If you dread tax season every year, this episode is for you! Hannah Cole is a tax expert for creatives and soul-centered entrepreneurs. We all have a money story and in this episode, Hannah dispels “being bad” with money and any negative beliefs that you might have when it comes to money. This episode combines the spiritual aspect of money, why we might not pay attention to it, and what we can look out for to better balance our books. Hannah also mentions that not everyone needs an accountant and common mistakes when bookkeeping. As artists, we want to focus on the creation process, but in this episode, we talk about the importance of approaching your finances like a ritual so that you are better prepared for tax season and can feel at peace with your finances. We also talk about money rituals that we both do in our own lives, which you can try at home too!

Watch Hannah’s free webinar “Understand Your Taxes and Make Money: The Ultimate Guide to the Hard Parts of Self-Employment”: ⁠⁠https://go.sunlighttax.com/register⁠⁠

Register for Money Bootcamp: ⁠⁠https://courses.sunlighttax.com/basictraining⁠ – get $200 off the entire program with code GRACED

Leave a podcast review on this episode and receive access to an abundance meditation which can help you get through any money blocks you may have to attract more abundance! Listen to details in the “Endtro” section.

00:00 Introduction – Mysticscopes first video on the Mystic Mondays YouTube! ⁠⁠

01:53 Interview begins

04:20 Money Stories and Accountants

08:22 Human Connection in Accounting

11:07 Measuring Success as an Artist1

13:55 Healing Money Stories

18:11 AD – Hannah’s Program – Money Bootcamp, get $200 off with code GRACED
https://courses.sunlighttax.com/basictraining

20:35 Common Mistakes with Bookkeeping

24:21 Who needs an accountant?

26:30 Money Rituals

28:00 Money Dates

29:26 Money and Joy

30:31 Celebrating Money Wins

37:14 What’s Next for Hannah?

38:22 Money Wins and Challenges

38:58 Where you can find Hannah

48:28 Endtro – get access to an abundance meditation when you submit a podcast review!

💖 INTRODUCTION

Hello and welcome to the GRACED podcast, where we infuse everyday magic into your everyday life. First off, some news – my first Mysticscopes video launched on the Mystic Mondays Youtube so thank you to everyone who watched the video or listened to the podcast episode!

Today’s episode I have Hannah Cole, who is a tax expert for creatives. Now, what’s a tax person doing on your podcast, you may ask? Well, something that I’m passionate about is enhancing your everyday life through rituals and why not approach your bookkeeping and taxes like a ritual?

As a creative myself, Hannah’s work really spoke to me – so much so that when we met at a virtual workshop, immediately afterwards, I signed up for her program Money Bootcamp. At the time, I was feeling pretty lost and confused about my own finances and I was really glad to have this program to help me sort it all out. so that I could have a better understanding and ultimately feel like I was in more control over my finances, and not my finances in control of me. Not only that, but Hannah is also an artist, so while taking her program, it really spoke to my creative brain the way she simplified how to approach your taxes. Because let’s face it – you are not taught how to do this stuff in school! Which can make adulting hard and unnecessarily complex. And taxes can sneak up on you! Especially if you’re working for yourself, like I am.

We’ve all got our money stories and this episode gives the scoop on how to handle your finances as a soul-centric creative and solopreneurs, without selling your soul. 

Now let’s dive in!

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✨ Interview begins

Hannah Cole: Hey, Grace.

Grace Duong: Hey, Hannah. Thanks for hopping on the podcast.

Hannah Cole: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Grace Duong: Yeah, definitely. So I know as a creative entrepreneur, artist, multi-disciplinary being that I tend to be, sometimes I can get a little confused about how to approach taxes. And I know we met virtually in a workshop. And I remember you explaining what you do. And I was like “Oh my god, I need that!” So can you tell us what you do and how that has evolved from the first time I’ve met you?

