What Does A Dream Cost: Ask a Disabled Solopreneur in 2026
The lived reality for a growing number of people is not a thriving future
I’ve written previously about how coming into 2024, my biggest aspiration was to become a paid, professional public speaker. I love being on stage, and I love how that allows me to connect with people.
2024 didn’t go as planned. Neither did 2025.
At least 2026 is looking a fair bit more promising, but we’ll see what happens!
I know that most people reading this probably don’t share my particular aspiration. But it’s probably also fair to say that a good chunk of you currently work a full time ‘day job’ that isn’t your dream, but ‘pays the bills’.
All too often, the only real way for us to get to live our values and do what we love is to start our own business. But as the saying rightfully goes:
“If starting a business was easy, everyone would do it!”
Let’s say for argument sake that you are like me, and you’ve gotten fed up with the 9-5 grind and trading 1/3 of your life to build someone else’s dream.
Even if you’re not striving to become a professional speaker - you will still need many of the same services any aspiring entrepreneur needs.
Maybe you can figure out how to do some of the marketing or accounting yourself, or maybe you have a friend or family member who can lend some help in the short term.
Regardless, starting a business requires some legit up front investment, and ongoing funding (because it almost certainly won’t be profitable for a while).
Let’s do a quick cost snapshot:
Photographer for professional headshots: $500-1000 (one time)
Business advisor/coach: $5,000-10,000 (starting)
Marketer/PR support: $3,000-10,000 (depending on needs/project type)
Social media manager: $3,000-6,000/mo
Digital strategist: $3,000-12,000 (starting)
Even on the low end there, we’ve got roughly $15,000. And that’s just for some select professional services.
There’s a reason they say ‘don’t quit your day job’, because often the only way someone has a chance of paying for these services (before their business is making money) is through their ‘discretionary spending’ from the day job they are trying to escape.
But here's the thing: what if the economy is in the dumpster? What if you're sick or disabled? What if you're single with minimal support?
What if… there isn’t any discretionary money to spend?
Here are some shocking stats courtesy of Lindsay Johnson:
Solopreneurs Simply Can’t Make Enough Money Doing It All Themselves
• The average annual revenue for the nearly 25 million non-employer businesses (solopreneurs) is approximately $46,900.
• Only about 7% to 10% of solopreneurs generate between $100,000 and $250,000 in annual revenue.
• Fewer than 2% of solopreneur service businesses ever cross the $1 million mark.
• You have to shift out of solopreneur mode and into business owner mode and build systems and a team to get more done together!
• Reality Check: You don’t have to make a million dollars (if you don’t want to) to run a sustainable, scalable business ... but you also can’t keep doing it all alone if you want to make more than $50,000 per year!
$46,900 - remember that.
The Reality of an Increasing Number of People
It’s no secret that the cost of living has shot up in recent years.
And it’s not just you, you are in fact working harder and not being compensated as much as you used to:
Going by that, whatever you currently earn per hour should be at least twice as much!
Likewise, here is a chart showing increase in CEO pay over time vs increase in regular worker pay:
What a rip off! I don’t know about you, but even if I hadn’t already wanted to go independent, I sure would now.
Get Woke About Being Broke
Let’s set the stage with some real numbers.
I will be quoting Canadian figures ($1 USD = approx $1.40 CAD), but I have double checked all of them against the same figures for the US, and in all cases the equivalent figure in the US is consistently aligned with the Canadian figure after considering that exchange rate.
As of 2023, the median annual ‘take home’ income for individuals and families in Canada was $74,200, or approx $6,200/mo.
The 2025 estimate in Canada for median monthly rent is $2,100, which is just over 1/3rd of the $6,200 monthly after-tax income. That is the median across the nation, but obviously in greater metropolitan areas such as Toronto or Vancouver (or New York, Los Angeles, etc) the number is much higher.
The median monthly grocery cost in Canada for an individual adult is a minimum of $350 but upwards of $500.
The median monthly utilities cost in Canada for an individual adult is a approx $375. It varies by city and season.
