Fees
Your fee is set prior to your first appointment. Factors that determine your fee are: which form of therapy you are contracting for (individual, couple, family, or group therapy); which of our therapists you are seeing; and the length of your session.
Typically, a 50-minute individual or couples therapy session with our licensed staff is $175 per session. Family therapy sessions are usually scheduled for one-hour-and-fifteen minutes. If a session is scheduled for more than 50 minutes, the fee is pro-rated to cover the additional time. Your health insurance plan may help to cover some of these fees. Please see the “Insurance” section below for more details.
If you’re not able to handle our regular fee due to financial hardship, we do our best to find a sliding-scale fee that can be workable for you and for us. What we mean by financial hardship is a fee that would affect your ability to pay for your food, housing, or other basic necessities. Because therapy is an additional expense, we recognize, and even anticipate, that it may impact your entertainment, travel, or other desirable, but non-essential, expenses. We want to support you in maintaining a balanced lifestyle, while also asking you to pay as full a fee as you can. Therefore, part of the agreement of having a sliding-scale fee at our Center is our good faith understanding that if and when your income increases or your financial situation improves due to any reason, or you recognize that you originally set too low a fee with us on the phone, you will let your therapist know, so that your fee can be adjusted. By the same token, your therapist may discuss your fee with you if he or she feels it necessary.
Group therapy sessions are $50 per group session for all of our ongoing groups: Living Life Fully a group for men and women, Men’s Therapy Group, and Women’s Therapy Group.
We also have a special 20-Week Group Intensive Program called Healing Your Past – Transforming Your Future that costs $87.50 per session, for a total fee of $1,750. To reserve a place in this Program, you either pay in full, in half, or make an initial deposit of $350. If you pay an initial deposit of $350, you would then make four more payments of $350 monthly during the course of the Program. If this plan poses a financial hardship, we also have an Extended Payment Plan option: the total cost of the Program ($1,750) stays the same, but the monthly payments are extended over a longer period of time, up to six months after the end of the Program.
Payment
During this period when the pandemic has necessitated all of CCG’s therapy sessions to be conducted virtually by Zoom or phone, we have also needed to make changes to the forms of payment that we can accept for session fees. At this time, we are not able to accept checks sent to our physical address. Instead, we now only accept payment made online with PayPal or Zelle, or made with a credit or debit card.
When we were able to meet with you in person, we collected fees at the beginning of the session in order to maximize the amount of time you and your therapist would have together to focus on therapy issues. This also provided support for the therapy work you had done in that session by not ending a session with business matters.
Paying by PayPal or Zelle: We would like to support this same atmosphere by requesting that if you make payment via PayPal or Zelle, you complete that transaction prior to your session starting and, when you see your therapist in session, simply let your therapist know that you have done that. This is a help to our bookkeeping system. You may also pre-pay for several sessions or a month’s worth of sessions at one time, if you prefer.
1. ZELLE:
To use Zelle, you can send a Zelle payment from your bank’s mobile app on your phone. If your bank does not participate in Zelle, you can, instead, download the Zelle app onto your phone and use the stand-alone Zelle app to make payment. Note: If you use the stand-alone Zelle app, you won’t be able to make a payment to us if your Zelle account is linked to a debit card.
To make a Zelle payment, either from your bank’s mobile app or the Zelle app, send payment to: jason@creativegrowth.com
2. PAYPAL: Please follow the instructions below carefully.
If you’d like to pay your session fees with PayPal, in your web browser please go to:
www.paypal.me/
It’s preferable to have your PayPal account linked to your checking account or debit card, and not your credit card. If your PayPal account is linked to your credit card, PayPal will charge you and us a fee to send money. If your PayPal account is linked to your checking account or debit card, there shouldn’t be a fee charged to you. If PayPal charges us a fee, we’ll contact you and ask you to cover any such additional charge.
