Woke up to 62 comments and just want to say I love how engaged and thoughtful this conversation is - particularly amongst people whose opinions differ. I’m still working out how I feel about these concepts, too; I think a lot of us are. Reading through comments like these (and figuring out how to articulate your own comment) is so useful, and I’m so grateful for this discussion!
I'd love to see a follow up interview that teases out 1) where bookkeeping and understanding your monthly cash flow ends and "budget culture" begins, and 2) what she has to say to YNAB and Ramit Sethi people (which I think is the majority of your audience) vs Dave Ramsey people. Focusing on the latter feels like a straw person argument because left-leaning upper middle class PMC types are not really on the Dave Ramsey train, but there are valuable conversations to be had in the more nuanced space.
I keep thinking there's some interesting crossover here with Prosperity Gospel and Kate Bowler's work--but the Dave Ramsay stuff as a secularized version of it. Good studies of Prosperity Gospel like Bowler's locate it as a specific and pernicious subculture in Christianity, though, and not a stand-in for any/all gospel messaging. I'd love to see a more nuanced version of this critique that gets more specific about the different kinds of budget/personal finance messages are out there.
another person I would add to the Ramit Sethi/YNAB camp is Chelsea Fagan (The Financial Diet) who also rejects the hoarding/FIRE approach to personal finance and is more focused on frugality and entrepreneurship. She is also quite conscious of the echoes between budget discussions and dieting; but doesn't come at it from a strong anticapitalist lens.
I love this space for discussion so much! One thing I would really love is a more nuanced look at FIRE folks. It’s a much broader and more interesting sub-culture than is being portrayed here, and it’s often caricatured or conflated with tech bro/Dave Ramsey nonsense, which is a bummer.
The original "lenders" were just our friends and family! That still is how most loans are made, and my friends launched a startup that helps those loans support credit history: https://www.about.givingcredit.org/
I also had a knee-jerk reaction to some of the concepts here, but I also found it to be helpful for me to frame a conversation I'm having with a friend. I recently moved in with a friend for a year (or two) while I am building a house. We've been negotiating our food budget – I love to cook, and in particular to cook for people. I buy mostly organic. Our economic situations are in different "snack brackets" as he describes it.
There's been some back and forth on our food budget. I love to cook, and have been cooking dinner us both every day. If I'm cooking for us both, do I change what I buy to fit his budget? It's not fair for me to ask him to increase his food budget to fit my tastes. We settled on him contributing a fixed amount. I don't want to change how I approach food because it's something I enjoy. It brings me peace and a creative outlet. I can afford it. Cooking for a friend every day brings me joy and fulfilment that cooking for only myself does not.
What I took away from this interview is that the budget isn't the only stakeholder in these discussions, but in a difficult conversation like this – where finances are entangled with relationship – it becomes the only variable we give weight to. In my situation, if we let strict budgeting be the only stakeholder then my conversations with myself or with other friends would be "Don't you feel taken advantage of? He's not pulling his weight! It's not fair!" and his conversations might be "You shouldn't have to pay more for groceries because he likes expensive, organic, bougie food!"
But what about our friendship, our relationship as roommates, the fulfilment I get for cooking for other people, the joy he gets from a home-cooked meal, the creativity of us exploring new recipes together, the joy and community of shared dinner? Plus he does the dishes and packs the leftovers. And we get to eat great food.
If the budget discussion won, I fear we'd be eating sad meals for one alone each day, paying for our own food, making our own meals. I'd be less creative in the kitchen cooing for one. We'd be less connected. We'd be negotiating duplicate butter in our separated fridge space.
But at the end of the day, I still have a rough budget. This is an area I can spend freely on as I have structured a larger-than-normal food budget into my life plans, and have done so far many years now.
i think this is where the comparison to diet culture isn't a bad one. You HAVE to handle and manage money, the same way that you HAVE to eat. I think the mental block I have here is to compare restrictive dieting to budgeting - to me budgeting is more akin to "goal setting". What do I want my money to do accomplish today, tomorrow, and in the future? For you food and the act of feeding the people you love is important! What better thing could you spend your money and time on?
something related (and mildly concerning) is that most folks get their financial literacy from whatever financial culture they're interacting with. As much as I dislike the man, Dave Ramsey has at least cautioned folks away from things like overly predatory systems like payday lending or title loans. I guess the question here is - which is worse? Bad or overly stringent financial advice? or NO financial advice?
I think this explanation is helpful because in my situation that means the comparison is to someone who doesn’t have enough food. They may not be trying to diet. They may abhor it and be all for fat liberation (I am!). But they’re still living with restricted eating and the constant triggering of diet culture pressures because of that.
Similarly, a person who doesn’t have enough money for the things they need may not engage in budgeting (I don’t) but figuring out how to make $7 cover $10 worth of expenses is still going to require handling budget culture triggers constantly, especially if the main option is debt and the financial precarity continues to grow because of the disability tax.
Thank you for sharing this practical example of negotiating this situation with a friend/housemate and rethinking the various ways we can contribute to each other. I hope your solution keeps working, and adjusts as needed!
I’ve read some of Dana Miranda’s work before (though not the book), and the question I always have, which I was hoping would be addressed here but wasn’t, is how to think about retirement/growing old in this paradigm.
It’s hard because I’m 100% on board with everything being said here about how things SHOULD be, and I do try to live my life in line with those values, including giving money away directly (though it can be VERY hard to get people to accept it) (donating through GiveDirectly gets around that somewhat but obv doesn’t build community), BUT as has been covered extensively on Culture Study, most people do not have access to the kind of community and mutual aid that could make wealth accumulation unnecessary.
On the one hand, accumulating wealth so you can stop working before you die is very much not open to everyone. On the other hand… is the suggestion here that we just embrace that, throw up our hands, and accept that we’ll probably die in poverty? That sounds really aggressive I know, but I genuinely want to know what the anti-budget-culture answer to the question of growing old is, beyond “make a community that will take care of you”, which I would argue is just as out of reach to a lot of people (most people?) as wealth accumulation is. I have never seen this question addressed in these conversations and it frustrates me.
Hmm OK thinking about this more, I wonder if the distinction here is that if you are in the category of people for whom wealth accumulation is not going to be a viable strategy (based on low income and lack of generational wealth), the suggestion is that you stop punishing yourself trying to reach an impossible goal and instead turn your energy and attention towards building the kind of community that will be able to take care of you. Still think that might be an equally impossible ask, but at least it’s constructive rather than restrictive—your life NOW would be improved.
Still think addressing this question head-on would be useful.
That makes a lot of sense. I also felt that there was an implication that if we are one of the many people commenting that we can't make a community like that, we should ask ourselves what it would take to get there. For example, I have a friend who recently moved from a coastal city to a small midwestern town to live closer to her mom and sister. She gave up a more exciting lifestyle, cool restaurants and living around more people with shared values. She gained trading off childcare duties with her sister and the ability to buy a house. Now she doesn't have to live a life where she is chasing more money in order to buy a house and pay for childcare on the coast. After reading an AHP post on the importance of living near friends, there is a piece of me that wants to explore a communal retirement plan where my friends and I pool resources.
My mom has both sufficient retirement funds and a local network of friends who she thought could take care of her, but I still had to drop everything and go across the country for two weeks last fall to take care of her. Social services are technically available but very bare bones and her social worker has 90 other clients. It's really up to family to take care of her needs.
The approach described in the interview seems hopelessly naive to me.
Totally!! Even if you build a really nice communal living situation for yourself in old age, medicare doesn't cover everything, and particularly if you need long-term super hands-on care, that's a lot to ask of your community.
I’m sure the book is great, but I’ll admit my kneejerk reaction to “wanting to accumulate enough wealth to be comfortable and leave something to your kids is weird, actually, and have you tried just asking for free babysitting” was “what a strange take”
I agree. Yes, I would love to live in a system with a more robust safety net AND fewer capitalistic influences always vying to help us spend our money but right now, I don’t live in that utopia and neither do my kids. I don’t have a community of people that can just give me money if I need it for our dental appointments. I don’t personally feel comfortable relying solely on free or underpaid childcare. I don’t want our lovely first grade teacher to be the only one buying tissues when they run out. If I want to pay our babysitter a living wage, pay for dental care, and buy supplies for our first grade classroom AND not go into debt for that (because I don’t- I don’t want to pay interest to banks when I can avoid it) then I may not be able to buy as many jumpsuits right now. And I’m cool with that trade off but it does mean I need to be somewhat aware of my money and spending.
Most “budgets” I’ve used are based on an awareness of how I need/hope to spend my money and less about random categories a stranger says I need to care about. I haven’t always budgeted my money (depends on the year and what’s going on for me), but when I have, it hasn’t really felt restrictive - more of a personal reminder that right now, this is my goal. Money is finite (for most of us); I don’t understand why tracking it is inherently a bad thing (which is implied here).
Also, I’ll admit that my feelings when reading this reminded me of when my experience when another popular newsletter writer (who writes mainly primarily about diet culture) wrote about budgeting as “diet culture” and then I read a NYT article about her where she inherited a lot of wealth which helped her buy her home. Maybe for some folks, where money is less finite, budgeting does feel like silly restrictions. But for me, it’s more about an awareness for how to align my financial behavior with my hopes and values. Sometimes I don’t need it to be on paper or in a spreadsheet so there’s not a “budget,” but sometimes there’s a lot going on and it’s easier for me to organize it visually.
Very much agree with you. I read a lot of the thinking in this interview as a conflict between nudging people towards the better world we want to live in and helping them be safe in the world we actually do live in. The financial system, especially in the US, is deeply predatory, especially for those in precarious circumstances. My kneejerk reaction to hearing a suggestion of "embracing products like credit cards and loans as ways to expand your resources" is that I'm being marketed to by a credit card company.
Also, I think what's doubly pernicious about debt and interest is that not only are those setups often predatory, but they result in people giving more money than necessary to those institutions and therefore empowering them to grow further and prey on more people. Debt is an entrenched part of our society and few people are ever entirely separated from it, but if I'm making a decision on taking out a payday loan to give money to a friend, then I'm going to factor the interest I'm giving to the payday lender into my decision.
I definitely had a similar kneejerk reaction to "embracing products like credit cards and loans as aways to expand your resources." I am failing to see how taking on debt constitutes "freedom" from budget culture. I would love to wave a magic wand and make a world in which everyone's needs are met without needing access to financial resources. But we don't have that wand, so advising people to lean harder into a broken system just because the system is broken is ... just not the advice I would give.
This was also something I thought about. As Grace says below, I'd probably have to read the book to comment more thoroughly, but there is something interesting to explore our reaction to different types of people taking on debt -- ie, if it's someone with a lot of money already, it's "strategic", if it's someone living with significant precarity, it can only be a bad idea. Some of this is definitely based on realities of different interest rates for different types of debt, but in reality, someone who might not otherwise have the funds using a credit card to pay for a dental visit could absolutely be strategic, in that putting off a problem can make it more expensive. But we're not conditioned to think of it that way. Not sure if that's what the author means, but it is interesting to consider the moral value we assign to debt, based on who has it.
YES! I really wanted to scream, 'not all debt is the same'! For instance, predatory credit card debt, or after pay type institutions specifically target the 'have nots' (broad term).
However, the wealthy know to leverage debt in ways that makes them richer. Rushing to pay off your mortgage or car loan if you're lucky enough to have locked in at sub 3% is not financially wise. You're better off putting that same amount in any index fund and getting an average return of 6%. In other words, paying off your cheap debt early will in fact cost you more money.
the difference between being "broke" and being "poor" is that the former means you're temporarily low on cash but you have resources to call on (salary, lines of credit, etc.) to fix it, whereas poor means you don't have cash AND you don't have access to those resources.
i think it's very much a net worth - debt ratio for folks. When I was earning $25k a year as a grad student and needed $1k for car repairs, it was put on a credit card at 18%. Now in my forties I can borrow against accumulated assets for a fraction of that APR.
I agree with you about feeling a bit icky over the suggestion of using credit cards/loans. That seems gimmicky to me. I was actually going to ask for clarification of what that really looks like in her opinion.
Bottom line, I use CC for ease but I can pay them off each month. I’ve used loans strategically—from my credit union with money from my savings as ‘collateral’. They’re tools, not products, in my opinion and as we know folks in our country are underwater with CC debt, suggesting we embrace CCs is odd: feels like we already do, no? To our detriment.
I agree, I think I would need to read the book to engage generously with these ideas, as they're not explained in enough detail here to overcome my initial reaction about the dangers of debt, unlikeliness of more support from the government coming soon, etc.
Yeah I don’t jive with the implication here that budgeting to save for retirement while also advocating for changes to our (very slow-moving) government programs are mutually exclusive somehow? Just comes off as odd.
Yeah a lot of this feels like "have you tried just assuming that capitalism will be overthrown before you reach retirement age?" And... no I have not tried assuming that because I can look around and see what public opinion looks like.
I mean, at this point, I'll practically be jubilant if we still have an active social security system by my retirement age. The Overton window has moved that far right.
That said, I do think taking away social security is the ONLY thing that will make Americans across the political spectrum riot.
I am now retired and drawing my Social Security. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I assumed that we would resolve the financial crises created by we baby boomers all getting old at once - because we had to. Silly me.
This was definitely the part of the interview I struggled with most, too. So, so many people are in debt - and yes, there are predatory systems at play creating that reality, but without the promise of government fixes and with the very real threat of personal danger and ruin at stake, it feels like individual approaches can be some of the only real band-aids to get people to a safer place. And for better or worse, they do get you to a safer place - having a retirement account is better and safer than not having one, full stop. Having a plan to save up so your kids have access to resources (education, housing) will keep them safer than not having that. (And as a parent, there's no universe in which I am willing to forego my kids' safety...I also think you can push for systemic change while creating that safety net personally!)
And there really isn't a lot of consistent free babysitting in the world. I know who I can ask in a pinch, for example, but that doesn't solve regular needs for childcare.
