62. People have plenty of money

If the economy is supposedly in the shitter, why is consumer spending at an all-time high? Let's look at the data behind the scarcity narrative that's been shrinking many businesses.

Listen to hear more about:

• The uncomfortable question hiding behind "people can't afford my prices"
• What your ideal client is actually choosing between 
• The difference between extraction and circulation, and what it actually looks like to care about access without depleting yourself

If you've been contracting your prices, your offers, and your energy around a scarcity story that doesn't match reality — this episode is the honest, data-backed wake-up call you didn't know you needed.

Transcript

Hello, hello. Welcome to another episode of Liberatory Business, and I'm your host, Simone Seol. Thank you so much for listening.

So let me tell you about something that happened a few weeks ago. I went to the mall because I suddenly developed a violent craving for Mexican food and I was like, I have to get some Mexican takeout. There's a mall near me that has Mexican takeout. So I walk into the mall, and on my way to get to the food court section, I see this giant line of people.

I'm like, what is happening? Is there a celebrity here? What's going on? And I realized — oh, it's a line of people trying to get into Louis Vuitton. And there was another line if I look in a different direction, and that's the line of people waiting to get inside Prada. And there's another line of people trying to get into Chanel. People have to get in line just for the privilege of being able to go into the store and browse. And in every store there are people being accosted by salespeople. Somebody's trying on an $800 top, somebody else is buying a $4,000 bag. It was a Tuesday.

And I did a double take, because isn't the economy supposed to be in the shitter right now? I mean, I live in Korea, right? Our local currency, the Korean won, is supposed to be tanking. That's what every headline is saying. Everyone's talking about how nobody has any money, everything's terrible.

But it got me thinking. In a Carrie Bradshaw voice — if you are not a Sex and the City person, I'm sorry — I couldn't help but wonder: when people say nobody has any money, who exactly is the "nobody" we're talking about? Because I'm looking at these lines and I'm like, are we on the same planet?

What the data actually says

So I went home with my Mexican takeout and I actually did some research, and what I found out kind of blew my mind. I wanted to share it with you because I think it has big implications for how you think about your business and this ambient story that we've all absorbed about what's happening in the economy.

So let's just zoom in on US consumer spending — how much Americans are actually spending. $16.7 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025. Total retail sales for the year up 3.7% from 2024. In December of 2025 alone, in one month, Americans spent $735 billion in retail. Discretionary spending — people spending money on things that they want, not the things they need to survive — was up 2.6%. And Gen Z and millennials spent 5.9% more in 2025 than the previous year. The US luxury market is valued at $115 billion and that number is actually growing. It's projected to nearly double to $196 billion by 2033.

So by all of these measures, people are spending more money, more discretionary money, not less. The data is very clear on this. But you'd never know it from the way most entrepreneurs talk about the economy, right? The narrative, the headlines, they're all about hardship and scarcity and tightening and pulling back. And it creates an environment where so many entrepreneurs I hear from are talking about how you gotta wait this period out, lower your prices, now is not the time.

And I wanna ask — where is this story coming from and who is it serving?

Feelings aren't facts

What seems to be the case according to research is that Americans consistently believe that they're worse off than they actually are. This is documented. This is a real phenomenon.

Social media gives a very different impression because social media amplifies the most alarming narratives, right? Like, 78% of Americans are one paycheck away from ruin. The middle class is disappearing. Everything is unaffordable. And these stories go viral because they're scary. They activate the dopamine response. They make us click.

And the feeling of precarity is real. I'm not dismissing that feeling. But feelings aren't facts. Because when you actually look at the data — this is right now — 51% of Americans qualify as middle class according to Pew Research. That's households earning roughly in a range of $53,000 to $161,000. And 14.4% of US households — that's roughly 18 million households — earn $200,000 or more.

So take that in. The story of "no one has any money" just doesn't hold up. Plenty of people have money. Plenty.

