"It Feels Like Everyone Else Has It Together While We’re Struggling."
A Q&A with Dana Miranda on how budget culture affects us and our kids.
If you’re a parent — and, well, even if you’re not — you may regularly worry about money. I certainly do, especially now that I’m paying a mortgage all by myself. I’m often asking myself what more I should be doing to manage my finances, and feeling guilty that I’m probably not doing enough.
Enter
’s new book You Don’t Need a Budget, which I found to be a salve for my financial anxiety. Dana, a personal finance journalist who writes the excellent Substack , digs into the powerful messages we get from our culture about money, explaining where they come from, whom they serve and how they actually affect the average person. Her arguments are thought-provoking, raising questions about many of the things I assumed were clear “truths” about budgeting and money management.I have been excited to run a Q&A with Dana here — not because I think that budgets are categorically bad or that people who manage their money in traditional ways are “doing it wrong,” but because I love evaluating the evidence behind cultural expectations and pressures. When this evidence is counterintuitive, it can be both illuminating and freeing, especially for people who struggle to uphold norms and don’t know why — because sometimes, our struggles stem from unrealistic and unfair expectations, rather than personal failures. One of my goals with Now What is to examine the many and varied sources of parental guilt and shame and explore whether they are truly warranted; although we might think of our finances as being only tangentially related to our parenting, there are many ways in which our relationship with (and shame around) money can affect our kids.
Without further ado, here’s my conversation with Dana, which I found fascinating and helpful — and I hope you will, too. I highly recommend the entire book!
Dana, what inspired you to write You Don't Need a Budget? Can you tell us a bit about your background?
I’ve been writing in personal finance media for 10 years. A few years ago I began to notice that every site I wrote for was promoting the same one-size-fits-all advice, coming from people with mostly the same white, middle-class lived experiences. I started Healthy Rich to explore experiences and perspectives we weren’t getting in the space, and I learned a ton from inviting in writers who were very different from me.
At the same time, I was learning a lot about diet culture and the ways we default to restriction around food and equate thinness with health, and the ways anti-fat bias is built into our culture (shout out Virginia Sole-Smith at Burnt Toast!). I was seeing the same things in personal finance: We default to restrictive budgets, equate wealth with being “good with money” and shame people for financial circumstances that are completely out of their control. But I didn’t see anyone calling out this approach, which I eventually called “budget culture,” the same way I saw so much good work pushing back against diet culture. I wrote You Don’t Need a Budget to start that conversation. I wanted to name budget culture, examine every bit of common financial advice through that lens and get people experimenting with a more nuanced approach to money.
I talk a lot here about the fact that there is no one "right" way to parent, even though our intensive parenting culture sure tells us otherwise. Your book helped me understand that there is no one "right" way to manage money, either, and that we should try to free ourselves of shame when we break money-related "rules." Can you share a few of the key things we are told to do or believe about money that aren't actually essential or even necessarily helpful? (This is not meant to be an attack on those who find budgeting helpful, by the way — if it works for you, that's great! — but I always think it's helpful to investigate norms and assumptions and try to understand what is evidence-based.)
“You need a budget” is the No. 1 thing I push back against. But you’re absolutely right that folks should do what truly works for them. I push back on this rule for several reasons: 1) It’s usually the first thing anyone hears from a personal finance book, influencer, financial coach or advisor, so it’s foundational to any other critique of our culture of money; 2) It embodies the focus on individual responsibility, restriction and discipline financial advice often relies on, so accepting the premise that budgeting is necessary kind of accepts those characteristics in our approach to money; 3) Research has found budgeting to be unsustainable and ineffective for a lot of people; it looks a lot like what we’ve known for a long time about dieting. Just taking budgeting as a rule for everyone leaves a lot of people floundering when their real challenge is a lack of resources or the unrealistic discipline a restrictive budget requires.
My other nemesis is the focus on fast and optimal debt payoff. We’re led to believe carrying debt or writing it off in any way is some kind of moral failing. But we have to question the circumstances that put us in debt in the first place: a financial system that allows a tiny percentage of people and institutions to hoard almost all of the wealth in our economy and then charge the rest of us to access it so we can afford to live our lives. Debt relief options and consequences for not repaying debt are built into the products; it’s not immoral to use every available tool to reduce the burden of a debt.
There are tons of other norms we accept about money — investing for long-term security, earning a living, accumulating wealth — but questioning and changing our mindset about budgeting and debt are foundational to rethinking the restriction and shame built into our cultural relationship with money.