Yeah, I have to admit I was very, uh, challenged by the "debt is fine actually" + "ask people for free labour" and "reconsider saving for retirement" stuff. Maybe it's more fleshed out in the book, but I wasn't convinced enough by this interview to want to bother reading it.
I get the sense that it's less about asking people to babysit for free who would otherwise expect to be paid, and more about being part of a community where your kids can go to a neighbor's house after school and play with their kids until you get off work, or where you live close to family members who would be happy to take the kids for an afternoon every week in service of their *own* relationships with your children. I definitely don't think it's realistic for these arrangements to be a substitute for childcare/babysitting 100% of the time. That speaks more to the systemic social safety net issue of not having subsidized/free childcare available to working parents the way it is in other wealthy societies.
Yeah, I know a lot of us are getting stuck on that, and it was obvious it was about "being part of a community" etc. But the reality is that not all of us are part of such a community, and building that community takes a lot of buy in from a lot of people, and we can't just unilaterally make that happen no matter how hard we try. Chiding people for paying for babysitting or other services when we don't have other options feels like just another way we're failing to be better socialists or whatever. I'd love a circular economy, a community of care and mutual aid, and all those other good things, and I simply cannot force those around me, let alone the structures that make up the city and country and world I live in, to get on my timetable.
I think you've hit on the author's point -- we cannot unilaterally make community (or other systemic changes) happen on our own. At the same time, I wonder if the idea that anything we can't achieve individually is unrealistic or shouldn't be seen as plausible is a construct of our highly individualistic capitalist culture? Maybe we're not being chided for paying babysitters so much as encouraged to think differently about what could be (while also doing what needs to be done from a practical standpoint to keep our families safe).
I also think the interview doesn't explicitly acknowledge that our financial system is deeply, messily intertwined with our politics and systems of government, which are notoriously slow-moving and, particularly at the moment, dysfunctional. I don't think it's anyone's personal responsibility to sacrifice their own wellbeing for the sake of being a "better socialist." I think it's more about looking at what small things we can do differently to move in a direction that better serves us all.
I don't disagree, I guess I'm just left feeling like I don't have practical options presented to me from the author in terms of what to do - beyond the personal financial decisions I do or don't make. I would hope it's obvious I'm not suggesting that anything we can't achieve individually is unrealistic. What I'm saying is - then what? What *should* I do? "Build a community" or "create a system" is not actionable advice.
This is a good read/point. I'm probably stuck on it to it because of my own personal context; in most ways I *do* have the kind of community that does this, and it still strikes me as a little off base to put this into the conversation in the way it is included above. I love living in my community and there are material ways that it has made parenting less financially stressful (the number of hand me downs alone!). People meal train at the drop of a hat and show up for each other and yes, babysit each others' kids. But...I don't know. Something about wrapping that into a conversation about easing monetary stress didn't work for me. You can have all those things and also still need to pay for childcare, healthcare, all the other things.
Totally! I definitely identify as a socialist and will always vote to raise taxes, etc. etc., and do try to focus on building a community of support/ mutual aid, but I live alone in a high-cost-of-living city, and my parents do not have retirement savings, so it's like... I actually do need a budget (yes, I have looked into government aid programs for my parents... it's incredibly bleak and basically a full-time job to manage them).
We're in a similar situation - we relocated my in-laws to live nearby and partially subsidize their retirement. They were totally from the "community" mindset that would be lauded by the author, they were part of the Back-to-Land Movement in the 70s. Think big spirit of community sharing, etc.....which meant they didn't have a lot in the way of savings, house value or Social Security earnings NOW. Ironically I now enjoy the "free babysitting" (and I love it) ....but it's a heck a lot more expensive than hiring a babysitter!
I think there's an important distinction between a) following a budget with preset limits and rules and b) keeping an accurate account of money going in and out.
The latter approach gives you knowledge and leaves you in control. The knowledge might lead you to make certain changes but that's up to you not to artificial rules that you've yoked yourself to.
Yes to this. If "budget culture" = you are responsible for any failure to be rich, then yeah, that's BS and the system is more responsible for it than your latte and avocado toast (HT to 2016!). But at least for me, I didn't like the feeling over overdrawing my checking account and feeling like I was always short at the end of the month. Budget software helped me stop that pattern--it didn't somehow turn me into a greed monster obsessed with hoarding money to bequeath to future generations.
I agree. The day I realized it was my budget and I could decide how to allocate the money based on what was important to me AND I could change my mind about what I wanted to use my money for was the day I could finally follow a budget. For me it’s about knowing where my money is coming from and going and making sure I like where it’s going (if I don’t, what can I do about that).
To me, the budget IS the freedom. I decide what I want, and then look at the numbers to see what it will take to get there, all while feeling comfortable knowing I have enough allocations for rent, utilities, etc
To Dana Miranda's point about investing in communities, directly giving to people: I can only do that because I have a budget! The budget is where I transform aspirations (have monthly allocation for mutual aid, saving to go on a trip, etc.) into real-life progress.
Yeah, I totally agree with this. I allocate money to give away, and more money specifically to give away during the holidays. I feel like it allows me to be more generous because I know the money is there and I dont have to wonder if I'm shorting myself on rent.
Still trying to process and then be able to articulate my thoughts on all of this, but you're definitely speaking my mind here.
I budget in a way that has "limits" (the free version of the Good Budget app), but frequently exceed those and just ignore the little sad red envelopes :D (which, ok, yes, reading this I can see are a great representation of the moralizing in budget culture). But what I really value is the ability to comprehensively look at where the imperfect resource that is money is coming from and going to in my life. Maybe this is just me valuing a sense of control like Dana Miranda said, but it feels more textured and nuances than that. Making decisions without that information would feel like...wow, it's hard to wrap my head around that because I have been budgeting my whole adult life...would feel like making them with one less physical sense available to me, I guess. Like eating food I couldn't smell.
I am about to step into living a choice to work less, to earn less money, with the hope that it's going to allow me to be a resource for others in deeper ways, and also have more energy to building up non monetary resources in my own life. and also spend more time in my home and with my family. it's really terrifying because from a wealth accumulation standpoint it's definitely the "wrong" decision. But I feel like having budget let me make a more informed decision about the trade-offs of each choice.
Maybe there's more nuance in Dana Miranda's perspective that I could clean from the book - I have read some of her work elsewhere and it's definitely challenging in a way that feels healthy! But I definitely wanted to highñight the distinction you made here.
Moralizing those red envelopes is teleology run amok. This is like moralizing the needle moving towards "E" in your car. Choosing to refuel before getting stuck somewhere is a practical choice, not a moral choice. The fact that many people might consider those red envelopes a moral issue explains why so many people can't resist social media or being online 24/7. It's hard to ignore notification indicators if they are about one's immortal soul rather than just offerings of potential interaction.
Thank you!! I felt like I was taking crazy pills going through this comments section. It really seems like a lot of these folks are too busy building up and justifying their own self-imposed anxieties to take any practical steps that would actually make their lives better.
Agree! There is also a distinction between a) following someone else's suggestions for how you "should" spend your money, and b) intentionally making a plan for your own spending. A budget is a plan for your money. Having a plan doesn't make you morally superior but it might help you do more things you value (work less, give more generously, cultivate hobbies that require materials, etc)
If I may, a gentle observation from reading the comments here: I don't think Dana Miranda or her book intends to discourage people from using a budget as a neutral administrative tool for keeping track of how we spend money. Rather, I think she is encouraging folks to interrogate what mainstream personal finance discourse in our capitalist society tells us is the "right" way to budget our money (which is unilaterally focused on maximizing long-term wealth accumulation at the expense of all other priorities).
(I also think maybe the title of the book is ill-considered, but knowing what I know about publishing, that might not have been Miranda's choice.)
This is such a fascinating, emotionally charged and critically important topic. Grateful for the opportunity to discuss it in this special community of thoughtful, respectful internet denizens!
I would argue that our society is far from unilaterally focused on wealth accumulation. It’s focused on maximizing consumption and the ability to consume.
I think that’s where I struggle with this interview, because in my own life, the concepts of living far below my means, thinking deeply about why I spend money where I do, and aggressively saving money as a means of filling gaps in the non-existent safety has meant trying to act in opposition to the “consume at all costs” current in our culture. (It’s also informed by some very traumatic experiences with our elder care and healthcare system in the US). It’s challenging to read that portrayed as greed.
I don't know - so much of what has created wealth inequality in our country is generational wealth, and that is the direct result of wealth accumulation. And I do think that the overall message is that each person has to accumulate as much as possible for *their* family. As you note, there's good reasons for that, because individual saving needs to account for a lack of a safety net - but for those of us who have enough, it's worth thinking about how we can share resources outside of our family units. (And I am including myself in that "we," not necessarily you!)
That's fair. Maybe this sounds nitpicky, but I'd characterize the pressure to maximize consumption as a pillar of capitalism writ large, and the pressure to maximize wealth as a component of budget culture. I also think that the meaning of "maximizing wealth" changes as the scale of that wealth increases. I don't think anyone would fault you for saving money to fund your own needs. But if you already had multiple vacation homes, and millions in the bank, and you were still tipping less than 20% in restaurants and/or paying an accountant to minimize your tax expenses? I would call that greed.
It sounds like a big existential question and it's not one I can answer, but when does one have "enough" that they can stop prioritizing accumulation above all else? From what I understand, that's not a concept that budgeting culture encourages people to engage with -- perhaps because to your point, in service of consumption and capitalism, we should never have enough, because we should always want to consume more.
Yeah, I would agree with that. It’s another reason I feel like it’s very weird that she goes after FIRE people and conflates them with that definition of budget culture. FIRE forums are just about the only financial community I’ve found that really grapples with the concept of “enough” in a concrete and non-multi-millionaire kind of way.
I mean, I can't speak for the author, but my personal perception of FIRE is that you save SUPER aggressively so that you can retire from working for pay as early as humanly possible. And again, speaking for me personally, the idea of forgoing any expense that isn't absolutely essential for survival in order to maximize one's "freedom"/exempt one from the need to work is a bit greedy -- or at least, a little antisocial in that you're declining to spend any of your money in the short term on things like supporting local businesses, or contributing to your community financially in other ways. But I am admittedly not a member of the FIRE community/movement, so if I'm misinformed, I am happy to be corrected!
There are folks that take it to the extreme like that, but I would argue that’s a caricature. FIRE is a broad group, and not all of us are fully on the “retire early” bandwagon. A lot of us want to get to a place where our whole universe isn’t tied to the almighty Job.
A lot of us are naturally frugal types. There’s a big anti-consumerism streak in those circles. The overall gist is just living below your means and not spending money where it doesn’t matter, and investing the difference. There’s a lot that can be said about investing feeding a shitty system, but it’s the toolset we have. It’s a much more philosophical community than you’d assume. We talk a lot about death and the meaning of the time we trade for money, and about what “enough” means. The idea of guilting people for not spending enough money doesn’t sit right with me personally, and conflating anti-consumerism or frugality with being antisocial feels…weird?
I’m very much a FIRE person. I’m a woman with an art degree that works in a tech adjacent job. We maintain a low-cost lifestyle because it means my husband gets to be a stay at home dad. That’s a “freedom from work” that is deeply meaningful to us. I save pretty aggressively (40-50% of my income) because my income is all there is. If I get laid off or put out of work, that’s it, money faucet is turned off for my family, so having a bigger cushion means less fear. I don’t feel deprived. Our hobbies just happen to be cheap.
I’m probably in the category of “money hoarder”, but to me it has meant being able to house and care for an aging parent without a second thought and being able to properly support and value the care work that my husband does. I also come from a long line of women who had to be the safety net when things went sideways, so at least in my case, I’ve never really thought of it in terms of pure individualism.
Thank you for your thoughtful response -- I appreciate the context, as well as your willingness to share your personal perspective one the FIRE community. To be clear, I do not begrudge anyone the desire to care for their family or establish a financial safety net.
I think where the concept of FIRE chafes for me is what you characterized as the "extreme" version of it, so I'm glad to hear that's not how most of the community applies its principles! My gripe is with people who work super high-paying jobs in fields like tech or big law or finance for a relatively short period of time, while also reducing their expenses by any means possible (for example, buying cheap stuff on Amazon instead of from local businesses where it costs more) so they can quit those jobs in their 40s or 50s, and divest both financially and civically from their communities by way of their wealth.
I find it especially aggravating when people with that mindset complain when their neighborhood gets overrun with corporate chains because local businesses can't survive. Or they gripe about the quality of public services, while jumping through hoops to avoid paying taxes.
I understand the value of being frugal, and at the same time, try to spend money in accordance with my other values, even if that means I'm paying more for some things than I could be (which directly conflicts with frugality!). I very much appreciate the space that is our local independent bookstore, and so I buy books there even though they sometimes cost twice as much as they would on Amazon. I donate money to a local independent cat rescue every month because I believe they are doing important work in our community and want them to continue, even though if I added up the amount I donate in a year and projected how much it could be earning in a mutual fund over the next 10 years, I would grow my own wealth faster by keeping that money for myself.
At the end of the day, I respect the need to make financial decisions according to values, and I think conversations that encourage us to think more deeply about how that looks for each of us (and understand different perspectives) are important and worthwhile -- thanks for having this one with me.
I read a study a few years back that the emotional sense of financial security, aka "enough", tends to plateau around $80k annual income. In trying to find that study, I found this 2024 survey indicating $186K/year as the security threshold. I haven't read it in full, so I wonder if that defines security as "enough", in the minimal sense, or if security includes a degree of assumed overconsumption. There's all sorts of ways you could compare this perception to people's actual incomes, but I find these figures curious in that they indicate there is, in theory, an upper threshold. In the $80k study, I remember reading participants who made more than that didn't have significantly greater happiness or life comfort than those right around $80k. I want to hear Dana Miranda and others explore this more - how do we figure out what is "enough" for us (factoring in variables like your region's cost of living, the predictable costs of known health conditions, and other things that are largely out of your control)? And then, based on if we're at or below that "enough" estimate, can that information help us make decisions where we both care for ourselves and care for our communities?
