Policies and Pricing Update (04/24/23)

Thank you for taking a few moments to read this post regarding an update on my policies and prices!

I will give the most relevant information to you as briefly as possible first (in bolded print for the quickest read), then offer more details and thoughts for those who wish to know more about why these changes are taking place.

I'm updating a few of my policies beginning on April 24th.

Please be sure you're informed of these changes, and check out the details provided later in this post if you're feeling confused as to why these changes are happening.

My traveling radius has been listed as 1 hour from Medford City Hall, and I'm reducing my travel distance to 30 minutes, with the following exceptions:

1. If you are an individual booking massages, and live between 30 minutes and 1 hour from Medford, I will now offer massages to you for an additional travel fee of $30 added to the cost of each visit to your location.

2. If you are booking for yourself and at least one another person on the same appointment date, I will continue to offer up to 1 hour of driving distance to that location at no additional cost.

Any massages that have already been paid for before April 24th are not subject to this travel fee.

My policy on prepaid massages has been listed as all purchases being valid for 6 months before expiring, unless otherwise discussed in writing between the client and myself. I previously rewarded all of my communicative clients by allowing unlimited extensions on these purchases, but I am no longer allowing indefinite extensions on expired purchases. From now on, if you have contacted me before an expiration to request an extension, and your extension has been awarded, the remaining monetary value of your purchase will be usable for up to an additional 60 days.

If you have massages that you purchased during my Re-Launch Event (fall 2022 promotional period), the extended deadline (1 year from purchase date) I offered for those is still being honored, and the new 60 day extension allowance is applicable if requested before that date as well.

If you currently have expired massages that I have already agreed to extend the deadline for, and we have settled on a date, that date will still be your expiration date.

Important Note: If you have not yet discussed with me a new expiration date after requesting an extension of an expired purchase, the remaining monetary value of your purchase will be usable until July 1st.

My rescheduling policy is changing as of April 24th. I previously required a minimum of 24 hours notice to reschedule a confirmed appointment without enforcing my cancellation fee. I will now contact you 48 hours before your scheduled appointment to confirm it instead of 24 hours. As always, you may reschedule your appointment any time before that confirmation is made for no fee, and reasonable emergencies (such as contagious illnesses or dangerous weather) may be deemed worthy of cancellation without a fee.

My prices are changing as of April 24th for all new clients.

To show gratitude to my current clients, these price changes will not go into effect for you until June 1st, and you may purchase a maximum of 8 more prepaid massages at my current rates if your purchase is made before the June 1st deadline. Expiration dates for these massages are negotiable if discussed in writing before purchasing, otherwise they expire as usual (6 months after purchasing).

I am slightly increasing the cost of my 1 hour and 1.5 hour massages.

My 2 hour massages will remain the same price.

The updated costs for massages will be:

$200 for 1 hour, $250 for 1.5 hours, or $300 for 2 hours.

Packages will continue to be offered as -

Package of 4: Prepay for 3, get a 4th at 50% off.

Package of 8: Prepay for 6, get 2 more massages for FREE.

The rest of this post details my reasoning for these updates in case anyone is curious or otherwise has questions. Please reach out if you need further clarification! Thank you again for taking the time to familiarize yourself with these changes.

Why I'm updating my pricing:

When I began my career as a massage therapist 7 years ago, my goal was to offer the convenience of in-home mobile massage therapy at the most affordable cost I could offer. As someone who desperately needed bodywork I couldn't afford, I opened my practice with my prices set drastically low at only $40/hour while the average in Asheville, NC was $95/hour. I knew that doing so meant that I was making significantly less money than I could be, but it felt like the right thing to do for my community.

As the costs of living increased, I had to raise my rates to keep up. I struggled with assigning a high enough monetary value to my work because I personally understood how hard it could be for people to afford the care they needed. My clients also often became my friends, and it's always been difficult for me to ask for more than I felt was accessible for them. By 2018, I was charging $85/hour.

