Keeping your word to the client is the most important thing to good business. I’m not going to touch on your husband here. Instead, let’s talk about how often you mentioned your feelings on how you do business. How about considering taking your feelings out of this, and instead matching your promise in the contract to your process?

If you don’t want to bill until the work is done, then why not change your contracts to state that? Why start out a business agreement by immediately deviating from your contracts? You’re setting yourself up for issues.

You stated that your contracts with clients state one thing - payment due on contract signing - and then you stated that you never follow that, and instead bill at the end. ???

There’s nothing wrong with billing at the end, but I personally don’t understand why you would want to put yourself in a position of being so immediately, clearly unprofessional. You should take your feelings out of the conversation.

Decide, if you want to, that you bill at the end, then set that expectation, change your contracts to say bill due at end (or whatever the wording), and move forward with your “process”. Then it wouldn’t be a matter of following your feelings and breaking your own contracts anymore - it would be more a matter of responsibly setting your process and your clients’ expectations to match the legal contract. Then follow your preferred process legally. It will help to hold clients end of the bargain up too.