Interesting! That reminds me of a study I remember coming across several years ago, which suggested that above about $75K/year, people with higher incomes aren't significantly happier.
That's not the same thing as feeling financially secure, though. I honestly think financial security past a certain point is a myth. I think it's wise to have 3-6 months' worth of living expenses in liquid savings to cover emergencies or float you if you get laid off (I don't, but I think it's smart, and I understand why people do it). I also think that if you plan to live for years after you stop working, you need to save money to pay your expenses (I have some of that, but not as much as I'm "supposed to" for sure).
But there's a lot of bad stuff that could happen to any one of us long before we're too old to work for pay, that no matter how big a pile of money we have, it wouldn't protect us from suffering. And that's where I think the idea of accumulating wealth for the sake of personal financial security becomes kind of a...self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way? Because if you need to self-insure for the absolute worst-case scenario (or if you think the more wealth you accumulate, the more secure you and your family will be), then it becomes really hard to justify using your money for anything else. And I wonder how much that perpetuates the individualistic, scarcity-driven thinking that hinders people from imagining and advocating for a better social safety net, and just a more equitable financial system in general.
I think you’ll find that a lot of folks in the FIRE community end up defining their “enough” a hell of a lot lower than you’d think. $40k - 60k a year is pretty common, maybe a bit higher if you have a family/elders to account for.
Thank you! My wife didn't start saving until she was 37 because her first husband just spent or drank everything they had. By the time I married her she had a mortgage on a townhouse and put 2 kids through college, basically living on stone soup. What I marvel about now — as we spend down our savings so she can have the care she deserves — is how she made living frugally (below our means) seem normal and creative and even fun.
Thanks for linking again. I think this paragraph outlining the type of budgeting she's railing against is super helpful to contextualize today's interview:
"This promise appealed directly to the work ethic of middle America: You can get rich with steady work and self control. The marriage of personal finance and self improvement — the Rich Dad Poor Dad, Millionaire Next Door, Finish Rich ethos — set a tone for our current dominant paradigm, which I’ve come to call budget culture.
Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success."
At the same time, I take major issue with this being characterized as the "dominant paradigm." I have 2-3 friends out of my entire social network who base their budgets around these sort of "get rich at all costs" schemes. They are annoying to be around but they are in the minority in my experience. I think using such a broad reaching term as "budget" for such a niche version of individualism/greed is doing a disservice to those she may be trying to help.
Hm, but what if you replace budget culture with diet culture in this comment? Only a small portion of people I know are basing how they eat and move around the most toxic aspects and goals regarding bodies and beauty. That doesn't mean that the cultural conditions that create them aren't influencing how I and others who don't do that think about bodies and beauty, even if I actively work against them, or that there aren't societal norms about how I should be eating (or making amends for eating "badly") or moving that can have social consequences if broken. This also applies to the breadth of the term - "diet" refers to essentially any way in which a person can eat for whatever reason, and only in some aspects does this apply to "diet culture."
I actually have been pondering this exact question for the past couple hours since commenting! I do think it's a fascinating comparison and really enjoyed reading some of the comments grappling with the two in this thread!
I remember reading "The Fuck It Diet" and having my entire world blown open by the idea that even tiny diet style adjustments to eating can harmful. It helped me understand why I, a person with no history of an ED, was still triggered by a friend going on Whole30 or whatever.
I think a key difference is that fighting diet culture happens within the context of people who generally have enough to eat. The alternative to diets is not starvation, it is plenty, it is trust. The current context for fighting "budget culture" is an America with no social safety net, untenable healthcare and housing costs, a minimum wage that has not been raised in decades, splintering social networks and deeply economically segregated communities. If your diet "fails", you gain some weight. If your budget fails, you are more likely to thrust your family into generational poverty. The stakes aren't really the same.
If fighting "budget culture" is only happening among those who are already quite wealthy, that's fine. But there are other ways to say "don't be a greedy asshole" that don't somehow implicate all forms of financial literacy and making ends meet.
But again, I really do appreciate the ways the comparison can be illuminating! Body size is not the result of a simple equation you should just better manage. The size of your bank account, similarly, in not the simple result of budget finagling.
But are you talking candidly about money with your 'entire social network '? I think even people who don't talk about it are influenced by it, and I do not think Americans in particular are very honest or forthcoming about our finances with each other; most people don't even know their coworkers salaries within the same office! And if we are talking about articles and books and schools of thought focused on how we spend money as individuals I do think that this is the context you see most abundantly.
It's also interesting that the word "diet" is just what you eat, at least as a noun. It's actually fairly neutral as a word, but as a culture we've turned into into something synonymous with restriction and unrealistic goals.
It looks like the exact same thing is happening with the word "budget".
Yes! I'm reading these comments and replacing 'budget' in my head with 'diet' and getting the same impression. A budget is a pre-conceved plan or approach to spending money, but in common use it means the strategy to maximize wealth or purchase power. Lots to think about.
Appreciate this perspective! The title question is an interesting one. If it doesn't reflect the content of the book well, that is very unfortunate. I think there are a few turns of phrase here that threaten to flatten the discussion a bit, and perhaps the title is one of them.
I've been thinking about this interview all day and trying to figure out why certain parts of it bothered some of us. I think part of where I was stumbling was that I *do* think a good chunk of mainstream discourse around this has already evolved in this direction - what she's talking about is pretty aligned with Ramit Sethi and to some extent with methodologies like YNAB (when not taken to an extreme, which is a whole other conversation). There is already a lot of critique of Ramsey et al. out there -- honestly for the newer generation of personal finance influencers, it feels much more like not wanting to come from a place of guilt or restriction has become a definitional throughline -- so I think I've been having trouble figuring out exactly where/how to locate this angle of this critique. Because ultimately I conceptually agree with most of this.
But I really agree with you that understanding this more as a critique than a methodology is critical to engaging with it.
I have so many thoughts on this (#neoliberalism). My main "aha" moment came about a decade ago. My husband and I fought about money constantly. I was always spending too much. We have 3 children. I worked at a nonprofit and we owned a small newspaper. There was never enough to make ends meet and we both always blamed me. Finally one day I got it through my thick skull. It wasn't because I wasn't sticking to the budget. It was because we weren't making enough money. It turns out $10/day just isn't enough to feed 5 people. I know it sounds obvious but that was such a turning point. It wasn't me. It wasn't the budget. There just wasn't enough money. It was a really freeing thought and I started feeling a lot better about myself.
This is such an interesting conversation, thank you! The title of the book itself seems like a play on "You Need A Budget"/YNAB, which honestly was the budgeting solution that finally worked for me *because* it didn't come from a place of restriction, but about purpose - I don't subscribe whole cloth to every part of the philosophy, but the mindset of "you've got some amount of money to work with, what's its purpose/job?" was helpful in generating a less stressful and more sustainable approach for me. Later, I also gravitated toward folks like Ramit Sethi and Katie Gatti Tassin in the personal finance space, because they were/are so open about the problems of living under both capitalism and patriarchy (this is something that genuinely impresses me about Ramit - his willingness to go all in on discussing the gender dynamics of couples handling money; Katie Gatti Tassin also talks about gender very explicitly). Both also talk about the importance of structural solutions, etc. - e.g. Ramit does emphasize the importance of actually paying taxes (to the point above!), Katie talks about the many issues with the American health insurance system and will cover things like how to find climate-friendly or weapons-free funds...
The latter part feels like the biggest unopened Pandora's box in the entire personal finance conversation re: wealth creation. It's easy enough to say - this is simple, invest in index funds as early as possible, and be patient. Certainly it's the most "personally responsible" wealth creation advice. But how do we grapple with the role of markets that value harm-producing industries? How do we think about the fact that if you just stick money in an index fund, part of what is creating value for your retirement is companies that are making weapons used in Gaza? The ESG conversation/trend feels like it is happening at the very broad level - which is good! - but would love more dialogue about how to think about these questions at the individual level.
Edit: I also ultimately believe that it's possible to find money systems that give you knowledge over your funds and reduce stress while also giving you space to advocate for better systemic resources and change. I think that is what the author is advocating - but I also think there are ways of "budgeting" that are not about restriction that can help you do that and find that safety and - ideally - abundance and joy.
Was talking to someone who’s used YNAB for a long time and she voiced what I thought was a super interesting distinction: she loves the tools of YNAB (I’m thinking here of the idea of money having jobs, too) but cannot read ANY of their copy, messaging, emails, etc. That strikes me as the difference between “budget” (knowing where your money is) and “budget culture”
I've been using YNAB for almost fifteen years now (!!) and never want to live without it. I actually think their approach is anti-budget (or used to be, anyway), in that it doesn't really push restriction but just asks you to be honest and realistic.
I get the dangers of restriction, but pre-YNAB my financial life was precarious, chaotic, and full of panic. Post-YNAB my finances feel abundant, manageable, and aligned with my values.
I have also been a YNAB user since 2018 and I cannot emphasize how much it has changed how I think about money. I feel like the philosophy is much more about values-based spending and has really helped me examine "needs" from an anti-capitalism standpoint. It's strange that she seems to target that app so specifically (I haven't read the book, but I did read on reddit she calls out the company founder by name), because they are much more focused on using your money in whatever way works best for you and one of the only personal finance "methodologies" that doesn't demonize debt. They actually have been doing a slow rebrand to stop using the word budget entirely. Honestly there is a whole YNAB subculture that could be its own Culture Study podcast. Also, from what I know they treat their employees really well which is basically the opposite of Dave Ramsey Inc.
This was my thought, as well; as soon as I saw the YNAB-targeted title, I was like, "Huh?" There are very fair critiques to be made of David Ramsey, to be sure, but her comment about "offloading your financial decision-making to a budget and a set of economic goals you didn’t choose" doesn't apply to a system like YNAB where you are absolutely choosing your own goals. Like, that's the whole point of YNAB.
She goes on to say budgeting "undercuts your ability to intuitively decide how to work and use money to live the life you want." I'm sorry, what? Sure, there are times for relying on intuition to make decisions, but spending money is most certainly not one of them. It's pretty wild to critique the "moralizing" around budgeting and debt while, in the same breath, applying a moral bent to spending money based on...just vibes, I guess?
Her critiques of the systems enabled by American individualism are valid, but her proposal that we should therefore approach spending as if we don't live in those systems is not. (The comment about getting neighbors to babysit for free is very "maybe grandma and grandpa want to help out a little bit more" a la JD Vance, which is ironic considering the discussion around Trump at the end.)
"It's pretty wild to critique the 'moralizing' around budgeting and debt, while in the same breath, applying a moral bent to money spending based on.. just vibes" --> Very well said. This articulates what doesn't sit very well with me in reading this interview.
Yeah, I have used YNAB since 2012 and I can't imagine my life without it. I doesn't feel like a scam to me, or some sort of cult-like brainwashing. I get X amount of dollars each month, and I get to decide how to use them. It helps me prioritize what I want (a new sweater, a new book, a trip somewhere) while making sure I pay my bills (electricity, mortgage).
There have been times where I've stopped myself from buying something because YNAB reminds me I'm saving for something else, and that to me is powerful.
I did follow the link in the article to her critique of FIRE and it started with someone talking about following Dave Ramsey and I had to pause. I don’t think she’s actually spent much time in FIRE circles, because Dave Ramsey is generally reviled in the spaces I’m in.
Yeah, I think the overall FIRE movement is more closely aligned with things like "Your Money or Your Life" or FrugalWoods-type stuff, which are pretty anti-capitalist. I do think a lot of the discourse is frustratingly apolitical, though (at least on Reddit).
I've budgeted all my adult life because I had to - for many many years just to make ends meet, not to build wealth, so I'm not about to stop or tell anyone else to. But what I am taking from this interview is the idea of consciously moving money out of the center of our wellness/security plan (not throw out! But de-center)? What if instead of researching how to improve my credit score, mortgage rates, index funds, blah blah - what if I centered... people? Relationships? I lived for a short time in a country very different from my own, where the mindset was if ONE person in the village came into money/wealth/success, then EVERYONE did. Because money was just another communal asset, another tool. It broke my brain a bit, but I so appreciate now that I saw that way of living in action. Of course they still needed money, they had to be strategic about its use - but they were more attuned to interpersonal connections and they prioritized that, and it worked . Obvs we can't go from A straight to Z but we do need to start somewhere...
100% this. I used to just panic when the credit card bill was due because I *should have* had enough but somehow didn't. That doesn't happen anymore and I prefer it. Is that fetishizing restraint? Meh.
I’m not a loyal YNAB user, but it was a key tool in bringing me out of a Ramsey view of finances. In particular, the “roll with the punches” part of YNAB’s philosophy felt so freeing. I also can’t reconcile how anyone pays bills without some kind of budget. And I think there are all kinds of budgets, some more formal like YNAB and some more casual like a simple list of typical bills and income amounts.
A friend recently introduced me to Ramit’s work and I’m a huge fan. Look forward to learning more about Katie Gatti Tassin’s work too. While some of the following words may be triggering, I do recommend the Frugal Friends podcast who recently published BUY WHAT YOU LOVE WITHOUT GOING BROKE. The idea of conscious spending has been revolutionary to me. Like anything, it’s a process, but one worth exploring.
Katie Gatti Tassin would be an incredible newsletter guest interview because she also has CS crossover appeal as a former Bama rush girl!! It’s been a lot of fun to see her podcast fully radicalize over the last year, to the point where she’s now interviewing folks like labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. You truly love to see it.
I also like Bad with Money with Gabe Dunn. Similar trajectory -- they were a creative who didn't know what an IRA even was and then just got radicalized over the course of their research.
I didn't know her so I looked her up. Her trajectory is interesting because it looks like she has no formal financial training and has only been writing about finance for a couple of years (unless there was something she did on the side). Not sure what to make of that.
YNAB is also the only budgeting that works for me, and it DOESN’T always work for me, but I have less anxiety when it does. I am an unconscious spender. I need it to yank me into consciousness.