When I moved from North Carolina to Massachusetts in 2019, my new clients laughed at my low prices of $85/hour. Many people were deeply grateful that I made this service so affordable for them, and I loved being able to offer that. I struggled to get by financially in this expensive area, but I felt fulfilled by the work I was doing and continued to offer my low rates.

During the first year of the pandemic, in-home massages couldn't be done safely and I had to drastically reduce my usual hours out of necessity for mine and my community's health. I was still offering my crazy low prices, and people were more grateful than ever for that, so I struggled to rationalize raising my rates even though that meant I was barely surviving. I finally raised them closer to (but still significantly less than) what my colleagues offered after my practice officially reopened to the public at my normal hours in 2022, and that was emotionally very hard for me. I felt like I was failing my community by having to raise my rates for them during a time of so much unease in our world.

And now here I am, finally putting my dream of being the Most Affordable Massage Therapist Who Ever Lived to rest after 7 years of undercharging... because I don't have any other choice. I'm not able to afford to live anymore unless I put the higher value on this work that it has always deserved. I spoke with about a dozen other mobile massage therapists across the state about their pricing and travel ranges, and I'm finally matching up my individual massage prices with what they are currently offering as well. This past year, I've been considering leaving my career behind entirely because I've become so chronically tired, and I struggle to ask for enough money for my massages without feeling like I'm failing at my original goal to make them affordable to everyone. But nothing else gives me a greater sense of purpose than this work does, and I don't want to leave my practice. I meet other local massage therapists who are less experienced than I am, aren't willing to travel more than 20 (or even 10) minutes, and charge way more than I do... and I finally realize that I have no choice but to assign a fair value to what I offer. If I don't, I won't be able to massage much longer before I'm completely physically burnt out from taking more appointments than my body can handle just so I can make ends meet.

I will stubbornly keep offering my super-discounted package rates until I can't anymore, and I'm working on creating some kind of monthly membership program to offer discounts for those who book consistently but can't afford to prepay in bulk. By raising my rates, I can also soon afford to offer more sliding scale sessions to people who struggle to pay for massages, and also find other ways to feel like I'm still serving my community as best as I can.

Long story short -- I hope you understand how hard I've worked for so long to try to bring the best care for the best prices to you, and I hope you see the value of my work and can support me in finally asking for that value to be properly compensated for. Thank you for taking the time to try to understand, and I promise to always keep trying to find ways to get bodywork to the people who struggle to afford it.

Why I'm updating my policies:

Travel radius is always a hotly discussed topic among mobile massage therapists. Mobile massage is usually only offered in densely populated areas, and therapists generally charge based on your distance from them by the mile. But honestly, the people who live further out in more rural areas tended to have amenities that made my work much easier than people in the cities had. Who was more likely to have accessible parking and first-floor access to the space we were going to be working in, the city client? Not likely. I used to ask myself - -why should I have charged more for the person who lives slightly further away, but was otherwise much more convenient to work for? I've always offered to drive up to 1 hour to access my clients because most of the time, the extra driving time was comparably less of an inconvenience than having to struggle to find a parking spot or haul my gear up flights of narrow stairs.

But nowadays, I'm finding that the further drive out means more gas money, more sitting in traffic, less time available in the day to see other clients, and overall - less money made. Every other massage therapist I know has a short travel radius (most not exceeding 20 minutes) and they charge between $40-$100 more than their office rates to haul their gear in and out of houses within that short distance. It's becoming harder to justify offering so much and asking for so little, especially because I've been doing this for 7 years and most mobile therapists are young and fresh out of massage school (because they're usually the only ones who are still vibrant enough to carry their gear around all day). It's rare to find a massage therapist who has been practicing more than two or three years and is willing to offer mobile massage work at all. Usually by then, our hands are tired and we want to focus on giving the highest quality massages with the lowest amount of effort we can expend to further save our hands and extend the span of our careers for as long as possible. Did you know the average career span for a massage therapist is only 5 years in the United States? We burn out fast.