For those who own a car, the median monthly cost (insurance, fuel, maintenance, etc) is approx $1,370/mo.
Where are we at so far?
$6,200 take home
-$2,100 rent
-$350 groceries
-$375 utilities
-$1,370 car costs
=$2,005.
Barely 1/3 of total take home pay is leftover.
(yes, if one does not own a car, that cost is lower, but transit and cabs still make a dent)
A lot of Americans think that Canada has 100% free healthcare, but that’s not correct. What is true is that we don’t get bankrupted by having to go to the hospital.
But we DO pay for dental, vision, prescriptions (depending on the medication and province), and if we don’t have any special health insurance (which entrepreneurs often don’t), physical therapy, massage therapy, chiropractic, and other. I don’t have health insurance.
Depending on the circumstances and timing, I could need to spend $1,500-2,000 in one month for medications, dental, physical or massage therapy, psychotherapy, etc.
$2,100
-$1,500 (upwards of $2000+ depending on needs)
=$600.
aka 10% of original monthly take home pay.
Leftover. And we haven’t even gotten to ‘leisure’ (or ambition) yet.
If you have any aspirations of travel, or an expensive hobby? Woof.
Remember, these are all averages & estimates.
$600 per month of ‘discretionary' spending money on average. To some that might seem like a lot, but $600 is easily gobbled up by ‘unforseen circumstances’.
That really helps explain why more and more people are saying it’s impossible to actually save money these days.
Internal Recalibration
In 2025 I got very serious about my speaking aspirations. I knew that without an agent, there was very low chances that I would get booked much, let alone paid. I didn’t have the luxury of slowly building over a few years.
Some might call me impatient, I call it ‘driven’ 😉
So I did what they say you have to do: I “invested in myself” and I hired an agent on a short term contract.
A couple of months in, I got approached by a company about a hosting gig and I went back to my agent and asked how much I should quote the client. To that point, I had not been approached about a gig like that.
My agent said $2,500, minimum. This was my reaction:
Just a few months prior, that was more than half my entire monthly take-home.
Internally I was like ‘how can I justify charging that much? I’m not famous!’
My own personal mental calibration had not yet adjusted from thinking of my time in the ‘hourly’ context. When you spent 10+ years making approx $27/hr, it gets pretty fixed in your head that ‘that’s what I’m worth’. At least it did for me.
Here in Ontario, our provincial minimum wage is still less than $20/hr.
Federally in America, it’s still $7.25 and hasn’t increased in decades.
That’s unfathomable.
But as I said, I had gotten so used to thinking of my time in an hourly context, the idea of going from $27/hr to $2,500/hr was unbelievable. But many of us are conditioned to sell ourselves far too short like that.
That’s the mindset many of us are indoctrinated to in the workforce.
I did as my agent directed and quoted the $2,500. Of course, even if that was a fair, industry standard price, doesn’t mean every potential client will agree to pay it. This one didn’t.
A few months later, my internal calibration had shifted to catch up. At least now I can quote my price without feeling like 3 grifters in a trenchcoat.
To be fair to themselves, freelancers need to charge for more than just their actual time doing given work, because they’re also charging for the years of training and practice and supplies/resources they’ve had to invest to that point. You pay a professional more because they can do the work better, faster, and ultimately cheaper than if you tried to do it yourself.
I get it. I do my own web design, graphic design, video editing, podcast production, bookkeeping, social media, and more. I’m fortunate to be so multi-talented and multi-capable, because having to pay for all of those things separately would cost me tens of thousands of dollars more per year.
But in order for my business to grow, I can’t keep being the every-role-in-the-company person. Lindsay already told us so!
Dream Equity
So Lacey wants to be a professional speaker.
What else (other than an agent) would she need to ‘level up’ in that realm?
A business coach/advisor, for one thing.
Now, I’ve sought out professional coaches before. As I mentioned earlier in the article they tend to cost $5,000 USD to start, but that’s not for the whole year (and that’s $7,000 in CAD).