I've used ynab for more than 10 years now and EVERY YEAR without fail I find some random price hike, double charge, or unauthorized charge (including a $7000 crate and barrel couch) that makes the service worth it for me.
I really like Ramit Sethi! When I heard him say “you can afford anything, just not everything” it really clicked. The idea of values-based spending was also pretty great. I’m still working on impulse spending (#ADHD) and have too much debt, but those concepts have helped me feel better about spending money on some “luxury” items while digging myself out.
YNAB is a wonderful tool and has definitely changed my finances for the better, but I’m so irritated that the price keeps going up every year when the software more or less stays the same. Must I be price-gouged on even my budgeting software?? Ugh.
Disabling chronic illness pushed me into a whole new money paradigm.
When you're sick:
1. *Costs no longer make sense.* And therefore, neither does budgeting. I can pick up a $3,600 bottle of rifaximin...that insurance makes $10 because my doctor used the "right code" (not for my condition, but for the approval.) I can have a four-figure hospital bill evaporate with a credit-preserving forgiveness application (that no one tells you about—guys, NEVER pay a hospital bill without questioning it first.)
There's a strange freedom in this funhouse financing. Feeling like it's all Monopoly money changed my relationship for how I price products in my business. Questioning what things should cost allows me a beautiful downtown apartment at half-price rent.
2. *Community is wealth.* Most of us do not start out feeling like we have the kind of community that would pay for our dentist appointments. Most of us do, though, so much more than we realize. The same community that I thought didn't understand my illness became the community that paid for me to go to off-insurance doctors, bought me a mobility trike, put a little cash in my account at the second-hand store, randomly sent me gift cards for groceries, and covered my laundry service.
What changed was me, and how I interacted with my existing community.
3. *Use the tools in a novel way.* I don't have debt (but I'm not opposed to taking it on). My credit score is 800+. But I leverage credit cards HARD. First: I use different cards for different spending categories (medical, groceries, etc.) so I can quickly scan my spending. I pay these every WEEK. Second: I reap beaucoup rewards off those cards. NEVER spend a dollar where you aren't getting something back. Third: put that good credit score to work. I've begun opening the occasional new account with $200-300 bonuses.
4. *Take what is meant for you.* The concept of Welfare Queens is absurd. In my time spent both in poverty and in working with non-profits with disadvantaged constituents, one thing is glaringly obvious: people are EXTREMELY reluctant to accept assistance of any kind, far beyond the point they need it. Montana STRUGGLED to spend the federal dollars granted to them via the CARES act because most eligible people refused to apply for things like housing assistance.
As a sweet lady in the hospital financial office said to me, "honey, the point isn't to go bankrupt and grovel. These programs exist because we don't WANT people hitting rock bottom." I promise you, you have already paid into the institutions that will later provide you assistance with your tax dollars, with dollars built into their pricing structure...and it doesn't NEED to be an exact transaction, anyway.
I qualified for and accepted *complete rent coverage* for a year and a half, reduced internet for over a year, complete hospital forgiveness for two years, and a grant for trying novel medical treatments. Applying was hard, mentally. The individualism is pounded into our brains. But receiving this assistance freed me up financially to try to be as well as possible, to contribute back to my community both personally and through non-profit consulting. Also, I've gratefully paid my taxes every year (yay libraries!) and I certainly spent enough years not knowing about forgiveness programs and paying through the nose to doctors and hospitals.
My baked-in, standard American financial values kept me feeling scarce, scared, and isolated. Redefining the rules through an illness that cost me HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars and decimated my ability to work took me to a place of feeling secure, relaxed, and even wealthy, despite an unimpressive income.
While I’m all about critiquing budget and wealth culture along the same lines as diet culture, I have to disagree with the overly broad brush being used for FIRE folks. Full disclosure, it informs a lot of my own financial outlook, but saying that we’re all tech bros competing for trophies is a bit much.
Theres a lot of us out here trying to build the kinds of safety nets that we wish everyone had with the few tools we have at our disposal. Women in my family have always been accumulators because we know what it means to be a backstop for those around us when nothing else is going to catch you once things start to slide. I could give a lot of examples of times when my mother, aunt, grandmas, sister, and I were able to step in and triage a crisis and keep some slack in the system so everything doesn’t break. In pretty much every case, it was because we had accumulated either enough money to address the crisis, or had the time, spare bedrooms, spare vehicle, or whatever that was needed, which all circles back to money.
Agreed. My partners and I have been doing a version of FIRE in large part so we can create an intentional community. I currently live in a co-housing situation that was only possible because my partner had saved enough money to invest in the house. I save most of my money to create a future that's more stable for me but also for others. My goal is to be like my family members (also mostly women) who use their wealth to help others.
I'm a little sleep-deprived, so maybe I'm just not as sharp as I could be, but I do not get this interview. Don't save for retirement? Huh? My mom wasn't able to save much for retirement for a variety of reasons, and now I have to make enough money to take care of her. It doesn't NOT affect my day to day quality of life that I'm financially responsible for an extra person who's in the most medically expensive years of her life. Yes, our government should be covering all of her health care needs. But.... they're not? I'm supposed to let her go into debt? What?
I'm interested in a discussion on using spare money to pay people to do things as opposed to giving that money away. If I have flexibility with $300/month, is it better to use that money to pay someone to help out with yard or house care? Or to give that money to a charity? I really like being able to pay people to do things, contributing to small local businesses in this way. I feel like it also does a lot of good, but it wasn't something I could afford earlier in life when I was making $5/month donations to charities.
I have significant money anxiety because my parents have no retirement savings outside of my dad’s pension. And that’s, for the most part, because of choices they made throughout their adult lives. When they got a windfall (and I’m talking a SUBSTANTIAL windfall), maybe they paid an extra chunk towards the mortgage, but in general, we got a pool! Or we went on a vacation! Or mom took all her employees to the spa at Christmas! And my parents were generous with us kids to the point of spoiling us, but now we’re all in our mid to late 30s, and we just really wish that we’d had slightly less elaborate birthday parties and they had put that money in retirement.
Yeah, if we’re extending the critique of generational wealth to people trying to save enough that their kids only have to support them emotionally in old age, then we’re just eating each other instead of the rich.
I’m in a similar situation with my mom (and so is my husband with his). She gets social security, but it’s not enough to live on. My mom doesn’t have a community to help her because she’s mentally ill and has isolated herself. If I didn’t pay her rent, she’d be living in her car. Not saving for retirement doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t want to financially burden another person because of my choices.
To me it kind of seems like you can budget and plan for your retirement, or you can have the government plan and budget for your retirement. I know the latter isn't happening, but that seems to be what is being suggested here? If the government gives you money when you retire, it's because they took it from you while you were working.
Another die-hard YNABer who felt personally attacked by this interview. Just kidding...
However, I think there's something to be said for those of us who did not have good financial role models and who grew up in families marked by scarcity. For me, learning to budget was about learning to understand how much money I had, how much I needed to be comfortable, and how to ensure I lived within my means. It also helps me save for the future AND helps me responsibility support causes I care about. Budgeting allows me to set up monthly recurring donations to different organizations and mutual aid funds, which allows me to be a consistent giver, rather than a knee jerk one. (Though I do have a category for knee jerk giving, too.) I guess I feel, much like eating healthy and fueling your body and exercising, you can budget without restriction and use it as a tool to live a happy and fulfilling life.
So I need to start by saying that I'm just doing my own three-year budget review to see if my assumptions are still good about how I'll afford to live until I'm 90 (as long as I live at about $40K/year, or no more than 80 percent of local individual median income). And the reason a hopeful projection is even possible is because I've closely managed financial resources for the last 25 years, AND because for 10 years I had a job that socked a LOT away in a retirement account. If it weren't for those two things, I might be a Walmart greeter right now.
I would never recommend Ramsey. At the same time, I grew up poor and worked nonprofit about half my career, so living relatively close to the bone is normal for me. I also taught Crown Financial Management for a while, after learning from a book by its founder that the reason my "down payment" savings kept disappearing is that I didn't also have a savings "bucket" for emergencies.
All that just to say: We live in a hyper individualistic culture, and we either adapt or we die like Dickens's "elderly governess-type of woman," slowly sipping the last half cup of cocoa in her unheated attic room. There have been cultural moments in the US when sharing and cooperatives have been more normative (think: the first 2 decades of the 20th century, especially how the lumber workers coop in the Pacific NW made it possible in an economic downturn for all to have enough income instead of many being laid off). BUT that's not our cultural moment. Even where people have the resources to be of real cultural influence, they imagine a more generous way of life (sorry, this is going to sound harsh) that looks a lot like the American version of cohousing, where a home costs more than median housing cost in every single community that's been developed. Folks who've grown up with financial resources seem to want a generous way of life as long as it doesn't cost them any of the amenities they've learned to expect. And then they assess that folks with less money live under the influence of "greed" because we live with the fiscal caution that our culture enforces.
It would be interesting for this analysis to be framed against the subcultures of working class, working poor, and new immigrant people in the US. I think the writer would see in that kind of daily life much more of the generous resource sharing she imagines. I think of the guy I know who owns a snowplow, so he plows his elderly neighbors' drives for free ... they "pay" him with a quart of homemade soup or a loaf of bread they baked. I think about immigrant families whose "day care" provider is an abuela (and I remember--an aside--that research shows life success is more dependent on early childhood experiences of love than on early reading or preschool instruction in Mandarin). I watch recent immigrants happily acquiesce to the idea that "to have more, you have to work more" while also sharing resources in ways we don't imagine, like crowding three generations into one apartment so they can rent for income the second apartment (of the home they bought less than a decade after arriving).
I wouldn't call it "greed" to be fiscally responsible as an individual or household when living in a hyper individual culture. I wouldn't call it "hoarding" to save what's likely to be needed for survival. And I'm grateful you're looking for ways to be generous that involve investments in people you know face to face (even while I remember the "generosity" of a family who capitalized, at more than a million dollars, a recent graduate's fashion startup because "she needs to have a job.") Just sayin' ... be sure you give yourself chances to meet people who really need your generosity.
Okay. That's enough not-very-thinly veiled social class commentary for now. Have a great day, all!
I'm trying to think about how rejecting what Miranda sees as "budget culture" is possible in the same way that we can individually work hard to opt out of diet or beauty culture. To do so as a woman, I have to be willing to accept that many others will see me as "letting myself go," irresponsible, and that it might have very real impact on how I'm perceived at work, etc. If I believe in the justice and selfcare of this model, and that I'm doing my small part to shift the culture, it may be "worth it" to me. I am thinking about how to draw effective parallels to budget culture, since her definition doesn't really sound like you're opting out of just HAVING a budget, but more like opting out of what's commonly accepted as financial responsibility. And of course you COULD do that--and similarly hope that it would be a small part of shifting our culture. But it doesn't feel like an apples to apples comparison in the practical realm. Run up debt and don't worry about paying it off...and then? Get your wages garnished? Be homeless and hope the world has changed enough that someone will take you in? The consequences feel a lot more existentially threatening.
Kerry, I absolutely see your perspective. I do think some of Miranda’s writing is a direct response to Dave Ramsey’s approach which prohibits any use of debt (good luck getting a home or car loan without a credit history). Highly recommend Amanda Montell’s SOUNDS LIKE A CULT podcast about THE CULT OF DAVE RAMSEY.
Oh. yeah. For many people, debt is not a categorical negative--student, mortgage, credit card, even. I can kind of understand that if you have a history of massive credit card debt, avoiding debt altogether might be a good plan--a little like having a history of binge drinking and not expecting you'll be able to easily shift to a half a glass of wine with dinner and stop at that.
You might purchase a membership or make a donation to aquariums doing conservation/rescue/rehab work with them. The Texas State Aquarium and the South Carolina Aquarium both do a lot of sea turtle work. People tend to think of memberships as being just for free visits, but they're a good way to help with the mission work these organizations do as well.
Woke up to 62 comments and just want to say I love how engaged and thoughtful this conversation is - particularly amongst people whose opinions differ. I’m still working out how I feel about these concepts, too; I think a lot of us are. Reading through comments like these (and figuring out how to articulate your own comment) is so useful, and I’m so grateful for this discussion!
I'd love to see a follow up interview that teases out 1) where bookkeeping and understanding your monthly cash flow ends and "budget culture" begins, and 2) what she has to say to YNAB and Ramit Sethi people (which I think is the majority of your audience) vs Dave Ramsey people. Focusing on the latter feels like a straw person argument because left-leaning upper middle class PMC types are not really on the Dave Ramsey train, but there are valuable conversations to be had in the more nuanced space.
This would be a great discussion for the podcast, please submit a question there!!! https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1x-9yH31NLM77GKHwsgKw5PHdtzZsGt9kjp3P2UuWidw/edit?usp=drive_web
I keep thinking there's some interesting crossover here with Prosperity Gospel and Kate Bowler's work--but the Dave Ramsay stuff as a secularized version of it. Good studies of Prosperity Gospel like Bowler's locate it as a specific and pernicious subculture in Christianity, though, and not a stand-in for any/all gospel messaging. I'd love to see a more nuanced version of this critique that gets more specific about the different kinds of budget/personal finance messages are out there.
Oh I really love bringing Kate Bowler's work into this. What a great insight.
Oh and going more into the non-Ramsey version of FIRE, since there are really interesting conversations to be had there.
another person I would add to the Ramit Sethi/YNAB camp is Chelsea Fagan (The Financial Diet) who also rejects the hoarding/FIRE approach to personal finance and is more focused on frugality and entrepreneurship. She is also quite conscious of the echoes between budget discussions and dieting; but doesn't come at it from a strong anticapitalist lens.
I love this space for discussion so much! One thing I would really love is a more nuanced look at FIRE folks. It’s a much broader and more interesting sub-culture than is being portrayed here, and it’s often caricatured or conflated with tech bro/Dave Ramsey nonsense, which is a bummer.
Our Big Journey or Family on YouTube is one of my favorite normal type FIRE accounts btw.