Hannah Cole: Sure. So I am the founder of Sunlight Tax. I’m an artist by training. So I’ve been a professional painter for almost 20 years, including still. And I basically have always felt very ill-served when it came to taxes and accounting.

 I’ve had some really traumatic experiences sitting in rooms with accountants where they were like, when are you going to get a real job? And I was like a professor of painting. I was not exactly an amateur. So I have just seen that people in the world who have their focus somewhere deeply important to them, and often that means it’s not on money. So whether you’re a creative person, whether you’re a spiritual person, a sort of soul-centric person, I think that we can tend to get misaligned when it comes to our money, because we have so many traumatic experiences like that, that we start thinking of money as the bad thing. Instead of associating it with the experiences we’ve had with money, which can be terrible. And so I wanted to create a company that serves people like us, mission-driven, heart-centric people, with tax and financial information so that they can set up really well and basically, not get distracted and be able to have a bigger impact with their work. So that’s what I do. And I run a program called Money Bootcamp, which is sort of a self-study program to set up your bookkeeping taxes and also your what I call FU money, which is your giant pile of money that helps you be able to make the decisions you want to and have more power. So yeah, that’s what I do.

 

✨ Money Stories and Accountants

Grace Duong: That’s amazing and congratulations on being an artist for over 20 years.

Hannah Cole: Thank you, I appreciate that. It’s nice to hear that.

Grace Duong: That’s a big deal. Yeah, I feel like the value, if we’re talking about money, and the money stories that comes with being an artist, I know something I hear a lot is that artists don’t make money. And I think that can affect how we even approach our practice.

Hannah Cole: Yeah.

Grace Duong: And I suppose, what was your defining moment in wanting to learn more about taxes and how that can actually support your creativity?

Hannah Cole: I’ve had several. I mean, my first most really awful one was just trying to hire my dad’s accountant when I got out of graduate school from my MFA program and just like literally sitting in a room with him thinking I was gonna get, you know, when you buy a professional tax return, when you go in for professional tax prep, I think the mistake people make is they think they’re gonna get more than a tax return and you don’t. So I thought I was gonna get all my questions answered and figure out all this crazy stuff I didn’t know how to do like, figure out estimated quarterly tax payments and you know which retirement, you know the difference between a Roth and a Traditional 401(k)— Sorry, a Roth and a Traditional IRA. I walked in there and he was like, he had no interest or curiosity in me as a creative person I think when I look back at with more mature eyes I see that he probably felt somewhat threatened by me because you know an accountant is so different from like an artist, right? They’ve made a very conservative life choice. They’ve made life choices around numbers and stability and you’re literally looking at someone who did the opposite. So he was very judgmental towards me and just made me feel so small and frankly intimidated the hell out of me because I didn’t know, you know? I didn’t know what these terms were that he was throwing around. I didn’t know difference between a Roth and a Traditional IRA or what ROI meant. So I was too intimidated to ask any questions and I didn’t get any of the value that I thought I should have out of that appointment because it was so honestly scarring. So yeah, it just made me want to do that better.

Grace Duong: Yeah, I mean totally. So that led you to learning taxes yourself and wanting to offer it to other people or were you doing it as a practice for yourself first?

Hannah Cole: I did it for myself first. And there were many more years that went by. Having a baby flipped the economics of my life on its head. And so that was a big moment where I was like Oh, I don’t know if my life is working. If the economics work anymore here. And then I had a job at a design agency in New York City for a short time that was a really wonderful job and I loved it. And a very crystallizing thing that happened there was that, my boss, who himself was a creative person, and similarly had kind of an allergy to his numbers, probably very much because he’d had been mistreated as a creative person in those settings. He didn’t know if he was profitable or not. And this is something that a lot of businesses encounter. They’re just like hustling for more work, but they don’t actually know what the numbers are, like how much it costs them to do that work. So one day, when he did finally get his bookkeeping together, he realized he wasn’t making any money at all. He was actually losing money and everyone, the company basically folded within the week. So I lost my job because my boss didn’t do bookkeeping. He didn’t know the answer to, am I profitable? So that made me real. I was out of a job at that point. That was the moment I went back to school for accounting because I was like: Oh, what am I going to do now? So…