Some have starting packages of $10,000 USD for say, 8 sessions.
That’s nearly $15,000 CAD. For 2 months of coaching (1 session per week).
To work with that coach for an entire year would cost $90,000. You might ask ‘well why not work with a cheaper coach?’
The cheapest coaches I’ve tended to see are still around $3,000 USD for a certain number of sessions. That still works out to over $30,000 CAD for the year.
Frankly, that is just not affordable for me (even on a payment plan), or for many others. I’ll tell you why shortly.
This is the thing - many people who decide to start their own businesses are NOT going to have a lot of the knowledge and skills needed. Some professional help will be needed.
Yes, there are some online communities, maybe they have a friend or family member who can help. But the idea is (rightfully) that a professional coach/advisor, while expensive, will not only save you money (from avoiding costly mistakes) but help you get more revenue as well, because they know how.
So it’s a logical and reasonable investment. IF you can afford the upfront cost.
An ever growing number of people can’t, which further reduces the client pool all these coaches are competing for.
Canada is unfortunate in that our dollar is far weaker than all of our major trade partners. The US, the UK, Europe, Australia. Everything costs us more, unless we are buying from a Canadian supplier. So as a Canadian, while there are certain undeniable upsides to living here, our currency strength and our biggest trade partner are not among them.
It has pained me to get on professional calls with some people and then find out their service costs $5,000 USD or more.
We are unfortunately at a point where if your service costs $10,000 or more (whether coaching, speaking, producing high quality promo content or slide decks, etc), the only people who can realistically afford that price are people who are already successful, privileged, and better off than most.
Putting the ‘Rush’ in ‘Crushing Poverty’
I am disabled. I’ve been a lot more open about that since 2025.
My disabilities are mostly invisible, but they still impact me and have made it nearly impossible to work in a ‘traditional’ job anymore without significant accommodations. Many employers are not honestly willing to provide those accommodations either.
Remember that $46,000 figure from earlier?
Want to take a guess what the median annual take home income for DISABLED individuals in Canada/the US is?
$74,000 is the overall median.
The median annual take home pay for disabled Canadians is $32,870.
That’s less than half as much.
Monthly, that works out to $2,740/mo.
That $600 discretionary spending money that was leftover originally?
$2,740 take home
-$2,100 rent
-$350 groceries
-$375 utilities
-$1,370 car costs
= -$1,455.
And again, that’s before medication/healthcare, and before any leisure.
Disabled people have to cut their costs out of sheer necessity, but at this point in time, there’s only so much you can cut when everything costs as much as it does now. Rent prices have quadrupled in some places in the last 20 years. Grocery prices have gone 2-4x depending on the item.
But wait, there’s more!
For an individual who is unable to work full time (whether due to chronic illness, severe physical or mental disability, or other) and whom has to rely solely on the government - the average of the maximum monthly disability supplements across provinces and territories is $1,180/mo.
Not $6,200.
Less than half the $2,740 monthly of disabled people who can still manage to work (cumulatively) full time.
The final kicker? Let’s look at the ‘poverty line’ (derived from the MBM):
The Market Basket Measure (MBM) calculates the minimum disposable income needed to afford a specific basket of basic goods and services (food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other essentials) for a modest standard of living in a given community size and region. The MBM is Canada’s official poverty line since it was enshrined in law in 2019 under the poverty reduction act.
That figure? approx $2,302/mo.
So a person who cannot work full time (let alone, a ‘good job’ that would require higher education/more complex skills) can be paid approx $1,180/mo by the government, and that’s HALF of the official ‘poverty line’.
It’s not even possible to get places for rent for as low as $1,180/mo in 2026, unless you are far away from the places where jobs actually exist. So if you can’t work at all, you’re effectively doomed to homelessness.
So, how many Canadians fall into the disabled category and are unable to make anywhere near the $74,000 median?
27% of Canadians (11 million), as of 2023, up from 22% in 2017.
The CDC estimate for America is 28.7% (99 million).