You talk in your book about how money culture is rooted in the idea of individual responsibility — that people who make good decisions with money typically do well, and those who make bad decisions suffer for their "thoughtless" choices. This framing can cause us to believe that our financial plights have nothing to do with broader laws or policies. I couldn't help but notice the parallels to parenting, which is often set up this way too — we're held to impossible parenting standards, expected to make all the best choices for our kids, yet we aren't given the governmental and institutional support we need to actually make those things happen. Can you talk about some of the reasons we're set up to fail, money-wise — why it might not actually be our fault when we experience financial hardship?
The effects of generational wealth, poverty and privilege are well known, but Americans are addicted to Cinderella stories, and our policies reflect the ridiculous belief that everyone should be able to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We haven’t instituted social supports to help those folks who start miles behind the starting line, or anyone who’s unable to earn a comfortable living through work because of disability, care responsibilities, geographic constraints, health issues or anything else.
But even for those folks who can generally participate in the workforce and earn a comfortable wage, our lack of safety nets for health care and retirement adds financial stress that financial educators and media treat as way too normal. Too many American families are one unexpected expense away from financial strain or catastrophe, and almost no one has the recommended amount of money saved for retirement. And parents tend to feel the strain of rising costs and tight resources at a greater rate than others, so there’s plenty of overlap in supporting parents culturally and socially, and setting families up for success financially.
Financial education and media tends to blame you or allow you to blame yourself for your financial circumstances, and they prescribe individualized actions to address any challenges. When every piece of financial advice starts with “make a budget,” it’s easy to believe your financial challenges exist because you haven’t figured out how to get your spending under control. We have to be better at incorporating what we know sociologically — e.g. about generational poverty, the racial wealth gap, gender discrimination, etc. — to the ways we think, teach and talk about money at a personal level.
Because many of us hold shame around money, we often don't talk about it with our kids. We might talk about the prices of grocery store items, but we typically don't talk about money woes or difficult financial decisions or the debt we might have. Do you think we should? If so, do you have any suggestions for how to have these conversations?
It’s so important to normalize talking about every side of money with kids! And you probably want to avoid offloading your worry, shame and stress onto your kids… Many of us start with a very loaded relationship with money, so I’d recommend investigating that in yourself to understand why certain feelings come up around certain money moves or decisions. (I have a set of reflection questions to help you do that!) If you can gain some awareness of where any worry, stress or shame around money is coming from, you can decouple that from money itself, so you don’t unintentionally teach kids to associate money with those negative experiences.
I think talking candidly to kids about money is an important step in breaking down budget culture. We often feel shame around money as adults because it feels like everyone else has it together while we’re struggling. We also take things like moms staying home instead of dads, or choosing medical care based on cost, as normal. If parents can share their challenges and contextualize financial circumstances for kids, kids can learn to question those norms and hopefully feel less shame and defeat around money as adults.
I talk a lot the importance of modeling generosity in front of our kids, and why it can be so powerful for kids to recognize the value of donating money or time to causes we care about. But as you explain in your book, budget culture can make generosity seem "foolish," and it encourages us to hoard our wealth rather than share it. I often fall into this mindset of "Oh I want to give money to X, but I am worried about paying the bills next month." Do you have any suggestions for how we can think about charitable giving and get out of this scarcity mindset?
The advice I share in the book is something I’ve learned from many spiritual and religious traditions: Whatever you own isn’t yours; it’s just in your care for now. Instead of framing generosity as giving away something of yours, frame it as stewarding resources that belong equally to everyone. You may hold something for now, but that doesn’t mean it’s yours; it’s just your turn to find the right place for it. In the same way, you can counter a scarcity mindset by realizing giving something away isn’t a loss to you; resources will be stewarded your way, as well.
On a more practical level, you can also broaden your understanding of giving to include more than formal charities. Paying taxes is an important form of generosity (one that, compared with private charities, is particularly efficient and easily distributed based on means). So is giving informal and sporadic gifts. If you feel like you have to give $100 to a nonprofit organization every month to fulfill your desire for charitable giving, you might never start because that feels like too much of a strain. But giving bus fare to a stranger, taking dinner to a neighbor with a new baby or buying $20 worth of toiletries for a friend who just lost their job are one-off steps you can take to be generous when you have the means and you see a need. You don’t necessarily need to support a “cause”; you can adopt a mindset of generosity in your day to day life and find small opportunities to share resources with the humans around you.
As a parent, one pressure I feel constantly is the pressure to save money for my kids' college costs. I feel like the assumption is that parents should save as much as possible so that their kids don't have to take out student loans. What are your thoughts on this? How should we think about college savings and student loan debt?