 

✨ Human Connection in Accounting

Grace Duong: Yeah, yeah. I feel that everything in life prepares you for the next step. And these stories, whether they’re uplifting or they just turn you on to another path, led you to figure this out yourself because nobody, every tax accountant has a different way of approaching things, even if there’s a standard way of approaching numbers. But something you said before was, the dehumanization you felt in the presence of your dad’s accountant and how you didn’t feel seen and heard as a human being. And so I’m wondering how you bring that human connection into your practice?

Hannah Cole: Yeah, that’s a great que  stion. I mean, I get crushes on my clients. I mean, not like a romantic crush, but I like see the work that my clients are doing. And I’m like, “Oh my god, it’s so cool.” I stalk them on their websites and just see like I have people doing really amazing things. And it’s a part of my mission of my business to make sure the clients know it. You know, when I talk to somebody. The fact is, a lot of creative people, a lot of your success may not be reflected in your numbers, but it is reflected in other ways. And so I try to always see that. You know, like if you’ve got this grant that’s really, really hard to get, because I know that world, I will say lik “Oh my gosh, congratulations on that grant. That must have been really hard.”Or, you know, I just try to witness them where they are.And it’s basically just being an artist together with them. They’re not all artists, but like, you know, whatever! I mean, with you, Grace, you’re doing amazing. But like, I remember when you came in and you had just like, you had all these different Tarot decks and you were getting all this business success, I just wanted to let you know that I saw that. I thought it was incredibly impressive. So that feels like an important thing.

Grace Duong: You know, I remember that very clearly too, because I definitely, I felt confused myself. And I was like, it just felt very validating to hear that from you and like, seeing that you saw the numbers and things that I think I had an allergy to at the time as well, just like understanding where I stood.

 

✨ Measuring Success as an Artist

Grace Duong: So just hearing that from somebody else, and I think having the standpoint of being an artist or being a creative and understanding the work that goes into being a creative because like you said, sometimes it’s not measured by monetary success necessarily, although that does tell a story. I think it also stands to the courage it takes to choosing a different path, to choosing something that may challenge these ideas of stability and creating a different way of life or a different way of a foundation for yourself.

Hannah Cole: Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, I think you said exactly what the problem is, it’s like a lot of times when you’re really focused somewhere else. Whether it is making the best Tarot deck you can, whether it is connecting deeply with someone you are delivering some type of healing to, whether it is a creative experience. When that is your biggest focus. And in fact, when you’re so hyper focused on that, that sometimes you g et a little unfocused on the money part. That will reflect in your money. You know what I mean? It will be visible on your balance sheet and your profit and loss statement. And that’s okay. Like we don’t need to say that’s good or bad. I’m not here to say it is good or bad, but I’m saying like it will show up. It will appear. And so it’s kind of, I think a lot of accountants are obviously, it’s their job to be oriented to the numbers. So that’s what they’re looking at. And they fail to see all the rest of the human sitting there in front of them, right? So to me, having been personally judged in that ay makes me very sensitive to that and be like: “Wait a minute, you are a lot more than the numbers here.” In fact, I’m recognizing that as you walk into this space, I’m saying as though I have an office people walk into, it’s a virtual company, but when you come into this space, I’m going to see all of you or I’m going to see the part that, I recognize that you’re coming in with a lot of fear about these numbers and actually part of what feels terrible to you when you deal with your numbers is the fact that your focus really is somewhere else and you haven’t put maybe the focus you might know that you need to here. And I’m gonna help you get your focus there without feeling judged and without, you know. Making it clear that this is not the only metric in the world that you have to be judged by.

Grace Duong: Absolutely. And there’s always room for improvement.