Just over 1/4 of Canadians, and nearing 1/3 of Americans.
It’s a lot more than I think a lot of people realize.
In North America (US centric):
• the bottom 50% of earners earn approx $50,000 annually, or less.
• the top 25% of earners earn approx $100,000 and up
while the bottom 25% earn $32,000 or less.
• the top 10% of earners earn approx $180,000 and up
while the bottom 10% earn $23,000 or less.
• the top 1% of earners earn approx $660,000 and up
while the bottom 1% earn $15,000 or less.
• the top 0.1% of earners earn approx $3.3M and up
while the bottom 0.1% earn $5,000 or less.
Remember that stat from Lindsay Johnson: the average annual revenue for the nearly 25 million non-employer businesses (solopreneurs) is approximately $46,900, yet $50,000 is the median income of ALL earners.
And the disparity between the top and bottom 1% is over half a million dollars.
[insert eye popping picture again]
One more quick stat:
A recent NerdWallet survey found that 57% of Americans said they were living paycheck to paycheck. As wealth inequality continues to rise, more than half of the nation is in effect “one crisis away from homelessness,” according to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
57% of Americans are one crisis away from homelessness. That’s a far cry from any sort of ‘American Dream’.
Misplaced Expectation or Massive Exploitation?
Since going out on my own, I’ve been able to be a lot more open about my disabilities, which has been very refreshing. But while I have been able to be more transparent about those struggles, there are still professional taboos i’ve felt compelled to avoid.
It’s not taboo to get loans or borrow money from friends and family, but it is taboo to be on the verge of bankruptcy. We will be open an honest about one but not the other. It’s a double standard.
And even when founders tend to ‘tell the real messy true story’, it is almost always after the fact, once they have ‘made it to the other side’ and are now successful. ‘See, it was all worth it!’
I know I write a lot about privilege (and I’m a white person), but it has both frustrated (and at times disgusted) me the way professional services are both marketed and priced.
I genuinely used to think that coaches charging $10,000 for their services were greedy gougers. Now I can understand the legitimate economics behind that price tag. But as I said before, at that ticket price your clients are likely only going to be other people who are already pretty ‘well off’.
And lots of coaches want it that way - you want clients who you don’t have to worry about stiffing you, but for the ones who need it most? It’s not really moral and ethical to leave them behind with a ‘too bad, so sad’. And as the number of people who can’t afford that continues to rise, the potential client base just shrinks.
I am tempted to say ‘a cheaper option is badly needed’ but I think the bigger issue is the combination of chronic, severe wage suppression and a brutal lack of equitable government support programs for disabled people (entrepreneurs or not).
It’s not necessarily that service providers are greedy over-chargers, it’s that people at the bottom are being horribly exploited and financially suppressed, and if they weren’t, they could afford these services more easily.
One thing I have seen some Canadian service providers (coaches, speakers, etc) do that I think is really great - they charge their normal rate (in USD) to customers around the world, but they charge that rate in CAD to fellow Canadians.
ie if their rate is normally $5,000 USD, Canadians will only pay $5,000 CAD, not $7,000. That’s a really fair and considerate thing to do when your country’s exchange rate blows.
The Entrepreneur Has No Clothes (or Hope?)
Time to show that I’m not ‘wearing a wire’.
In 2024 (the last year I worked 40hrs/wk in an office), I earned $62,000 after-tax income. That has been the highest earning year of my adult life.
At the end of 2024 I went on medical leave from my job (after landing in the hospital from extreme stress), and early in 2025 I began to build my own business.
I knew that was realistically my only chance to support myself going forward. The rigid, unforgiving 9-5 corporate world had proven it would always keep me in perpetual burnout, as it does for many neurodivergent people.
But also as many people know, businesses are virtually never profitable in their first year.
In 2025:
My official business activities earned me $4,800.
Freelance accounting/admin work (my old career) earned me $8,900.
Government issued ‘Employment Insurance’ paid me $15,000.
Additional government assistance paid me another $3,800.