Normalize giving your friends money in times of crisis!!! Even if you have to get sneaky and take out cash and slip it in their mailbox!
The original "lenders" were just our friends and family! That still is how most loans are made, and my friends launched a startup that helps those loans support credit history: https://www.about.givingcredit.org/
Thank you for sharing this! I’m so excited this exists.
I also had a knee-jerk reaction to some of the concepts here, but I also found it to be helpful for me to frame a conversation I'm having with a friend. I recently moved in with a friend for a year (or two) while I am building a house. We've been negotiating our food budget – I love to cook, and in particular to cook for people. I buy mostly organic. Our economic situations are in different "snack brackets" as he describes it.
There's been some back and forth on our food budget. I love to cook, and have been cooking dinner us both every day. If I'm cooking for us both, do I change what I buy to fit his budget? It's not fair for me to ask him to increase his food budget to fit my tastes. We settled on him contributing a fixed amount. I don't want to change how I approach food because it's something I enjoy. It brings me peace and a creative outlet. I can afford it. Cooking for a friend every day brings me joy and fulfilment that cooking for only myself does not.
What I took away from this interview is that the budget isn't the only stakeholder in these discussions, but in a difficult conversation like this – where finances are entangled with relationship – it becomes the only variable we give weight to. In my situation, if we let strict budgeting be the only stakeholder then my conversations with myself or with other friends would be "Don't you feel taken advantage of? He's not pulling his weight! It's not fair!" and his conversations might be "You shouldn't have to pay more for groceries because he likes expensive, organic, bougie food!"
But what about our friendship, our relationship as roommates, the fulfilment I get for cooking for other people, the joy he gets from a home-cooked meal, the creativity of us exploring new recipes together, the joy and community of shared dinner? Plus he does the dishes and packs the leftovers. And we get to eat great food.
If the budget discussion won, I fear we'd be eating sad meals for one alone each day, paying for our own food, making our own meals. I'd be less creative in the kitchen cooing for one. We'd be less connected. We'd be negotiating duplicate butter in our separated fridge space.
But at the end of the day, I still have a rough budget. This is an area I can spend freely on as I have structured a larger-than-normal food budget into my life plans, and have done so far many years now.
i think this is where the comparison to diet culture isn't a bad one. You HAVE to handle and manage money, the same way that you HAVE to eat. I think the mental block I have here is to compare restrictive dieting to budgeting - to me budgeting is more akin to "goal setting". What do I want my money to do accomplish today, tomorrow, and in the future? For you food and the act of feeding the people you love is important! What better thing could you spend your money and time on?
This really makes sense to me re: we have to eat, we have to deal with money; thank you for phrasing it this way!
something related (and mildly concerning) is that most folks get their financial literacy from whatever financial culture they're interacting with. As much as I dislike the man, Dave Ramsey has at least cautioned folks away from things like overly predatory systems like payday lending or title loans. I guess the question here is - which is worse? Bad or overly stringent financial advice? or NO financial advice?
I think this explanation is helpful because in my situation that means the comparison is to someone who doesn’t have enough food. They may not be trying to diet. They may abhor it and be all for fat liberation (I am!). But they’re still living with restricted eating and the constant triggering of diet culture pressures because of that.
Similarly, a person who doesn’t have enough money for the things they need may not engage in budgeting (I don’t) but figuring out how to make $7 cover $10 worth of expenses is still going to require handling budget culture triggers constantly, especially if the main option is debt and the financial precarity continues to grow because of the disability tax.
Thank you for sharing this practical example of negotiating this situation with a friend/housemate and rethinking the various ways we can contribute to each other. I hope your solution keeps working, and adjusts as needed!
I’ve read some of Dana Miranda’s work before (though not the book), and the question I always have, which I was hoping would be addressed here but wasn’t, is how to think about retirement/growing old in this paradigm.
It’s hard because I’m 100% on board with everything being said here about how things SHOULD be, and I do try to live my life in line with those values, including giving money away directly (though it can be VERY hard to get people to accept it) (donating through GiveDirectly gets around that somewhat but obv doesn’t build community), BUT as has been covered extensively on Culture Study, most people do not have access to the kind of community and mutual aid that could make wealth accumulation unnecessary.
On the one hand, accumulating wealth so you can stop working before you die is very much not open to everyone. On the other hand… is the suggestion here that we just embrace that, throw up our hands, and accept that we’ll probably die in poverty? That sounds really aggressive I know, but I genuinely want to know what the anti-budget-culture answer to the question of growing old is, beyond “make a community that will take care of you”, which I would argue is just as out of reach to a lot of people (most people?) as wealth accumulation is. I have never seen this question addressed in these conversations and it frustrates me.
Hmm OK thinking about this more, I wonder if the distinction here is that if you are in the category of people for whom wealth accumulation is not going to be a viable strategy (based on low income and lack of generational wealth), the suggestion is that you stop punishing yourself trying to reach an impossible goal and instead turn your energy and attention towards building the kind of community that will be able to take care of you. Still think that might be an equally impossible ask, but at least it’s constructive rather than restrictive—your life NOW would be improved.
Still think addressing this question head-on would be useful.
That makes a lot of sense. I also felt that there was an implication that if we are one of the many people commenting that we can't make a community like that, we should ask ourselves what it would take to get there. For example, I have a friend who recently moved from a coastal city to a small midwestern town to live closer to her mom and sister. She gave up a more exciting lifestyle, cool restaurants and living around more people with shared values. She gained trading off childcare duties with her sister and the ability to buy a house. Now she doesn't have to live a life where she is chasing more money in order to buy a house and pay for childcare on the coast. After reading an AHP post on the importance of living near friends, there is a piece of me that wants to explore a communal retirement plan where my friends and I pool resources.
This is helpful and clarifying, and could have been articulated in the original post, thanks
My mom has both sufficient retirement funds and a local network of friends who she thought could take care of her, but I still had to drop everything and go across the country for two weeks last fall to take care of her. Social services are technically available but very bare bones and her social worker has 90 other clients. It's really up to family to take care of her needs.
The approach described in the interview seems hopelessly naive to me.
Totally!! Even if you build a really nice communal living situation for yourself in old age, medicare doesn't cover everything, and particularly if you need long-term super hands-on care, that's a lot to ask of your community.
I’m sure the book is great, but I’ll admit my kneejerk reaction to “wanting to accumulate enough wealth to be comfortable and leave something to your kids is weird, actually, and have you tried just asking for free babysitting” was “what a strange take”
I agree. Yes, I would love to live in a system with a more robust safety net AND fewer capitalistic influences always vying to help us spend our money but right now, I don’t live in that utopia and neither do my kids. I don’t have a community of people that can just give me money if I need it for our dental appointments. I don’t personally feel comfortable relying solely on free or underpaid childcare. I don’t want our lovely first grade teacher to be the only one buying tissues when they run out. If I want to pay our babysitter a living wage, pay for dental care, and buy supplies for our first grade classroom AND not go into debt for that (because I don’t- I don’t want to pay interest to banks when I can avoid it) then I may not be able to buy as many jumpsuits right now. And I’m cool with that trade off but it does mean I need to be somewhat aware of my money and spending.
Most “budgets” I’ve used are based on an awareness of how I need/hope to spend my money and less about random categories a stranger says I need to care about. I haven’t always budgeted my money (depends on the year and what’s going on for me), but when I have, it hasn’t really felt restrictive - more of a personal reminder that right now, this is my goal. Money is finite (for most of us); I don’t understand why tracking it is inherently a bad thing (which is implied here).
Also, I’ll admit that my feelings when reading this reminded me of when my experience when another popular newsletter writer (who writes mainly primarily about diet culture) wrote about budgeting as “diet culture” and then I read a NYT article about her where she inherited a lot of wealth which helped her buy her home. Maybe for some folks, where money is less finite, budgeting does feel like silly restrictions. But for me, it’s more about an awareness for how to align my financial behavior with my hopes and values. Sometimes I don’t need it to be on paper or in a spreadsheet so there’s not a “budget,” but sometimes there’s a lot going on and it’s easier for me to organize it visually.
Very much agree with you. I read a lot of the thinking in this interview as a conflict between nudging people towards the better world we want to live in and helping them be safe in the world we actually do live in. The financial system, especially in the US, is deeply predatory, especially for those in precarious circumstances. My kneejerk reaction to hearing a suggestion of "embracing products like credit cards and loans as ways to expand your resources" is that I'm being marketed to by a credit card company.
Also, I think what's doubly pernicious about debt and interest is that not only are those setups often predatory, but they result in people giving more money than necessary to those institutions and therefore empowering them to grow further and prey on more people. Debt is an entrenched part of our society and few people are ever entirely separated from it, but if I'm making a decision on taking out a payday loan to give money to a friend, then I'm going to factor the interest I'm giving to the payday lender into my decision.
I definitely had a similar kneejerk reaction to "embracing products like credit cards and loans as aways to expand your resources." I am failing to see how taking on debt constitutes "freedom" from budget culture. I would love to wave a magic wand and make a world in which everyone's needs are met without needing access to financial resources. But we don't have that wand, so advising people to lean harder into a broken system just because the system is broken is ... just not the advice I would give.
What's interesting to me is that leveraging debt is how rich people get richer.
This was also something I thought about. As Grace says below, I'd probably have to read the book to comment more thoroughly, but there is something interesting to explore our reaction to different types of people taking on debt -- ie, if it's someone with a lot of money already, it's "strategic", if it's someone living with significant precarity, it can only be a bad idea. Some of this is definitely based on realities of different interest rates for different types of debt, but in reality, someone who might not otherwise have the funds using a credit card to pay for a dental visit could absolutely be strategic, in that putting off a problem can make it more expensive. But we're not conditioned to think of it that way. Not sure if that's what the author means, but it is interesting to consider the moral value we assign to debt, based on who has it.
YES! I really wanted to scream, 'not all debt is the same'! For instance, predatory credit card debt, or after pay type institutions specifically target the 'have nots' (broad term).
However, the wealthy know to leverage debt in ways that makes them richer. Rushing to pay off your mortgage or car loan if you're lucky enough to have locked in at sub 3% is not financially wise. You're better off putting that same amount in any index fund and getting an average return of 6%. In other words, paying off your cheap debt early will in fact cost you more money.
But rich people have the money to pay back the debt. That’s their leverage. Most of us don’t have that luxury.
the difference between being "broke" and being "poor" is that the former means you're temporarily low on cash but you have resources to call on (salary, lines of credit, etc.) to fix it, whereas poor means you don't have cash AND you don't have access to those resources.
Yes of course. Rich people CAN leverage debt to increase wealth. Poor people can’t.
So telling poor people to just not worry about debt and use it to “expand their resources” seems not just clueless but actively harmful.
I was thinking about this earlier myself. Will be reading folks thoughts with interest!
i think it's very much a net worth - debt ratio for folks. When I was earning $25k a year as a grad student and needed $1k for car repairs, it was put on a credit card at 18%. Now in my forties I can borrow against accumulated assets for a fraction of that APR.
Agree completely. In our current system, it’s unethical to position debt as a resource equal to asking a neighbor to watch your kids.
I agree with you about feeling a bit icky over the suggestion of using credit cards/loans. That seems gimmicky to me. I was actually going to ask for clarification of what that really looks like in her opinion.
Bottom line, I use CC for ease but I can pay them off each month. I’ve used loans strategically—from my credit union with money from my savings as ‘collateral’. They’re tools, not products, in my opinion and as we know folks in our country are underwater with CC debt, suggesting we embrace CCs is odd: feels like we already do, no? To our detriment.
"I don’t have a community of people that can just give me money if I need it for our dental appointments."
And if you did have such a community, presumably they would have gotten the money by "hoarding", according to this theory.
I legit gasped out loud when I learned that VSS came from money.
Thank you for articulating my exact feelings as I was reading this interview!
I agree, I think I would need to read the book to engage generously with these ideas, as they're not explained in enough detail here to overcome my initial reaction about the dangers of debt, unlikeliness of more support from the government coming soon, etc.
Yeah I don’t jive with the implication here that budgeting to save for retirement while also advocating for changes to our (very slow-moving) government programs are mutually exclusive somehow? Just comes off as odd.
Yeah a lot of this feels like "have you tried just assuming that capitalism will be overthrown before you reach retirement age?" And... no I have not tried assuming that because I can look around and see what public opinion looks like.
I mean, at this point, I'll practically be jubilant if we still have an active social security system by my retirement age. The Overton window has moved that far right.
That said, I do think taking away social security is the ONLY thing that will make Americans across the political spectrum riot.
I am now retired and drawing my Social Security. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I assumed that we would resolve the financial crises created by we baby boomers all getting old at once - because we had to. Silly me.
This was definitely the part of the interview I struggled with most, too. So, so many people are in debt - and yes, there are predatory systems at play creating that reality, but without the promise of government fixes and with the very real threat of personal danger and ruin at stake, it feels like individual approaches can be some of the only real band-aids to get people to a safer place. And for better or worse, they do get you to a safer place - having a retirement account is better and safer than not having one, full stop. Having a plan to save up so your kids have access to resources (education, housing) will keep them safer than not having that. (And as a parent, there's no universe in which I am willing to forego my kids' safety...I also think you can push for systemic change while creating that safety net personally!)
And there really isn't a lot of consistent free babysitting in the world. I know who I can ask in a pinch, for example, but that doesn't solve regular needs for childcare.
Yeah, I have to admit I was very, uh, challenged by the "debt is fine actually" + "ask people for free labour" and "reconsider saving for retirement" stuff. Maybe it's more fleshed out in the book, but I wasn't convinced enough by this interview to want to bother reading it.
I get the sense that it's less about asking people to babysit for free who would otherwise expect to be paid, and more about being part of a community where your kids can go to a neighbor's house after school and play with their kids until you get off work, or where you live close to family members who would be happy to take the kids for an afternoon every week in service of their *own* relationships with your children. I definitely don't think it's realistic for these arrangements to be a substitute for childcare/babysitting 100% of the time. That speaks more to the systemic social safety net issue of not having subsidized/free childcare available to working parents the way it is in other wealthy societies.