Hannah Cole: Of course.

Grace Duong: It’s not like these numbers can’t change, grow, or expand as you expand. And I tend to experience changes whenever I’m going through an internal change myself.

 

✨ Healing Money Stories

Grace Duong: So, so much of what we attach to money is also attached to our childhood wounds, our traumas, what we’ve experienced generationally or what’s passed down from our lineage.

Hannah Cole: So true.

Grace Duong: and I think there’s a lot that goes into healing, healing money stories. And I’m wondering, how much of this spiritual healing have you done for yourself on your money stories, if any?

Hannah Cole: What a good question and not the thinker. I mean, I have really sat with a lot of people and their pain around this stuff. I mean, I really consider myself kind of a shepherd for this work. And I feel like my role is witness, you know, like I, I mean, I’ll just give you an example, because I think that every single individual, no matter what gender identity, race, ethnicity, etc. we all have trauma around these things. Like honestly, I see everyone has shame when it comes to their money, literally everyone. People you wouldn’t assume had it, do have it. But I have learned so much about, I’ve seen a lot of patterns, right? So I do see that a lot of people socialized as women are taught certain things about money and that it’s not for them. It’s not a space that is okay for them or safe for them. I see that pattern. I also see, I mean, I’ll give you an example. I have this client who is a Native American and she said this thing to me that will never leave me. She said, she owed a fair amount of tax when I was talking to her and she was like: Hannah, you know, honestly, as a Native person, I feel historic trauma around the US government taking things from me. And it just like, that really hit me. I mean, that’s not my experience in the world, but to hear that, it just gave me the sensitivity to the various, the lineages that people bring to their money. It can carry a lot of weight.

Grace Duong: Absolutely.  And how does one heal from that?

Hannah Cole: I think I want to tell you I know the answer. I’m not positive that I do. I do think that the first step really is to forgive yourself. I think a lot of us take mistakes we’ve made in the past and we make them tell a story that isn’t really true. The fact is like everyone makes mistakes, especially with money. There’s no one who doesn’t. And yet some of us take those mistakes and they make it mean that we are bad with money or like kind of permanently bad at this. And if you think about that in the context of anything else in your life, that’s a ridiculous thing, right? Like you would never as a toddler fall down when you’re walking and be like, “Oh, I guess walking is not for me. I’m bad with walking.” That’s how you learn to walk, actually. And in fact, experiencing pain and doing things wrong and making mistakes is actually how you stop doing it. The role of pain is to teach you not to do that thing. So, and I stand here as a shining example of this. At the moment, I’m an expert in tax and I have really locked down my finances. I feel very proud of where I am with my money at this moment. Who I was 20 years ago? I would have been the last person on Earth you thought would do this work. I mean, literally my husband and all my accounting professors laughed at me when I started this path. They were like: “You are going to teach people about money?”And I was like: “Who better? Because I’ve made all the mistakes.” Like, nobody’s gonna feel threatened by me. And actually, I think that’s a good thing.

✨ AD – Join the Money Bootcamp!

Ok so if you’ve ever felt like you’re quote on quote “bad with money”, this is a good pause to take because, like Hannah mentioned – is an absurd belief. But let’s face it! With the lack of education on how to properly take care of your finances, bookkeeping, accounting, and preparing yourself for tax season basically sets you up for failure in our Adulting lives. And if you have a feeling of dread every year come tax season, well I’ve got the thing for you. Hannah has a program called Money Bootcamp and if you use code GRACED, you get $200 off!

But first, I’d like you to see if you like Hannah’s teaching style and see for yourself by registering for her free webinar called “Understand Your Taxes and Make Money: The Ultimate Guide to the Hard Parts of Self-Employment”. After the one hour, free webinar, you have the option of going deeper into understanding your finances by enrolling in Money Bootcamp. From there, you can use code GRACED for $200 off the entire program. 

You can register for the free webinar at go.sunlighttax.com/register. 