The more honest question

So if you feel like you are not selling, if you feel like people around you don't have as much money to invest in your thing as before — is it really the case that they don't have money, or have they just decided that your thing isn't worth standing in line for?

I know that's uncomfortable, but it's the more honest question.

And look, I already know what some of you are thinking, because that was what I was thinking too, which is — wait, Simone, but aren't so many people genuinely struggling? And the answer is yes, of course. And I think it's important to tell the truth about that, because this is actually where the argument of "people always have money, people who have money always have money" — I hear this argument and a lot of the time, when it comes from business coaches who are trying to sell you business coaching, it falls apart when it tips over into what I'm gonna call sort of delusional capitalistic prosperity gospel, right? Like, abundance is infinite, it's all in your mindset, all limitation is just a perception. I'm not doing that, because that's not true. Some limitations are real. Some constraints are real. Some scarcity is real.

However. Let's get real specific. Because if you're a coach, consultant, artist, some kind of practitioner, service provider — I want you to think about who your actual client is. Not the theoretical person that you've constructed in your head, but the kind of client that it actually makes sense for your business to serve. The kind of person who gets what you do, who understands its worth the way that you understand its worth. Who's been looking for so long for exactly the thing that you offer, and when they find you, they don't need a whole sales spiel. They're like, "Oh my God, do you have space for me?"

And the kind of client who, if clients like this filled your roster, they would leave you energized and they would leave your business so well resourced that you can keep doing your best work and you can keep growing and keep building and keep giving back.

That person is not at the verge of ruin. They have a job. They have a coffee habit. They're most likely carrying a very expensive phone. They have a vacation plan for this year — at least one.

To put it differently, your ideal client is not choosing between your offer and feeding their kids. That is not the decision they're making. And if they are making that decision, that is not someone you wanna be selling to. You never wanna ask people to choose between your product and survival. Someone who doesn't have to make that choice because they have enough, and they're gonna be delighted by paying your price — those are the clients you want. Those are the clients that make sense for your business to have.

Stop building your business around a person who's not in the room

But when you just give in to this vague scarcity narrative, what it does is it convinces you that your client is someone who's one purchase away from being homeless, right? And when you think that's the person, you end up contorting your entire business — your pricing, your offers, your energy, your creativity — around protecting this person who is not in the room.

And meanwhile, the person who is in the room, the person who is actually considering working with you and would love to work with you and leave you well resourced to keep doing your best work — they're choosing between your program and a graduate degree with an extremely poor record of financial return. They're choosing between your course and a conventional course of treatment that costs just as much, if not more, and has dubious effectiveness. They're choosing between your service and their monthly eating-out budget, or your program and a subscription box that they forgot they signed up for.

And while you're sitting there agonizing whether your price is too high for them, what you're doing is trying to make their financial decisions for them. And that is paternalism. That's condescension.

Where the money goes when it doesn't go to you

So let's keep going. Because the scarcity narrative doesn't just shrink your business. When you contract, when you lower your prices, agree to work under worse conditions — not only do you personally feel miserable and broke, what happens on a macro level is that capital that's not coming to you is flowing and concentrating elsewhere. Because while you are lowering your rates and giving everybody whatever discount they're asking for, consumer spending is once again up 3.7%. People are spending. No one's asking Louis Vuitton for an income-based sliding scale.

And if you're thinking, okay, but luxury consumers aren't my people, that's not my world — fine. Nobody tells their dental hygienist that they should take a pay cut to be "more equitable." Nobody emails their electrician calling them insensitive for charging $150 an hour. But when it's time to pay a creative, a coach, a healer, an educator, suddenly there's this extreme moral scrutiny on every dollar.

Why is this? Well, it's not about the money. It's about the ambient message in the culture we live in about what constitutes real work. Who we've been taught to believe deserves good compensation. Who we're taught to believe is qualified to do important work.