Yeah, I know a lot of us are getting stuck on that, and it was obvious it was about "being part of a community" etc. But the reality is that not all of us are part of such a community, and building that community takes a lot of buy in from a lot of people, and we can't just unilaterally make that happen no matter how hard we try. Chiding people for paying for babysitting or other services when we don't have other options feels like just another way we're failing to be better socialists or whatever. I'd love a circular economy, a community of care and mutual aid, and all those other good things, and I simply cannot force those around me, let alone the structures that make up the city and country and world I live in, to get on my timetable.
I think you've hit on the author's point -- we cannot unilaterally make community (or other systemic changes) happen on our own. At the same time, I wonder if the idea that anything we can't achieve individually is unrealistic or shouldn't be seen as plausible is a construct of our highly individualistic capitalist culture? Maybe we're not being chided for paying babysitters so much as encouraged to think differently about what could be (while also doing what needs to be done from a practical standpoint to keep our families safe).
I also think the interview doesn't explicitly acknowledge that our financial system is deeply, messily intertwined with our politics and systems of government, which are notoriously slow-moving and, particularly at the moment, dysfunctional. I don't think it's anyone's personal responsibility to sacrifice their own wellbeing for the sake of being a "better socialist." I think it's more about looking at what small things we can do differently to move in a direction that better serves us all.
I don't disagree, I guess I'm just left feeling like I don't have practical options presented to me from the author in terms of what to do - beyond the personal financial decisions I do or don't make. I would hope it's obvious I'm not suggesting that anything we can't achieve individually is unrealistic. What I'm saying is - then what? What *should* I do? "Build a community" or "create a system" is not actionable advice.
This is a good read/point. I'm probably stuck on it to it because of my own personal context; in most ways I *do* have the kind of community that does this, and it still strikes me as a little off base to put this into the conversation in the way it is included above. I love living in my community and there are material ways that it has made parenting less financially stressful (the number of hand me downs alone!). People meal train at the drop of a hat and show up for each other and yes, babysit each others' kids. But...I don't know. Something about wrapping that into a conversation about easing monetary stress didn't work for me. You can have all those things and also still need to pay for childcare, healthcare, all the other things.
Totally! I definitely identify as a socialist and will always vote to raise taxes, etc. etc., and do try to focus on building a community of support/ mutual aid, but I live alone in a high-cost-of-living city, and my parents do not have retirement savings, so it's like... I actually do need a budget (yes, I have looked into government aid programs for my parents... it's incredibly bleak and basically a full-time job to manage them).
We're in a similar situation - we relocated my in-laws to live nearby and partially subsidize their retirement. They were totally from the "community" mindset that would be lauded by the author, they were part of the Back-to-Land Movement in the 70s. Think big spirit of community sharing, etc.....which meant they didn't have a lot in the way of savings, house value or Social Security earnings NOW. Ironically I now enjoy the "free babysitting" (and I love it) ....but it's a heck a lot more expensive than hiring a babysitter!
Raise taxes: but only if said raised taxes are being used for the common good. As they should be.
I don’t want my taxes raised so billionaires can have these lowered even more.
Thanks for this interview.
I think there's an important distinction between a) following a budget with preset limits and rules and b) keeping an accurate account of money going in and out.
The latter approach gives you knowledge and leaves you in control. The knowledge might lead you to make certain changes but that's up to you not to artificial rules that you've yoked yourself to.
Yes to this. If "budget culture" = you are responsible for any failure to be rich, then yeah, that's BS and the system is more responsible for it than your latte and avocado toast (HT to 2016!). But at least for me, I didn't like the feeling over overdrawing my checking account and feeling like I was always short at the end of the month. Budget software helped me stop that pattern--it didn't somehow turn me into a greed monster obsessed with hoarding money to bequeath to future generations.
I agree. The day I realized it was my budget and I could decide how to allocate the money based on what was important to me AND I could change my mind about what I wanted to use my money for was the day I could finally follow a budget. For me it’s about knowing where my money is coming from and going and making sure I like where it’s going (if I don’t, what can I do about that).
To me, the budget IS the freedom. I decide what I want, and then look at the numbers to see what it will take to get there, all while feeling comfortable knowing I have enough allocations for rent, utilities, etc
To Dana Miranda's point about investing in communities, directly giving to people: I can only do that because I have a budget! The budget is where I transform aspirations (have monthly allocation for mutual aid, saving to go on a trip, etc.) into real-life progress.
Yeah, I totally agree with this. I allocate money to give away, and more money specifically to give away during the holidays. I feel like it allows me to be more generous because I know the money is there and I dont have to wonder if I'm shorting myself on rent.
Still trying to process and then be able to articulate my thoughts on all of this, but you're definitely speaking my mind here.
I budget in a way that has "limits" (the free version of the Good Budget app), but frequently exceed those and just ignore the little sad red envelopes :D (which, ok, yes, reading this I can see are a great representation of the moralizing in budget culture). But what I really value is the ability to comprehensively look at where the imperfect resource that is money is coming from and going to in my life. Maybe this is just me valuing a sense of control like Dana Miranda said, but it feels more textured and nuances than that. Making decisions without that information would feel like...wow, it's hard to wrap my head around that because I have been budgeting my whole adult life...would feel like making them with one less physical sense available to me, I guess. Like eating food I couldn't smell.
I am about to step into living a choice to work less, to earn less money, with the hope that it's going to allow me to be a resource for others in deeper ways, and also have more energy to building up non monetary resources in my own life. and also spend more time in my home and with my family. it's really terrifying because from a wealth accumulation standpoint it's definitely the "wrong" decision. But I feel like having budget let me make a more informed decision about the trade-offs of each choice.
Maybe there's more nuance in Dana Miranda's perspective that I could clean from the book - I have read some of her work elsewhere and it's definitely challenging in a way that feels healthy! But I definitely wanted to highñight the distinction you made here.
Moralizing those red envelopes is teleology run amok. This is like moralizing the needle moving towards "E" in your car. Choosing to refuel before getting stuck somewhere is a practical choice, not a moral choice. The fact that many people might consider those red envelopes a moral issue explains why so many people can't resist social media or being online 24/7. It's hard to ignore notification indicators if they are about one's immortal soul rather than just offerings of potential interaction.
Yes to practical vs moral!
Thank you!! I felt like I was taking crazy pills going through this comments section. It really seems like a lot of these folks are too busy building up and justifying their own self-imposed anxieties to take any practical steps that would actually make their lives better.
Agree! There is also a distinction between a) following someone else's suggestions for how you "should" spend your money, and b) intentionally making a plan for your own spending. A budget is a plan for your money. Having a plan doesn't make you morally superior but it might help you do more things you value (work less, give more generously, cultivate hobbies that require materials, etc)
This is a great distinction
If I may, a gentle observation from reading the comments here: I don't think Dana Miranda or her book intends to discourage people from using a budget as a neutral administrative tool for keeping track of how we spend money. Rather, I think she is encouraging folks to interrogate what mainstream personal finance discourse in our capitalist society tells us is the "right" way to budget our money (which is unilaterally focused on maximizing long-term wealth accumulation at the expense of all other priorities).
(I also think maybe the title of the book is ill-considered, but knowing what I know about publishing, that might not have been Miranda's choice.)
This is such a fascinating, emotionally charged and critically important topic. Grateful for the opportunity to discuss it in this special community of thoughtful, respectful internet denizens!
I would argue that our society is far from unilaterally focused on wealth accumulation. It’s focused on maximizing consumption and the ability to consume.
I think that’s where I struggle with this interview, because in my own life, the concepts of living far below my means, thinking deeply about why I spend money where I do, and aggressively saving money as a means of filling gaps in the non-existent safety has meant trying to act in opposition to the “consume at all costs” current in our culture. (It’s also informed by some very traumatic experiences with our elder care and healthcare system in the US). It’s challenging to read that portrayed as greed.
I don't know - so much of what has created wealth inequality in our country is generational wealth, and that is the direct result of wealth accumulation. And I do think that the overall message is that each person has to accumulate as much as possible for *their* family. As you note, there's good reasons for that, because individual saving needs to account for a lack of a safety net - but for those of us who have enough, it's worth thinking about how we can share resources outside of our family units. (And I am including myself in that "we," not necessarily you!)
I do 100% agree with that. To me it’s a “secure your mask first” kind of deal. But you have to actually help others once you can breathe.
I would also add that the FIRE community is not about endless wealth accumulation. The concept of “enough” is a big part of that philosophy.
That's fair. Maybe this sounds nitpicky, but I'd characterize the pressure to maximize consumption as a pillar of capitalism writ large, and the pressure to maximize wealth as a component of budget culture. I also think that the meaning of "maximizing wealth" changes as the scale of that wealth increases. I don't think anyone would fault you for saving money to fund your own needs. But if you already had multiple vacation homes, and millions in the bank, and you were still tipping less than 20% in restaurants and/or paying an accountant to minimize your tax expenses? I would call that greed.
It sounds like a big existential question and it's not one I can answer, but when does one have "enough" that they can stop prioritizing accumulation above all else? From what I understand, that's not a concept that budgeting culture encourages people to engage with -- perhaps because to your point, in service of consumption and capitalism, we should never have enough, because we should always want to consume more.
Yeah, I would agree with that. It’s another reason I feel like it’s very weird that she goes after FIRE people and conflates them with that definition of budget culture. FIRE forums are just about the only financial community I’ve found that really grapples with the concept of “enough” in a concrete and non-multi-millionaire kind of way.
I mean, I can't speak for the author, but my personal perception of FIRE is that you save SUPER aggressively so that you can retire from working for pay as early as humanly possible. And again, speaking for me personally, the idea of forgoing any expense that isn't absolutely essential for survival in order to maximize one's "freedom"/exempt one from the need to work is a bit greedy -- or at least, a little antisocial in that you're declining to spend any of your money in the short term on things like supporting local businesses, or contributing to your community financially in other ways. But I am admittedly not a member of the FIRE community/movement, so if I'm misinformed, I am happy to be corrected!
There are folks that take it to the extreme like that, but I would argue that’s a caricature. FIRE is a broad group, and not all of us are fully on the “retire early” bandwagon. A lot of us want to get to a place where our whole universe isn’t tied to the almighty Job.
A lot of us are naturally frugal types. There’s a big anti-consumerism streak in those circles. The overall gist is just living below your means and not spending money where it doesn’t matter, and investing the difference. There’s a lot that can be said about investing feeding a shitty system, but it’s the toolset we have. It’s a much more philosophical community than you’d assume. We talk a lot about death and the meaning of the time we trade for money, and about what “enough” means. The idea of guilting people for not spending enough money doesn’t sit right with me personally, and conflating anti-consumerism or frugality with being antisocial feels…weird?
I’m very much a FIRE person. I’m a woman with an art degree that works in a tech adjacent job. We maintain a low-cost lifestyle because it means my husband gets to be a stay at home dad. That’s a “freedom from work” that is deeply meaningful to us. I save pretty aggressively (40-50% of my income) because my income is all there is. If I get laid off or put out of work, that’s it, money faucet is turned off for my family, so having a bigger cushion means less fear. I don’t feel deprived. Our hobbies just happen to be cheap.
I’m probably in the category of “money hoarder”, but to me it has meant being able to house and care for an aging parent without a second thought and being able to properly support and value the care work that my husband does. I also come from a long line of women who had to be the safety net when things went sideways, so at least in my case, I’ve never really thought of it in terms of pure individualism.
Thank you for your thoughtful response -- I appreciate the context, as well as your willingness to share your personal perspective one the FIRE community. To be clear, I do not begrudge anyone the desire to care for their family or establish a financial safety net.
I think where the concept of FIRE chafes for me is what you characterized as the "extreme" version of it, so I'm glad to hear that's not how most of the community applies its principles! My gripe is with people who work super high-paying jobs in fields like tech or big law or finance for a relatively short period of time, while also reducing their expenses by any means possible (for example, buying cheap stuff on Amazon instead of from local businesses where it costs more) so they can quit those jobs in their 40s or 50s, and divest both financially and civically from their communities by way of their wealth.
I find it especially aggravating when people with that mindset complain when their neighborhood gets overrun with corporate chains because local businesses can't survive. Or they gripe about the quality of public services, while jumping through hoops to avoid paying taxes.
I understand the value of being frugal, and at the same time, try to spend money in accordance with my other values, even if that means I'm paying more for some things than I could be (which directly conflicts with frugality!). I very much appreciate the space that is our local independent bookstore, and so I buy books there even though they sometimes cost twice as much as they would on Amazon. I donate money to a local independent cat rescue every month because I believe they are doing important work in our community and want them to continue, even though if I added up the amount I donate in a year and projected how much it could be earning in a mutual fund over the next 10 years, I would grow my own wealth faster by keeping that money for myself.
At the end of the day, I respect the need to make financial decisions according to values, and I think conversations that encourage us to think more deeply about how that looks for each of us (and understand different perspectives) are important and worthwhile -- thanks for having this one with me.
I would love for you to expand on the idea that saving money is "greedy" and "antisocial," because that is one hell of a take.
Respectfully, that's an oversimplification and bad-faith reading of my comment.
I read a study a few years back that the emotional sense of financial security, aka "enough", tends to plateau around $80k annual income. In trying to find that study, I found this 2024 survey indicating $186K/year as the security threshold. I haven't read it in full, so I wonder if that defines security as "enough", in the minimal sense, or if security includes a degree of assumed overconsumption. There's all sorts of ways you could compare this perception to people's actual incomes, but I find these figures curious in that they indicate there is, in theory, an upper threshold. In the $80k study, I remember reading participants who made more than that didn't have significantly greater happiness or life comfort than those right around $80k. I want to hear Dana Miranda and others explore this more - how do we figure out what is "enough" for us (factoring in variables like your region's cost of living, the predictable costs of known health conditions, and other things that are largely out of your control)? And then, based on if we're at or below that "enough" estimate, can that information help us make decisions where we both care for ourselves and care for our communities?