I applied for but received no grants and no business loans from any bank.
Combined, that’s $32,500 (which is right on par with the median disabled income in Canada cited above).
I live in Toronto, one of the most expensive cities in Canada. Despite that, I got ‘lucky’ (but also unlucky, as the blog post I linked to earlier helps explain) in that I was living in ‘temporary’ housing for most of 2025, which also gave me greatly reduced rent.
Even so, the money I was bringing in did not match my expenditures.
I had to borrow money from friends and family not to grow my business, but to survive (rent, groceries, and other living expenses). I used up the entirety of the credit that was available to me from before I left my prior job.
That puts around roughly as much I made in 2024, but half of this new total is debt, not income or revenue.
But it was necessary. The devil I know (traditional jobs) are guaranteed to keep me in chronic burnout, depression, and my earning ability was pretty much capped.
Building my own business has allowed me to work in a way that worked for my brain, allowing me a real chance at a life that works for me.
It was not a question. I needed time and space to build - to get a foothold. That meant sacrifice. When I’m forced to spend 40hrs a week building someone else’s dream, I just don’t have enough left to build my own.
So I had to commit to giving myself a year to build a foundation, and that meant a lot of debt and hardship because funding and supports were not sufficiently available.
Disabled, Not Incapable
I am disabled but I am not incapable. FAR from it.
If there was a founder struggle bingo card, I’ve checked most boxes: hospital from burnout, borrowed money, maxed credit, services nearly shut off.
But ‘disabled with minimal support’ rarely makes it on the bingo card.
Why?
Not because disabled people never succeed or are incapable, but because the deck is stacked against us from the start. We have great ideas and valuable offerings.
You’ll hear about disabled entrepreneurial success stories here and there. But there would be many more if we were actually supported equitably instead of having to work ten times as hard to get one tenth as far. And the success stories wouldn’t be almost exclusively white people and/or men.
A common frustration even just within the neurodivergent community is how we know we have good ideas, we know we’re highly capable under the right circumstances. But we never get a proper chance.
Either we get used as token ‘inspiration porn’ when we ‘play by the rules’ well enough - or we’re relegated to the ‘oh well, you can’t afford the service so you don’t get to play’ pile.
This is the thing - we tend to have to make our own opportunities. To choose to smash the glass ceiling ourselves, and then drag ourselves through the broken glass too.
The government has supports for small businesses, but they are notably less accessible for people that really need them.
And once again, if we were all paid (and treated) more equitably by traditional jobs, much of this wouldn’t even be such an issue.
It’s Not Just Me Saying This
Chelsea Fagan (aka The Financial Diet on youtube and instagram) recently put out this excellent video:
She talks about many things that I have been thinking about.
And here is the Canadian version, from YouTuber Ashley Embers:
Here are a few real banger quotes from the second video:
• “Toxic individualism means we see ourselves as being in competition with others” - Parkrose Permaculture
• ”How much would minimum wage need to be today to match the home buying power of baby boomers getting minimum wage in the 1970s? My guess was $35. The actual answer is $66. That is diabolical” - @iarbosss on tiktok
• ”If some of us grow rich in our sleep, where do we think this wealth is coming from? It doesn’t materialize out of thin air. It doesn’t come without costing someone, another human being. It comes from the fruits of others’ labours which they don’t receive” - John Stuart Mill (1848)
So what does building your dream as a disabled solopreneur cost in 2026?
Too much. In too many different ways. And it’s only getting worse.
The current model is unsustainable for everyone.
Marginalized people push to make things better for everyone, so it’s counter productive for society to keep them marginalized. But that toxic individualism makes people with privilege feel like we’re enemies.
I want to build and live in a community (and world) where talent and effort are compensated fairly and equitably. Where access isn't reserved for people already halfway up the ladder (who may or may not be placing panes of glass behind them).
That’s what I’m building towards. Are you with me?
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and media producer. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting which provides sensory comfort and accessibility consulting. She also writes the Beyond Quiet Rooms blog, also on Substack.
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