So a more honest question than "can people afford this?" might be — have I built something that's valuable enough and compelling enough that people want to be able to afford it? That people with basically healthy finances — of which there are so many — for them it's worth rearranging some things. It's worth giving up on some discretionary spending to be able to prioritize your thing. That's the real question.

The difference between extraction and circulation

Now here's another question that I think is worth asking, which is — isn't charging more just because some people can afford it just extracting from people who already have money and leaving people with less financial resources behind?

And I think that's actually a really important question and one that is kind of brushed aside by a lot of "manifest money!" type of people. Because here's how I think about the distinction between extraction and circulation. It's not about how much you charge. It's about what happens to the money once it reaches you.

So for example, companies like Apple, Meta, Amazon, Walmart, Louis Vuitton — they take your money and it ultimately ends up in shareholders' hands. It concentrates decision-making power in the hands of a tiny number of extremely wealthy people, and it leaves your local ecosystem. It's gone.

But you, as a small business — you charge real prices and with that you resource your life. You feed your family, you pay your team, a meaningful percentage gets redistributed. It funds the infrastructure you're building in the world. It stays in your community. It circulates. At least that's what it would do if you're following the model that I teach. Even if you buy something for the same price point, if you're spending with giant billionaire companies versus paying a creator who's circulating the money in their local ecosystem, it's a completely different economic impact.

What real access actually looks like

And what about the people who genuinely can't afford your work and are genuinely economically struggling? Because I think that deserves real consideration.

And the answer is that you build real infrastructure for them — not discounting randomly in a way that depletes you and treats those people like charity cases. Real systems. Like a suite of free resources that are genuinely useful. And I don't mean watered-down teasers that are designed to incentivize people to want to buy the full-price thing. I'm not talking about that. That's bullshit. I'm talking about actual tools that people can use to change their lives without ever paying you a dollar.

By the way, that's how I define marketing — giving people real value, changing their lives before they ever pay you a dollar, regardless of whether they ever pay you a dollar.

You can do things like community events that are open to everyone, where people get real value, real connection. A podcast like this one, or an email series where you give away your best thinking, best tools for free. Sponsored seats in your programs funded not by feelings of altruism, but by the revenue that your well-priced offers generate. That is what it actually looks like to care about access.

You build something that can sustain itself. You create an ecosystem where the people who can pay, pay — and they get incredible value and they're delighted — and that revenue funds you, your work, your family, and real dignified access for the people who can't. Because you are not constantly scrambling to survive. There's a real difference in the quality and sustainability of access when you are resourced to build a structure that can generously provide it.

And that's the difference between performative accessibility and actual infrastructure. You cannot redistribute resources that you did not allow yourself to receive. You can't build community infrastructure from an empty bank account. You just can't. There's a ceiling to that. The math doesn't math unless you actually let money in.

It's not an economy problem

I am not denying material conditions. Inflation is eye-watering. Housing costs are brutal in so many places, including the city I live in. There are many people who are genuinely struggling, and what they deserve is a thoughtful and effective structural response — not charity born out of your martyrdom.

But the scarcity story that so many of us have absorbed — this blanket, vague belief that everyone's struggling, everything's terrible, and therefore to make your business work or to be a good person you have to charge as little as possible — that's not one, an accurate description of reality, and two, it's not helping anyone. It's not contributing towards any kind of positive change. It's not helping you. It's not helping your clients. It's not helping the people that you wanna serve but can't reach yet.

Your ideal client has money. They might have to save, they might have to rearrange some things and prioritize. They might be making strategic trade-offs. But they have money that they're going to invest in a better future. Their money's going somewhere. Make sure you can stand behind the value of what you're selling. And if so, make sure people know why their money should go to you.

If you can't do that quite yet, you might have a skills problem or a positioning problem or a mindset problem or a marketing skill problem — but it is not an economy problem.

That's all for today. I'll talk to you another time. Thanks for listening. Bye.