve that mission. It keeps you financially depleted, which keeps you dependent, which keeps you from building the kind of sustainable practice that can genuinely impact the people you want to help.
You can't heal from scarcity.
The Next Economy framework is explicit: life design should "question excessive consumption patterns" and the "normal U.S. pathway of getting a job to pay for your needs has been shaped by power, wealth accumulation, white supremacy, and colonization." The path out of that system asks you to design your life and your business differently — and that includes designing your pricing to actually sustain you.
Charging what your work is worth isn't extractive. It's regenerative.
Values-Aligned Pricing: Honoring Your Worth AND Your Values
So what does pricing look like when you decolonize it?
It starts with a reframe. Pricing is not about what the market will bear. It's not about what you think clients can afford. It's about the full value of what you're offering — your clinical expertise, your lived experience, your training, your time, your emotional presence — and about designing a sustainable container that can actually hold that work long-term.
Here are a few principles I use with my clients:
1. Price from sustainability, not scarcity.Your price should allow you to work at your best — rested, resourced, and present. The Next Economy concept of "pricing that doesn't induce panic" is real. If your rates leave you overextended and resentful, you can't actually serve your clients well.
2. Transparency is part of ethical care.Values-aligned pricing includes being clear about what you charge and why. No pressure tactics. No artificial urgency. Informed consent in enrollment applies to pricing just as much as it does to clinical care. Learn more about ethical enrollment practices in my post on building a coaching business as a nurse.
3. Sliding scales and equity pricing — when they serve, not deplete.If you feel called to offer sliding scale pricing, build it into your business model intentionally — not as a default panic response when someone hesitates. Accessible pricing and sustainable pricing can coexist when they're designed thoughtfully. But accessible pricing that bankrupts you helps no one.
4. Your rate is part of your offer.When you charge confidently, you signal to clients that your work has real value. Underpricing actually erodes trust. Clients who pay premium prices tend to show up more fully, implement more consistently, and get better results. Your pricing sets the energetic container for the work.
For a deeper look at pricing psychology and money mindset, check out Why Nurse Entrepreneurs Undercharge (And It's Not What You Think) and How to Price Your Nurse Coaching Services Without Guilt.
Pricing as Boundary-Setting, Not Greed
I want to name the fear directly.
Many nurse entrepreneurs — especially those from AAPI, Black, Latinx, or other communities of color — carry layered stories about money and worthiness. "Charging this much makes me look greedy." "People from my community will judge me." "Who am I to charge that?"
This isn't just personal psychology. It's the colonizer virus doing what it was designed to do: keeping you small, keeping you extractable, keeping you from accessing the economic prosperity that your expertise earns and your community deserves.
Pricing is a boundary. And nurses know a lot about boundaries — even if they've been trained out of enforcing their own.
A boundary says: this is what my work requires to be sustainable. This is what I need to show up fully. This is what honoring my craft looks like in dollars and cents.
Setting that boundary is not greed. It's a sacred act of self-respect. And it's also, in the language of the Next Economy, a political act — one that pushes back against the systems that have long extracted your labor without fair return.
When you charge what you're worth, you're modeling something for every nurse who comes after you. You're widening the aperture of what's possible. You're using money the way Edgar Villanueva challenges us to: "for the sacred purpose of restoring balance."
That's medicine.
If you're navigating the deeper identity work underneath the pricing fear — the nervous system piece, the inner child piece, the "who am I to charge this" piece — that's exactly what I explore in my Clinical-to-CEO coaching work and in the post on Imposter Syndrome in Nurses.
The Bottom Line
Your pricing is not a neutral business decision.
It's a reflection of what you believe about your worth, your work, and your place in the economy. And for nurse entrepreneurs — many of whom have spent careers in a system designed to extract rather than restore — getting that number right is deeply personal and deeply political.
Edgar Villanueva asks: can money heal? Can it restore balance, rebuild communities, and undo generations of colonial harm?
The Next Economy MBA says yes — but only when we're willing to do the inner work of decolonizing how we think about money first.
That work starts in your business. In your pricing page. In the moment you hold your rate without flinching.
Your price is a healing act. Claim it.
Want to go deeper on aligned pricing and building a business that honors your values? Start with Your Business as a Spiritual Curriculum: What It’s Trying to Teach You and explore Why Your Clinical Training Makes You a Better Business Owner
