Anthony Centore

According to Salary.com, the average Licensed Professional Counselor working in Cambridge, Massachusetts makes $39,778 a year*. That’s beyond bleak. For a city where a 900 square foot apartment can run over $400,000, it’s dismal. Is this our fate? Financially speaking, are counselors better off getting jobs at Wal-mart? I don’t think so. With good practice planning, counselors can do better. For many, earning over $100,000 profit in year two of private practice is an obtainable goal. In this article, we’re going to look at the financial aspects of running a private counseling practice.

From recent graduates to seasoned clinicians, today it seems that everyone in part- or full-time private practice is asking the same question: “Should I accept health insurance?”It’s a complicated question. The decision whether to accept third party payments will have a big impact on your counseling practice. The question is made even more difficult as there isn’t just a lot of information to consider—there is also a lot of misinformation about working with insurance companies.

Medical billing is a frustrating process for counselors who are often juggling too many business tasks, as well as trying to provide excellent clinical care. In fact, many counseling practices collect less than 85% of the monies that they’re rightly owed from insurance companies. However, with good planning, and a smart billing staff (in house or otherwise), your practice can reasonably expect to collect between 96-99% of claims.

In my last article, I talked about “the counseling office” and how, while it may be true that therapist offices are sometimes poorly designed, client’s expectations of what counselor offices should look like are often derived from what they’ve seen on TV (read the previous post to view images of some fantastic TV counseling offices!).

[Readers, don’t forget to leave your comments below—I reply to every comment or question!] It’s hard to get people to talk about your business…if you’re a restaurant. If you’re a counselor, you’re really fighting an uphill battle, as clients need to overcome the social stigma of being in counseling in order to tell others about your service.