BUT help me out, and I'll help you. Save me from having to drive to someone else to get a second or third massage done for the day, and that travel fee suddenly doesn't seem so necessary! So if your partner, neighbor, roommate, etc wants to get a massage after you, I'll waive the travel fee for those living in that outer radius.

Expiration dates for prepaid purchases is a rule I've had to start setting with the introduction of my amazingly discounted massage packages. I was able to justify those discounts because that meant that I was getting more money upfront to pay my bills and budget with, and I could more accurately predict the flow of clients I'd be seeing over the next few months. One of the main reasons that so few massage therapists work for themselves is that the flow of income can be very unstable and unpredictable, so anything I can do to foster stability in my practice makes my life a lot less stressful. The packages also encourage people to get massages consistently enough to see the results they are hoping to achieve from bodywork. Most problems that massage solves don't get accomplished in just one session, so having people commit to packages of massages means that more people see lasting results in the work and my practice grows because they recommend me to their peers.

The downside to offering packages occurs when people don't book their prepaid massages at a predictable pace. If someone gets a package of 4, uses 2, then doesn't contact me for a year before they pop up and want to book the other 2, by that point I haven't accounted for them being in my calendar anymore and I've historically then had to overbook myself to try to squeeze those people in when they suddenly popped back up and I was already booked out for several weeks ahead. This started happening often enough that planning my schedule became really challenging, and I was almost always overworking myself trying to manage juggling an unpredictably high flow of clients. My solution was to set an expiration date for the purchases of 6 months, that way I could reasonably predict the flow of clients in a controlled chunk of time and leave enough space in my calendar for the more spontaneous clients to get their appointments when they wanted them. And for years, it felt reasonable that if a client was unable to get their massages scheduled before they expired, but reached out to me and communicated this, that I could extend their expiration and continue to reasonably predict my work flow. The need for extensions was very rare and therefore easy to manage.

But a new problem came to light when I moved to Massachusetts. When I first got here in 2019, I was still charging my low rates from North Carolina of $85/hour. For reference, the next cheapest mobile massage in this area was $120, with most people asking for more than that. I was also offering packages of 4 massages at prepay for 3, get 1 free. Everybody was buying packages, how could they not? It was so much cheaper than what they were used to! And I was so glad to offer an affordable service to them at that time. Then, pandemic hit. A lot of my clients felt unsafe booking the massages they paid for because they were afraid of getting Covid-19, so I told them all that the expiration was no big deal and we would book them when they felt safe. Many people waited to book anything for over 2 years, most while maintaining the communication I asked for, most expressing a lot of gratitude for me holding onto those massages for them.

In 2021, I raised my rates to $120/hour to survive while others were charging a minimum of $160 at the time. After another year, I raised my rates to $160/hour. Plenty of other bodywork therapists were charging a lot more, and I still felt bad about having to raise my rates to make ends meet as the costs of living were skyrocketing.

So during 2022, I was charging almost double what I was in 2019, still undercharging for the current market, and I had a huge backlog of people who bought my insanely cheap packages years ago and were feeling ready to start redeeming them again. Financially speaking, I was drowning. I was working back-breaking hours trying to get everybody caught up, barely making any new money, still not charging enough for my new clients, and while most people were appreciative and patient with me as I tried to accommodate everyone, many people were unkind, demanding, and unappreciative.

Now it's 2023, and I hope those of you who benefited from these long extensions remain grateful for my efforts to help out during these last few difficult years of our lives, and you agree that it's fair for me to honor the remaining monetary value of those purchases a bit longer before enforcing a final expiration date.

Why I'm updating my confirmation requirements:

This one doesn't need a long explanation, thankfully! I'm finding it harder nowadays to fill time slots that suddenly become open the next day when people have to reschedule the day before, so I'm asking people to confirm their appointments 2 days ahead instead of just one.

If you actually made it this far and read all this, I'm awarding you a free hot stone Add-On to a massage you book in the next 6 months. Thanks for caring about my feelings and valuing my time as much as I value yours as well!