OR if you already know Money Bootcamp is for you and want to claim that $200 off the entire program, you can go to courses.sunlighttax.com/basictraining to register now.

Links will be in the show notes!

Now back to the show.

Grace Duong: Well, what I feel with you is I relate to you because you’re creative too. And so there’s a sense of trust versus if I was speaking to somebody who didn’t understand what I do and there might be that judgment or there might be just a misunderstanding. Because I think money is a sensitive topic to so many people. And I think most of the time, most of us do feel like we’re doing it wrong.

Hannah Cole: Yeah.

Grace Duong: And there’s no one really validating if you’re doing it right, you know?

Hannah Cole: Yeah. Totally, totally.

 

 

✨ Common Mistakes with Bookkeeping

Grace Duong: So what are some common mistakes, if any, that you’re seeing because you mentioned something along the lines of you’re able to tell when there’s confusion in the books. And what does that tend to look like?

Hannah Cole: Yeah. Well, I think what happens—bookkeeping is basically built on financial accounting. And when I went back to school for accounting, I learned that there’s not just one kind of accounting, that tax accounting is actually a little bit different from financial accounting, the system that bookkeeping is based on. And something that is just not clear to you if you don’t have formal training, right? Nobody knows that who’s not an accountant. And the fact is that the way that just a standard bookkeeping setup doesn’t account for a lot of stuff that you need to account for when you do your taxes. And so what happens is people, even when they’re really sincerely putting in a lot of effort and trying to do their best, like documenting all their expenses, they end up having to recalculate stuff at tax time. And I think it feels really yucky because you’re like, “I thought I was being organized. Why do I have to redo my numbers when I thought all year I was doing this right?” Well, it’s not you. It’s because the bookkeeping system you’re using is not accounting for taxes. And so there’s some stuff. It’s not a lot of stuff. Like there is a tremendous overlap between financial accounting and tax accounting. But there are some key areas where they don’t overlap. And that’s basically, those are the areas that cause people stress and cause people confusion. Because the IRS, in tax law, a lot of times you get to take the bigger of two different, you can take one deduction, whichever one is bigger this way or this way. And so the only way to know which one is bigger is to actually be tracking both. And so if you set up your system, for example, where you track both all year long, then at tax time, you just see the answer. You know which one is bigger. But if you haven’t tracked it, way all year, you have to go back and you have to recalculate it again with this other method. And that’s one of those sources of stress for people, just for an example. There’s also other areas in your bookkeeping where you never track the things that go on your tax return. So for example, like personal expenses, there’s a lot of things that the tax law will allow you to take a little portion of something that is mixed use between your business and your personal life. For example, your phone, right? So I use my phone in my business because I only have one cellphone and I don’t even have a landline. So all my client calls are on my phone. Well, I’m allowed to deduct a portion of that and that’s reasonable because I really do use it for business. But I can’t deduct the whole thing. So my bookkeeping doesn’t show my phone at all because my phone is, most of it is a personal expense. So there’s a little piece of it where at tax time I pull out a piece and I put that on my taxes and it’s deductible. So there are things like that also that are like not in your bookkeeping that it’s easy to forget about at tax time and you have to be like, “Oh wait, my phone, my internet, my home office, my car, like all these things.” So there’s just little details like that that to me I have learned cause a lot of confusion for people and if you don’t have an accountant sort of full service taking care of that for you, which cost a ton of money, then you just feel confused a lot about it. That’s what I see.

 

✨ Who needs an accountant?

Grace Duong: Sure. So who needs an accountant? Like who would you recommend to have an accountant versus not having an accountant?