During the PayPal payment process, you’ll see a screen that gives you a choice to accept the default setting of “Send with Purchase Protection,” or to click on the box that says “Send to someone you trust.” PLEASE BE SURE TO CLICK ON THE “SEND TO SOMEONE YOU TRUST BOX” so that the “Send to someone you trust” box is circled in green and has the green check box in the right top corner (see illustration below). If you don’t click on the “Send to someone you trust box,” PayPal will automatically assume you’re purchasing their “Purchase Protection” plan and will deduct a fee from your payment to us, which we will then ask you to cover.
3. CREDIT/DEBIT CARD
If you wish to pay by credit or debit card, please note that the fee that is set in your phone intake session prior to your first appointment is our discount rate and is based on your paying for your sessions with either PayPal or Zelle. Session fees paid by credit or debit card are not eligible for our discount rate and, therefore, have a higher cost than our discount rate. This is due to the fact that credit card companies charge us a fee, based on a percentage of your session cost, when you use your credit or debit card to make payment. To cover those charges, as well as the costs involved in processing credit and debit cards, we add a fee onto our discount rate.
To determine your actual payment to CCG we use the following formula: If you use your credit or debit card, $5 will be added per $100 of session cost. This means that session costs of $15-$100 have $5 added, session costs of $101-$200 have $10 added, session costs of $201-$300 have $15 added, session costs of $301-$400 have $20 added, etc. The amount added to your discount rate depends on the total amount you are paying, not the number of sessions. For example, If you pay by credit or debit card for two $175 sessions at once, you’ll be charged a total of $370. (That works out the same as if you had paid for your $175 session plus the add-on fee of $10 per session.) If you’d like to avoid the higher cost fees that come from using a credit or debit card, we encourage you to consider using PayPal or Zelle.
Insurance
Depending on your current health insurance provider or employee benefit plan, it is possible for our services to be covered in full or in part. We would be glad to check your health insurance plan for you. If you’d like us to do that, please let us know when we speak to you on the phone.
If you prefer to check on your insurance coverage yourself, you can contact your provider to verify how your plan compensates you for psychotherapy services. We would recommend asking these questions of your insurance provider to help determine your benefits:
- Does my health insurance plan include mental health or psychotherapy benefits?
- Do I have a deductible? If so, what is it and have I met it yet?
- Does my plan limit how many sessions per calendar year I can have? If so, what is the limit?
- Am I responsible for a co-payment amount and, if so, how much is that?
- Do I need written approval from my primary care physician in order for services to be covered?
Victims of Crime Program
We also serve people who are enrolled in the Victim of Crimes program. If you are participating in this program, we arrange to receive payment directly from that agency.
Cancellation Policy
We require more than 24 hours advance notice if you need to cancel or change your scheduled session. Please note that if you cancel or change your scheduled session with less than 24 hours notice, you will be financially responsible for that session. (Example: if your session is on Tuesday at 10am, you’ll need to cancel your session before 10am the Monday before, in order to not be charged for that session).
In cases of severe emergency, this 24-hour notification policy may be waived. Severe emergencies include instances of sudden hospitalization for you or a family member, sudden death in the family, being stuck on a closed bridge, in a closed tunnel, or on a closed freeway, or natural disaster. Examples of situations that we do not consider severe emergencies include: illness, other traffic problems, work-related commitments, childcare problems, forgotten appointments, or other comparable situations.
Confidentiality
What goes on in your session is legally confidential. You can share whatever you’d like with whomever you’d like. We will share information about you and your therapy with others only with your written permission beforehand. There are a few exceptions to this that we’d like you to know about:
- We will share information with other staff members at our Center as needed.
- If you are a danger to yourself or to others, the legal protection of confidentiality is no longer in effect.
- If there is a reasonable suspicion of child abuse, elder abuse, or dependent adult abuse we are legally required to report this.
Any Other Questions
Please contact us for any additional questions you may have. We look forward to hearing from you!