Interesting! That reminds me of a study I remember coming across several years ago, which suggested that above about $75K/year, people with higher incomes aren't significantly happier.
That's not the same thing as feeling financially secure, though. I honestly think financial security past a certain point is a myth. I think it's wise to have 3-6 months' worth of living expenses in liquid savings to cover emergencies or float you if you get laid off (I don't, but I think it's smart, and I understand why people do it). I also think that if you plan to live for years after you stop working, you need to save money to pay your expenses (I have some of that, but not as much as I'm "supposed to" for sure).
But there's a lot of bad stuff that could happen to any one of us long before we're too old to work for pay, that no matter how big a pile of money we have, it wouldn't protect us from suffering. And that's where I think the idea of accumulating wealth for the sake of personal financial security becomes kind of a...self-fulfilling prophecy, in a way? Because if you need to self-insure for the absolute worst-case scenario (or if you think the more wealth you accumulate, the more secure you and your family will be), then it becomes really hard to justify using your money for anything else. And I wonder how much that perpetuates the individualistic, scarcity-driven thinking that hinders people from imagining and advocating for a better social safety net, and just a more equitable financial system in general.
I think you’ll find that a lot of folks in the FIRE community end up defining their “enough” a hell of a lot lower than you’d think. $40k - 60k a year is pretty common, maybe a bit higher if you have a family/elders to account for.
Thank you! My wife didn't start saving until she was 37 because her first husband just spent or drank everything they had. By the time I married her she had a mortgage on a townhouse and put 2 kids through college, basically living on stone soup. What I marvel about now — as we spend down our savings so she can have the care she deserves — is how she made living frugally (below our means) seem normal and creative and even fun.
Yes!! THIS!!
I definitely think this interview would have benefited from a question at the start asking her to define "budget" or "budget culture."
I do think I should’ve copied more direct text from the original budget culture piece Dana wrote for Culture Study, which she links to and summarizes in the first response: https://open.substack.com/pub/annehelen/p/budget-culture-and-the-dave-ramseyfication
Thanks for linking again. I think this paragraph outlining the type of budgeting she's railing against is super helpful to contextualize today's interview:
"This promise appealed directly to the work ethic of middle America: You can get rich with steady work and self control. The marriage of personal finance and self improvement — the Rich Dad Poor Dad, Millionaire Next Door, Finish Rich ethos — set a tone for our current dominant paradigm, which I’ve come to call budget culture.
Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success."
At the same time, I take major issue with this being characterized as the "dominant paradigm." I have 2-3 friends out of my entire social network who base their budgets around these sort of "get rich at all costs" schemes. They are annoying to be around but they are in the minority in my experience. I think using such a broad reaching term as "budget" for such a niche version of individualism/greed is doing a disservice to those she may be trying to help.
Hm, but what if you replace budget culture with diet culture in this comment? Only a small portion of people I know are basing how they eat and move around the most toxic aspects and goals regarding bodies and beauty. That doesn't mean that the cultural conditions that create them aren't influencing how I and others who don't do that think about bodies and beauty, even if I actively work against them, or that there aren't societal norms about how I should be eating (or making amends for eating "badly") or moving that can have social consequences if broken. This also applies to the breadth of the term - "diet" refers to essentially any way in which a person can eat for whatever reason, and only in some aspects does this apply to "diet culture."
I actually have been pondering this exact question for the past couple hours since commenting! I do think it's a fascinating comparison and really enjoyed reading some of the comments grappling with the two in this thread!
I remember reading "The Fuck It Diet" and having my entire world blown open by the idea that even tiny diet style adjustments to eating can harmful. It helped me understand why I, a person with no history of an ED, was still triggered by a friend going on Whole30 or whatever.
I think a key difference is that fighting diet culture happens within the context of people who generally have enough to eat. The alternative to diets is not starvation, it is plenty, it is trust. The current context for fighting "budget culture" is an America with no social safety net, untenable healthcare and housing costs, a minimum wage that has not been raised in decades, splintering social networks and deeply economically segregated communities. If your diet "fails", you gain some weight. If your budget fails, you are more likely to thrust your family into generational poverty. The stakes aren't really the same.
If fighting "budget culture" is only happening among those who are already quite wealthy, that's fine. But there are other ways to say "don't be a greedy asshole" that don't somehow implicate all forms of financial literacy and making ends meet.
But again, I really do appreciate the ways the comparison can be illuminating! Body size is not the result of a simple equation you should just better manage. The size of your bank account, similarly, in not the simple result of budget finagling.
But are you talking candidly about money with your 'entire social network '? I think even people who don't talk about it are influenced by it, and I do not think Americans in particular are very honest or forthcoming about our finances with each other; most people don't even know their coworkers salaries within the same office! And if we are talking about articles and books and schools of thought focused on how we spend money as individuals I do think that this is the context you see most abundantly.
I agree. Above someone made the distinction between "budget" and "budget culture" and I think that is key.
I am also reminded of the reactions folks have to early alerts and awareness about diet culture, which tend to fall into two buckets:
1) "This critique feels like a personal attack" / "not MY diet"
2) "If you divest from diet culture it must mean that you eat bonbons all day and don't care about nutrition" / "but NUTRITION!!!!"
I can see a lot of that here and appreciate you voicing where the nuanced reality likely lies.
It's also interesting that the word "diet" is just what you eat, at least as a noun. It's actually fairly neutral as a word, but as a culture we've turned into into something synonymous with restriction and unrealistic goals.
It looks like the exact same thing is happening with the word "budget".
Yes! I'm reading these comments and replacing 'budget' in my head with 'diet' and getting the same impression. A budget is a pre-conceved plan or approach to spending money, but in common use it means the strategy to maximize wealth or purchase power. Lots to think about.
This right here. "My diet 'works for me'"
Appreciate this perspective! The title question is an interesting one. If it doesn't reflect the content of the book well, that is very unfortunate. I think there are a few turns of phrase here that threaten to flatten the discussion a bit, and perhaps the title is one of them.
I've been thinking about this interview all day and trying to figure out why certain parts of it bothered some of us. I think part of where I was stumbling was that I *do* think a good chunk of mainstream discourse around this has already evolved in this direction - what she's talking about is pretty aligned with Ramit Sethi and to some extent with methodologies like YNAB (when not taken to an extreme, which is a whole other conversation). There is already a lot of critique of Ramsey et al. out there -- honestly for the newer generation of personal finance influencers, it feels much more like not wanting to come from a place of guilt or restriction has become a definitional throughline -- so I think I've been having trouble figuring out exactly where/how to locate this angle of this critique. Because ultimately I conceptually agree with most of this.
But I really agree with you that understanding this more as a critique than a methodology is critical to engaging with it.
This is a really great distinction. I think this hits the nail on the head as to why I, as someone who budgets, feels so fired up by the interview!
I have so many thoughts on this (#neoliberalism). My main "aha" moment came about a decade ago. My husband and I fought about money constantly. I was always spending too much. We have 3 children. I worked at a nonprofit and we owned a small newspaper. There was never enough to make ends meet and we both always blamed me. Finally one day I got it through my thick skull. It wasn't because I wasn't sticking to the budget. It was because we weren't making enough money. It turns out $10/day just isn't enough to feed 5 people. I know it sounds obvious but that was such a turning point. It wasn't me. It wasn't the budget. There just wasn't enough money. It was a really freeing thought and I started feeling a lot better about myself.
This is such an interesting conversation, thank you! The title of the book itself seems like a play on "You Need A Budget"/YNAB, which honestly was the budgeting solution that finally worked for me *because* it didn't come from a place of restriction, but about purpose - I don't subscribe whole cloth to every part of the philosophy, but the mindset of "you've got some amount of money to work with, what's its purpose/job?" was helpful in generating a less stressful and more sustainable approach for me. Later, I also gravitated toward folks like Ramit Sethi and Katie Gatti Tassin in the personal finance space, because they were/are so open about the problems of living under both capitalism and patriarchy (this is something that genuinely impresses me about Ramit - his willingness to go all in on discussing the gender dynamics of couples handling money; Katie Gatti Tassin also talks about gender very explicitly). Both also talk about the importance of structural solutions, etc. - e.g. Ramit does emphasize the importance of actually paying taxes (to the point above!), Katie talks about the many issues with the American health insurance system and will cover things like how to find climate-friendly or weapons-free funds...
The latter part feels like the biggest unopened Pandora's box in the entire personal finance conversation re: wealth creation. It's easy enough to say - this is simple, invest in index funds as early as possible, and be patient. Certainly it's the most "personally responsible" wealth creation advice. But how do we grapple with the role of markets that value harm-producing industries? How do we think about the fact that if you just stick money in an index fund, part of what is creating value for your retirement is companies that are making weapons used in Gaza? The ESG conversation/trend feels like it is happening at the very broad level - which is good! - but would love more dialogue about how to think about these questions at the individual level.
Edit: I also ultimately believe that it's possible to find money systems that give you knowledge over your funds and reduce stress while also giving you space to advocate for better systemic resources and change. I think that is what the author is advocating - but I also think there are ways of "budgeting" that are not about restriction that can help you do that and find that safety and - ideally - abundance and joy.
Was talking to someone who’s used YNAB for a long time and she voiced what I thought was a super interesting distinction: she loves the tools of YNAB (I’m thinking here of the idea of money having jobs, too) but cannot read ANY of their copy, messaging, emails, etc. That strikes me as the difference between “budget” (knowing where your money is) and “budget culture”
Oh "budget" vs "budget culture" really nails the crux of this conversation, which has had me stewing and churning.
Yes, this distinction is huge!!
100% agree with this. The copy/tone/conversations around it is very optimization-focused, which is a tendency I had to dial back for myself a lot.
I've been using YNAB for almost fifteen years now (!!) and never want to live without it. I actually think their approach is anti-budget (or used to be, anyway), in that it doesn't really push restriction but just asks you to be honest and realistic.
I get the dangers of restriction, but pre-YNAB my financial life was precarious, chaotic, and full of panic. Post-YNAB my finances feel abundant, manageable, and aligned with my values.
I have also been a YNAB user since 2018 and I cannot emphasize how much it has changed how I think about money. I feel like the philosophy is much more about values-based spending and has really helped me examine "needs" from an anti-capitalism standpoint. It's strange that she seems to target that app so specifically (I haven't read the book, but I did read on reddit she calls out the company founder by name), because they are much more focused on using your money in whatever way works best for you and one of the only personal finance "methodologies" that doesn't demonize debt. They actually have been doing a slow rebrand to stop using the word budget entirely. Honestly there is a whole YNAB subculture that could be its own Culture Study podcast. Also, from what I know they treat their employees really well which is basically the opposite of Dave Ramsey Inc.
This was my thought, as well; as soon as I saw the YNAB-targeted title, I was like, "Huh?" There are very fair critiques to be made of David Ramsey, to be sure, but her comment about "offloading your financial decision-making to a budget and a set of economic goals you didn’t choose" doesn't apply to a system like YNAB where you are absolutely choosing your own goals. Like, that's the whole point of YNAB.
She goes on to say budgeting "undercuts your ability to intuitively decide how to work and use money to live the life you want." I'm sorry, what? Sure, there are times for relying on intuition to make decisions, but spending money is most certainly not one of them. It's pretty wild to critique the "moralizing" around budgeting and debt while, in the same breath, applying a moral bent to spending money based on...just vibes, I guess?
Her critiques of the systems enabled by American individualism are valid, but her proposal that we should therefore approach spending as if we don't live in those systems is not. (The comment about getting neighbors to babysit for free is very "maybe grandma and grandpa want to help out a little bit more" a la JD Vance, which is ironic considering the discussion around Trump at the end.)
"It's pretty wild to critique the 'moralizing' around budgeting and debt, while in the same breath, applying a moral bent to money spending based on.. just vibes" --> Very well said. This articulates what doesn't sit very well with me in reading this interview.
Yeah, I have used YNAB since 2012 and I can't imagine my life without it. I doesn't feel like a scam to me, or some sort of cult-like brainwashing. I get X amount of dollars each month, and I get to decide how to use them. It helps me prioritize what I want (a new sweater, a new book, a trip somewhere) while making sure I pay my bills (electricity, mortgage).
There have been times where I've stopped myself from buying something because YNAB reminds me I'm saving for something else, and that to me is powerful.
I have a family member that works at YNAB and they are, by several miles, the BEST employer I’ve ever seen.
I did follow the link in the article to her critique of FIRE and it started with someone talking about following Dave Ramsey and I had to pause. I don’t think she’s actually spent much time in FIRE circles, because Dave Ramsey is generally reviled in the spaces I’m in.
Yeah, I think the overall FIRE movement is more closely aligned with things like "Your Money or Your Life" or FrugalWoods-type stuff, which are pretty anti-capitalist. I do think a lot of the discourse is frustratingly apolitical, though (at least on Reddit).
I've budgeted all my adult life because I had to - for many many years just to make ends meet, not to build wealth, so I'm not about to stop or tell anyone else to. But what I am taking from this interview is the idea of consciously moving money out of the center of our wellness/security plan (not throw out! But de-center)? What if instead of researching how to improve my credit score, mortgage rates, index funds, blah blah - what if I centered... people? Relationships? I lived for a short time in a country very different from my own, where the mindset was if ONE person in the village came into money/wealth/success, then EVERYONE did. Because money was just another communal asset, another tool. It broke my brain a bit, but I so appreciate now that I saw that way of living in action. Of course they still needed money, they had to be strategic about its use - but they were more attuned to interpersonal connections and they prioritized that, and it worked . Obvs we can't go from A straight to Z but we do need to start somewhere...
100% this. I used to just panic when the credit card bill was due because I *should have* had enough but somehow didn't. That doesn't happen anymore and I prefer it. Is that fetishizing restraint? Meh.
I’m not a loyal YNAB user, but it was a key tool in bringing me out of a Ramsey view of finances. In particular, the “roll with the punches” part of YNAB’s philosophy felt so freeing. I also can’t reconcile how anyone pays bills without some kind of budget. And I think there are all kinds of budgets, some more formal like YNAB and some more casual like a simple list of typical bills and income amounts.