Hannah Cole: That’s such a good question. I don’t think everybody needs an accountant. I don’t even think you need necessarily somebody to do your taxes for you. But there are times that it’s a good idea. So generally, it’s good to get someone to help you with your taxes in a year where you have a big financial change. And that’s because you can’t use the tax return from the year before to help you with this year when you’re doing something new. And also there are places where you might not know the tax law and it would be very helpful if you did. So those are times that you should use an accountant, I think. And what I mean when I say that is like, if you buy or sell a business, if you’re buying a house, if you’re getting married, actually the year that you get married, I think is a good year to hire an accountant for your taxes because that’s a huge financial shift for both people in the couple. But I also think that most people, if they set up bookkeeping. And for that, you don’t need a whole accountant. You can hire a bookkeeper to set it up and then you can maintain the books yourself, or you can set up your own bookkeeping. You want to get some expert input when you do that because

Hannah Cole: setting up your bookkeeping wrong is an expensive mistake to make. But if you have good books set up, you can maintain them yourself and you don’t really need an accountant for that. So that’s kind of the baseline of where I recommend. I do think, once you have a larger company, if you’re making six figures or so, at that point you might want to consider outsourcing your bookkeeping to save yourself time as the CEO. And also to get some higher level advisory, because at that point you might be considering more complicated things like hiring someone, running payroll, and those are good check-in points with an accountant, I think. Yeah.

Grace Duong: Definitely.

 

✨ Money Rituals

Grace Duong: So rituals, I think are really important for someone’s life. And would you consider bookkeeping a ritual that you do for yourself? And how often would you recommend bookkeeping as a ritual? Like weekly, monthly?

Hannah Cole: Oh! I love that. I love it. I love to think of it as a ritual. I think that’s great. I think if depending on the size of your business, if you don’t have a tremendous amount of transactions, then I think a sort of minimum bookkeeping to be doing a good job is quarterly. So if you do bookkeeping every quarter, that’s usually pretty good. And that corresponds to the fact that businesses, small businesses, If you’re making your income, if you’re making your living from your business, then you will need to be paying quarterly taxes. So doing your books every quarter is a good idea because then you can estimate a quarterly tax payment. So that’s why quarterly is a good minimum standard. I like to light a candle, like play good music and clean my desk. Like I really do like to kind of turn it into, yeah, like a special moment, kind of a ritual and think of it more as self-care than as a duty. Because it just helps me. And I like to associate it with something like I get a nice cup of tea

Grace Duong: I love that.

Hannah Cole: and just try to make it a pleasant atmosphere and I find that helps me quite a bit.

 

✨ Money Dates

Grace Duong: Absolutely. Do you ever have money dates?

Hannah Cole: You know, I know that there are people who teach this. The idea of money dates, I have not so much. I do it a little more like a business meeting with myself, which is probably not very sexy, but I will put it on my calendar like Money Monday, and I’ll just like sit and just like look at my spreadsheets and make decisions about things. I definitely, at this point in my business I do my accounting monthly and so every month I look at my profit and loss statement. And so that’s kind of my—at this point, that is my ritual. Looking at my profit and loss statement, seeing how high my expenses are, if they’re still all worth it. Things like that just seeing what I can see in my numbers.

Grace Duong: Totally. And I feel like what you’re describing is really similar to a money date. So it’s whatever relationship you want to have with your money. Whether it’s a business meeting or however you want to preference it. But I think what I’m hearing is through this business meeting, you’re removing some of the emotion from it that might appear maybe during a money date or something that might feel a little bit more personable.

 

 

✨ Money and Joy

Grace Duong: So I’m wondering how, if you do, how important is it to remove emotion from your accounting and bookkeeping and how important is it to let your emotions fuel your money making decisions?

Hannah Cole: Wow. Such an interesting question. I mean. In a way, I feel like I don’t want to say that you need to pull all the emotion out. For me personally, based on my own experience with money, my challenge has been to bring joy to my money. So I want emotion. I just want it to be a positive one. Like I have, as an artist for so lon g, I was living so close to the bone. I mean, I was proud of the fact that I could live on like a $20 grocery bill every week for many years. Until I had a baby and then that didn’t feel ethical anymore. So I definitely sort of had like scarcity feeling was really big for me.

