CASE FILE: Finance

Subject: Aileen Carol Wuornos Known for: Highway 75 cases, subject of the film Monster Estimated victims: 7 Operational period: 1989–1990

Aileen Wuornos spent most of her adult life being undervalued.

By people who should have protected her. By systems that failed her. By an economy that offered her almost no legitimate options. By a world that consistently told her, in explicit and implicit ways, that she was worth less than she was.

She eventually disagreed. Violently, and with catastrophic consequences. But the disagreement itself — the refusal to accept the valuation others placed on her — that part is instructive.

Most people are chronically undercharging.

Not because they lack skills. Because they have absorbed, through years of negotiating from weakness, a distorted sense of what they’re actually worth. They price for approval rather than value. They discount preemptively. They take the first offer because waiting feels dangerous.

It is not dangerous. It is negotiating.

Know what your work costs someone if they don’t get it done well. Know what your time is actually worth in the market. Know the difference between a client who respects your rate and one who is trying to extract as much as possible before you figure it out.

Price for the former. Walk from the latter.

Wuornos’s approach to rate enforcement was not legally sound and we are not recommending it. But the underlying principle — I am worth more than this, and I will not pretend otherwise — is one more people should carry with them into salary negotiations.

File closed. Results pending.