A friend recently introduced me to Ramit’s work and I’m a huge fan. Look forward to learning more about Katie Gatti Tassin’s work too. While some of the following words may be triggering, I do recommend the Frugal Friends podcast who recently published BUY WHAT YOU LOVE WITHOUT GOING BROKE. The idea of conscious spending has been revolutionary to me. Like anything, it’s a process, but one worth exploring.
I love Katie Gatti Tassin! For me she strikes a really great balance between "we are living in a capitalist hellscape but also here is how a ROTH IRA works." Also she has new book coming out! https://moneywithkatie.com/rich-girl-nation?utm_campaign=mwk&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_source=morning_brew
Katie Gatti Tassin would be an incredible newsletter guest interview because she also has CS crossover appeal as a former Bama rush girl!! It’s been a lot of fun to see her podcast fully radicalize over the last year, to the point where she’s now interviewing folks like labor journalist Hamilton Nolan. You truly love to see it.
I just looked up Katie because she is new to me and see that she recently had Dana Miranda as a podcast guest! How interesting! Will check it out.
Yes this is such a good suggestion! I very much enjoy Katie’s weekly newsletter and a CS crossover would be so thought-provoking I think!
I also like Bad with Money with Gabe Dunn. Similar trajectory -- they were a creative who didn't know what an IRA even was and then just got radicalized over the course of their research.
I didn't know her so I looked her up. Her trajectory is interesting because it looks like she has no formal financial training and has only been writing about finance for a couple of years (unless there was something she did on the side). Not sure what to make of that.
I read her emails on and off, but when she first came on the scene I also looked up her background and was surprised to find there wasn’t much of it.
YNAB is also the only budgeting that works for me, and it DOESN’T always work for me, but I have less anxiety when it does. I am an unconscious spender. I need it to yank me into consciousness.
I've used ynab for more than 10 years now and EVERY YEAR without fail I find some random price hike, double charge, or unauthorized charge (including a $7000 crate and barrel couch) that makes the service worth it for me.
I really like Ramit Sethi! When I heard him say “you can afford anything, just not everything” it really clicked. The idea of values-based spending was also pretty great. I’m still working on impulse spending (#ADHD) and have too much debt, but those concepts have helped me feel better about spending money on some “luxury” items while digging myself out.
YNAB is a wonderful tool and has definitely changed my finances for the better, but I’m so irritated that the price keeps going up every year when the software more or less stays the same. Must I be price-gouged on even my budgeting software?? Ugh.
Disabling chronic illness pushed me into a whole new money paradigm.
When you're sick:
1. *Costs no longer make sense.* And therefore, neither does budgeting. I can pick up a $3,600 bottle of rifaximin...that insurance makes $10 because my doctor used the "right code" (not for my condition, but for the approval.) I can have a four-figure hospital bill evaporate with a credit-preserving forgiveness application (that no one tells you about—guys, NEVER pay a hospital bill without questioning it first.)
There's a strange freedom in this funhouse financing. Feeling like it's all Monopoly money changed my relationship for how I price products in my business. Questioning what things should cost allows me a beautiful downtown apartment at half-price rent.
2. *Community is wealth.* Most of us do not start out feeling like we have the kind of community that would pay for our dentist appointments. Most of us do, though, so much more than we realize. The same community that I thought didn't understand my illness became the community that paid for me to go to off-insurance doctors, bought me a mobility trike, put a little cash in my account at the second-hand store, randomly sent me gift cards for groceries, and covered my laundry service.
What changed was me, and how I interacted with my existing community.
3. *Use the tools in a novel way.* I don't have debt (but I'm not opposed to taking it on). My credit score is 800+. But I leverage credit cards HARD. First: I use different cards for different spending categories (medical, groceries, etc.) so I can quickly scan my spending. I pay these every WEEK. Second: I reap beaucoup rewards off those cards. NEVER spend a dollar where you aren't getting something back. Third: put that good credit score to work. I've begun opening the occasional new account with $200-300 bonuses.
4. *Take what is meant for you.* The concept of Welfare Queens is absurd. In my time spent both in poverty and in working with non-profits with disadvantaged constituents, one thing is glaringly obvious: people are EXTREMELY reluctant to accept assistance of any kind, far beyond the point they need it. Montana STRUGGLED to spend the federal dollars granted to them via the CARES act because most eligible people refused to apply for things like housing assistance.
As a sweet lady in the hospital financial office said to me, "honey, the point isn't to go bankrupt and grovel. These programs exist because we don't WANT people hitting rock bottom." I promise you, you have already paid into the institutions that will later provide you assistance with your tax dollars, with dollars built into their pricing structure...and it doesn't NEED to be an exact transaction, anyway.
I qualified for and accepted *complete rent coverage* for a year and a half, reduced internet for over a year, complete hospital forgiveness for two years, and a grant for trying novel medical treatments. Applying was hard, mentally. The individualism is pounded into our brains. But receiving this assistance freed me up financially to try to be as well as possible, to contribute back to my community both personally and through non-profit consulting. Also, I've gratefully paid my taxes every year (yay libraries!) and I certainly spent enough years not knowing about forgiveness programs and paying through the nose to doctors and hospitals.
My baked-in, standard American financial values kept me feeling scarce, scared, and isolated. Redefining the rules through an illness that cost me HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of dollars and decimated my ability to work took me to a place of feeling secure, relaxed, and even wealthy, despite an unimpressive income.
While I’m all about critiquing budget and wealth culture along the same lines as diet culture, I have to disagree with the overly broad brush being used for FIRE folks. Full disclosure, it informs a lot of my own financial outlook, but saying that we’re all tech bros competing for trophies is a bit much.
Theres a lot of us out here trying to build the kinds of safety nets that we wish everyone had with the few tools we have at our disposal. Women in my family have always been accumulators because we know what it means to be a backstop for those around us when nothing else is going to catch you once things start to slide. I could give a lot of examples of times when my mother, aunt, grandmas, sister, and I were able to step in and triage a crisis and keep some slack in the system so everything doesn’t break. In pretty much every case, it was because we had accumulated either enough money to address the crisis, or had the time, spare bedrooms, spare vehicle, or whatever that was needed, which all circles back to money.
Agreed. My partners and I have been doing a version of FIRE in large part so we can create an intentional community. I currently live in a co-housing situation that was only possible because my partner had saved enough money to invest in the house. I save most of my money to create a future that's more stable for me but also for others. My goal is to be like my family members (also mostly women) who use their wealth to help others.
I'm a little sleep-deprived, so maybe I'm just not as sharp as I could be, but I do not get this interview. Don't save for retirement? Huh? My mom wasn't able to save much for retirement for a variety of reasons, and now I have to make enough money to take care of her. It doesn't NOT affect my day to day quality of life that I'm financially responsible for an extra person who's in the most medically expensive years of her life. Yes, our government should be covering all of her health care needs. But.... they're not? I'm supposed to let her go into debt? What?
I'm interested in a discussion on using spare money to pay people to do things as opposed to giving that money away. If I have flexibility with $300/month, is it better to use that money to pay someone to help out with yard or house care? Or to give that money to a charity? I really like being able to pay people to do things, contributing to small local businesses in this way. I feel like it also does a lot of good, but it wasn't something I could afford earlier in life when I was making $5/month donations to charities.
I have significant money anxiety because my parents have no retirement savings outside of my dad’s pension. And that’s, for the most part, because of choices they made throughout their adult lives. When they got a windfall (and I’m talking a SUBSTANTIAL windfall), maybe they paid an extra chunk towards the mortgage, but in general, we got a pool! Or we went on a vacation! Or mom took all her employees to the spa at Christmas! And my parents were generous with us kids to the point of spoiling us, but now we’re all in our mid to late 30s, and we just really wish that we’d had slightly less elaborate birthday parties and they had put that money in retirement.
Yeah, if we’re extending the critique of generational wealth to people trying to save enough that their kids only have to support them emotionally in old age, then we’re just eating each other instead of the rich.
I’m in a similar situation with my mom (and so is my husband with his). She gets social security, but it’s not enough to live on. My mom doesn’t have a community to help her because she’s mentally ill and has isolated herself. If I didn’t pay her rent, she’d be living in her car. Not saving for retirement doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t want to financially burden another person because of my choices.
To me it kind of seems like you can budget and plan for your retirement, or you can have the government plan and budget for your retirement. I know the latter isn't happening, but that seems to be what is being suggested here? If the government gives you money when you retire, it's because they took it from you while you were working.
Another die-hard YNABer who felt personally attacked by this interview. Just kidding...
However, I think there's something to be said for those of us who did not have good financial role models and who grew up in families marked by scarcity. For me, learning to budget was about learning to understand how much money I had, how much I needed to be comfortable, and how to ensure I lived within my means. It also helps me save for the future AND helps me responsibility support causes I care about. Budgeting allows me to set up monthly recurring donations to different organizations and mutual aid funds, which allows me to be a consistent giver, rather than a knee jerk one. (Though I do have a category for knee jerk giving, too.) I guess I feel, much like eating healthy and fueling your body and exercising, you can budget without restriction and use it as a tool to live a happy and fulfilling life.
So I need to start by saying that I'm just doing my own three-year budget review to see if my assumptions are still good about how I'll afford to live until I'm 90 (as long as I live at about $40K/year, or no more than 80 percent of local individual median income). And the reason a hopeful projection is even possible is because I've closely managed financial resources for the last 25 years, AND because for 10 years I had a job that socked a LOT away in a retirement account. If it weren't for those two things, I might be a Walmart greeter right now.
I would never recommend Ramsey. At the same time, I grew up poor and worked nonprofit about half my career, so living relatively close to the bone is normal for me. I also taught Crown Financial Management for a while, after learning from a book by its founder that the reason my "down payment" savings kept disappearing is that I didn't also have a savings "bucket" for emergencies.
All that just to say: We live in a hyper individualistic culture, and we either adapt or we die like Dickens's "elderly governess-type of woman," slowly sipping the last half cup of cocoa in her unheated attic room. There have been cultural moments in the US when sharing and cooperatives have been more normative (think: the first 2 decades of the 20th century, especially how the lumber workers coop in the Pacific NW made it possible in an economic downturn for all to have enough income instead of many being laid off). BUT that's not our cultural moment. Even where people have the resources to be of real cultural influence, they imagine a more generous way of life (sorry, this is going to sound harsh) that looks a lot like the American version of cohousing, where a home costs more than median housing cost in every single community that's been developed. Folks who've grown up with financial resources seem to want a generous way of life as long as it doesn't cost them any of the amenities they've learned to expect. And then they assess that folks with less money live under the influence of "greed" because we live with the fiscal caution that our culture enforces.
It would be interesting for this analysis to be framed against the subcultures of working class, working poor, and new immigrant people in the US. I think the writer would see in that kind of daily life much more of the generous resource sharing she imagines. I think of the guy I know who owns a snowplow, so he plows his elderly neighbors' drives for free ... they "pay" him with a quart of homemade soup or a loaf of bread they baked. I think about immigrant families whose "day care" provider is an abuela (and I remember--an aside--that research shows life success is more dependent on early childhood experiences of love than on early reading or preschool instruction in Mandarin). I watch recent immigrants happily acquiesce to the idea that "to have more, you have to work more" while also sharing resources in ways we don't imagine, like crowding three generations into one apartment so they can rent for income the second apartment (of the home they bought less than a decade after arriving).
I wouldn't call it "greed" to be fiscally responsible as an individual or household when living in a hyper individual culture. I wouldn't call it "hoarding" to save what's likely to be needed for survival. And I'm grateful you're looking for ways to be generous that involve investments in people you know face to face (even while I remember the "generosity" of a family who capitalized, at more than a million dollars, a recent graduate's fashion startup because "she needs to have a job.") Just sayin' ... be sure you give yourself chances to meet people who really need your generosity.
Okay. That's enough not-very-thinly veiled social class commentary for now. Have a great day, all!
As a Victorianist, I loved the governess image!
I'm trying to think about how rejecting what Miranda sees as "budget culture" is possible in the same way that we can individually work hard to opt out of diet or beauty culture. To do so as a woman, I have to be willing to accept that many others will see me as "letting myself go," irresponsible, and that it might have very real impact on how I'm perceived at work, etc. If I believe in the justice and selfcare of this model, and that I'm doing my small part to shift the culture, it may be "worth it" to me. I am thinking about how to draw effective parallels to budget culture, since her definition doesn't really sound like you're opting out of just HAVING a budget, but more like opting out of what's commonly accepted as financial responsibility. And of course you COULD do that--and similarly hope that it would be a small part of shifting our culture. But it doesn't feel like an apples to apples comparison in the practical realm. Run up debt and don't worry about paying it off...and then? Get your wages garnished? Be homeless and hope the world has changed enough that someone will take you in? The consequences feel a lot more existentially threatening.
Kerry, I absolutely see your perspective. I do think some of Miranda’s writing is a direct response to Dave Ramsey’s approach which prohibits any use of debt (good luck getting a home or car loan without a credit history). Highly recommend Amanda Montell’s SOUNDS LIKE A CULT podcast about THE CULT OF DAVE RAMSEY.
Oh. yeah. For many people, debt is not a categorical negative--student, mortgage, credit card, even. I can kind of understand that if you have a history of massive credit card debt, avoiding debt altogether might be a good plan--a little like having a history of binge drinking and not expecting you'll be able to easily shift to a half a glass of wine with dinner and stop at that.
I wish there was a way to give direct cash to sea turtles.
You might purchase a membership or make a donation to aquariums doing conservation/rescue/rehab work with them. The Texas State Aquarium and the South Carolina Aquarium both do a lot of sea turtle work. People tend to think of memberships as being just for free visits, but they're a good way to help with the mission work these organizations do as well.
(You do not actually have to visit or ever have visited if you want to support what the org is doing - for pretty much any cultural organization!)