 

✨ Celebrating Money Wins

Hannah Cole: So to me, when I make money or get a grant or something like that, I actually find it really important for me to like celebrate a little bit, like associate some joy with it instead of just being like, “Well, this has to pay down debt only!” or “This can only go to my retirement account.” I make myself buy some little pleasurable item. Like not a vacation to Mexico necessarily every time, but like a pair of earrings or a nice dinner out. And so to me, having some positive emotion, like actually on purpose every time doing something positive, and that includes actually how I do my bookkeeping or like I light a candle, get a nice cup of tea. Bringing that joy in feels very important to me.

Grace Duong: Absolutely. Especially if you are the vessel for making the money, the money is not necessarily separate from you and how you treat money is often a reflection of how you’re treating yourself. So in a lot of ways, when you’re treating yourself to that nicely lit candle or the nice cup of tea or the nice earrings, you know? You’re acknowledging yourself to be able to embrace the abundance that you’re naturally attracting. So I feel like the more we acknowledge that energy, the more that we’re able to receive it. And with this whole giving and receiving energy, it’s also about giving to yourself, right? And like being able to give yourself nice things, but also being able to receive the nice things that you’re giving to yourself.

Hannah Cole: So beautifully stated. Yes, yeah, I think that is all so true. And giving yourself a—when you make it a pattern, training yourself that you can look forward to it, that it will be a good thing. Yeah.

Grace Duong: Totally! And then it becomes a ritual. You know, the money ritual that you’re creating for yourself.

Hannah Cole: Yeah. I like that. I’m curious if you have any of these, Grace, yourself, like when you’re handling your money, if you do anything to try and like either make it joyful or pleasant or create a little ritual around it. Do you have those things?

Grace Duong: You know, I’m really trying to embrace that a bit more. I also like to light candles and sometimes I’ll etch in my intention or a word that I’m working on, so maybe it could be abundance and I just etch it into the candle. I have started doing money dates for myself, so I’ll track my bank account,

Hannah Cole: Nice.

Grace Duong: I’ll look at my bank account and I’ll track the numbers and I put like a sexy little burning heart next to my money date tracker.

Hannah Cole: Nice.

Grace Duong: And I just, I try to actually be as neutral as possible whenever I view the numbers because whether, whatever it is, I don’t want it to affect my own sense of my self-worth. And I think this falls into like a lot of people who are working for themselves might feel a certain way about themselves because of how much their bank account might reflect. And so something that I’ll take myself out on this money date, but no matter what, I’ll just illuminate a feeling of lightness when I’m looking at my bank account And I think that’s important to remember because It’s a state of flux and permeability and that we have an opportunity to create change in our lives. And so if it’s something that we’re working on, I always just try to visualize what I want and how to attract that more into my life. Some other things that I’ve been doing is I’ll put like a wallpaper on my phone to remind myself of what I want to attract in. So that could be money. That could be other things. I also find that it’s helpful to a point that you said earlier that value is not always dependent on money. And to find that in other avenues. So it could be through how fulfilling your relationships are, or it could be through how you’re treating your body that day. You know, it really depends on what we qualify as worthy.

Hannah Cole: Yeah. Yeah, totally, totally. I’m finding this honestly in my like entrepreneurship journey that there are times that I find very difficult like to receive feedback. For example, I can find that very difficult. I’m very sensitive. I mean, I don’t know who’s not but I feel like I really want to do a good job. And so I hate reading that, if I could have made my program better in this way or that way. For example, I’ve had people write in that they wanted close captions because of hearing impairment and I didn’t at the time—I do now, but I didn’t at the time have closed captions I was like, “Oh, I’m a terrible person. I didn’t think about that!” You know, but I needed the feedback in order to be able to implementthis thing that is important I just couldn’t see—you can’t see everything. So taking those things in with a little less of a sense of like judgment about myself as a person and that I had failed people and more like, oh, this is information and I can respond to it. I find it challenging.

Grace Duong: And that reminds me of when we did our consultation and you were like, “Grace, you’re doing great!” and then I was like, “Whaaa—oh my god! That made my day” The whole thing is like, we can be so critical of ourselves.

Hannah Cole: Yeah.

Grace Duong: And we’re seeing it in a certain lens based on our own experiences and whatnot. But I think it’s important to try to step of that. And I think in that case, it does help to have an outside eye,

Hannah Cole: Yeah.

Grace Duong: to like help guide you if you’re not comfortable looking at it yourself yet.

Hannah Cole: Absolutely. No, I know. And also, you can’t read the label from inside the jar. Sometimes you just need a different person to reflect to you what you’re doing well at, you know, like you can’t always see it yourself.

 

✨ What’s Next for Hannah?

Grace Duong: Right. So what’s next for you?

Hannah Cole: What is next for me? Well, I’m sort of switching seasons a little bit. We’re kind of in the moment right now of the actual tax deadline. And so people are either just finishing, having done their taxes, or they’re kind of feeling the feelings of: “Oh, maybe that didn’t go as well as I wished.” So that’s kind of the headspace that I’m interacting with a lot, trying to sort of talk to people about: “Well, If you if you’re interested, if that feeling didn’t feel good, what would it feel like if that was better?” And so just trying to sort of talk about my program a little bit in that context of making next year better. Setting things up so that it’s easier.

 Grace Duong: Yeah.

Hannah Cole: Yeah, that’s kind of my plan. And I started a podcast a couple months ago. And so I’m super, super excited to just be digging in on creating episodes there. To talk about different money issues because it’s kind of my favorite thing to talk about.

 

✨ Money Wins and Challenges

Grace Duong: I mean, money wins and challenges are so interesting because I think it speaks to much more than just money most of the time. It’s like there’s so many different layers to it.

Hannah Cole: Definitely, definitely. I mean, my father’s always like: “I don’t understand how you can think of something to talk about every week.” And I’m like: “I have endless ability to talk about money.” Because when you’re talking about people about their money, they will always bring new things to your attention. So it’s delightful to me.

 

 

✨ Where you can find Hannah

Grace Duong: So Hannah, where can people find you?

Hannah Cole: You can find everything at my website sunlighttax.com. So there’s the Sunlight Podcast is linked to there, or you can find that on your Apple on iTunes, Spotify, etc. And yeah, so just come to Sunlight Tax. And also, if your listeners are interested in downloading a guide to their tax deductions, I have a visual guide that is just a one page reference and it’s very colorful and it’s really built for people who are oriented visually. So you can just print it out, have it right above where you do your bookkeeping or your taxes, and then just got it all where you need it, when you need it. So that’s also available at my website, sunlighttax.com.

Grace Duong: Perfect! Make sure to check those out.

Hannah Cole: Nice.

Grace Duong: So thank you, Hannah, so much for your time, knowledge, and compassion for I feel like the human connection within managing your money. I think that’s missing a lot from other, I would say, tax advisors and bookkeepers. There’s so much more that goes into managing your money because it’s very much about managing your lifestyle and our beliefs that go along with it. So thank you so much for being here today.

Hannah Cole: Such a pleasure. Thank you for having me Grace. I’m so honored. It’s really nice to talk to you.

Grace Duong: Absolutely, same here. Alright, until next time.

Hannah Cole: Alright, bye!

✨ Endtro 

Thanks so much for tuning in to the GRACED podcast! I’ve got another bonus for you – an abundance meditation! If you’re ready to heal money wounds and amplify your abundance, this meditation can help you clear any blocks that you may have around attracting more money into your life. You can receive this abundance meditation for free by leaving a podcast review for this episode, taking a screenshot, and emailing it to graced@mysticmondays.com

 

Alright friends! Sending you so much grace, today and everyday.

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