No one goes broke from avocado toast
This is a new kind of conversation about money.
Healthy Rich is a platform for inclusive, budget-free financial education by Dana Miranda, CEPF®.
Through my platform for educators, I work with organizations dedicated to making money better for folks who are often left out of the conversation. Through this newsletter, we make space for those voices to share stories that highlight the diversity of our relationships with money — all written by folks we don’t hear from enough in personal finance media, including women, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, rural, working class and people with disabilities.
Become a free subscriber to get the latest from the Healthy Rich blog and Make Money Better podcast right in your inbox. Add a paid subscription to support sponsored memberships for educators and help us increase access to financial education taught by passionate, confident instructors.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
We all have unique relationships with work and money.
You’re welcome here, whether you earn a six-figure salary, get by gig to gig, work for tips, pay bills with unemployment or Social Security checks, are saddled with unpaid caretaking or domestic work, work in middle management, run a small business, manage a nonprofit, or cover everything with credit cards or student loans.
Healthy Rich is a place for everyone to get in touch with their relationship with money and discover ways to manage it with ease.
Our approach to financial education lends an antidote to pervasive budget culture, a damaging set of beliefs that rewards restriction and deprivation, and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial wellness.
We reject budget culture, because we know budgeting doesn’t work.
We don’t prescribe one “right” way to manage your money, because no way is right for everyone. Instead, we make space for diverse perspectives to help you discover what makes sense for you. We know the value of your wisdom to choose your next move, and we’ll be beside you as you do it.
At Healthy Rich
you don’t need a budget
there are no debt-free screams
we won’t teach you to be rich
and you can buy the damn latte.
In a healthy rich world, we don’t have to earn spending through productivity, saving or debt payoff; we aren’t obsessed with mathematical optimization; we don’t apologize for spending money, having debt or using community resources; we don’t presume to know what’s a “need” versus a “want” — and we’ll never tell you not to buy it either way.
We’re smart and kind, but we’re not perfect. We know no one can ever fully understand anyone else’s experience, and we know we all swim in a fishbowl of biases. We’ll get everything wrong. We’ll admit our mistakes, apologize for our impact and keep moving forward together.
Work and money are universal issues we each experience uniquely — and we don’t talk about the nuances enough. Budget culture ignores the “unique” part. At Healthy Rich, we shine a big, bright spotlight on it.
Thanks for being part of this new kind of conversation about money!
WHAT WE MAKE
On this Substack, you’ll find:
Healthy Rich blog: Essays that explore the ways money intersects with our culture and individual lifestyles.
Make Money Better podcast: Conversations and actionable ideas to earn, manage, save and spend money with ease and joy.
Personal finance classes: Lessons on managing money based on our budget-free framework.
Financial educators, interested in getting access to our class materials for your students/program participants? To learn more about those resources and bespoke course design, email me anytime: hi (at) healthyrich (dot) co
Resources and training
Through our platform for educators, members get access to:
Lesson materials: Curated toolkits cut through the noise and help instructors find the best free and affordable resources to teach the topics their communities need.
Course blueprints: Our signature budget-free framework makes it simple to provide participants with personal finance fundamentals.
Support for educators: Member-only virtual events, training and customized consultations help facilitators teach personal finance with confidence, clarity and care.
Team training: Through one-time and ongoing support, I help personal finance educators wade through the vast resources available and get confident teaching this complex subject.
Community workshops: I partner with national and local organizations to deliver virtual or in-person workshops on personal finance fundamentals for their communities.
Custom course design: I design and build a personal finance course for your organization, so your facilitators can just show up and teach.
Who we are
Created by Dana Miranda, CEPF®
I’m a Certified Educator in Personal Finance® (CEPF®), author and personal finance journalist. I operate from a fundamental belief that work should be fun and money should be easy.
I grew up in a working-class family in a small town in Wisconsin. When I joined the ranks of personal finance media in 2015, I found the niche led mostly by advice (and admonitions) from middle-class white men, ignoring the broad diversity of our relationships with work and money. After leaving a leadership position with a popular financial media startup and spending 2 1/2 years as a freelance writer, I founded Healthy Rich to change the way we talk about money.
I’m the author of the forthcoming YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET: How Toxic Budget Culture Ruined Your Relationship With Money—And How To Fix It, where I get to spend a whole book diving deep into the ills of budget culture and lay out in-depth the EASY approach to budget-free money management.
I’ve also written about work and money for Forbes, Business Insider, The Penny Hoarder, Culture Study, the New York Times, CNBC, The Motley Fool, NextAdvisor and Inc. magazine, among others.
💗 Thanks to our team and contributors
Jessica Lawlor, blog editor
Carson Kohler, blog writer
Stefan Davis, graphic designer, audio/video editor
Farrah Daniel-Bermudez, writing contest judge
Illustrations by Katelyn Valentine
Photos of Dana by Heather Comparetto
And keep an eye out for all of our contributors to the Healthy Rich blog — their bios and links are at the top of each post! Like, follow and comment to let them know how their stories impact you.
WHY BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER?
Support access to inclusive, budget-free financial education
As a free subscriber, you’ll get an email when we publish new blog posts and podcast episodes, and anyone can access that content on the site.
When you upgrade to a paid subscription for $7/month (or $84/year), you’ll help me bring inclusive, budget-free financial education to the communities that most need these resources — and keep Healthy Rich the one place in personal finance media that doesn’t rely on corporate sponsors or fintech advertisers.
The majority of teachers assigned to personal finance say they don’t feel confident teaching the course. While support for requiring financial education in K-12 classrooms is growing from state to state, most of the laws passed are unfunded mandates — meaning most fin ed classes don’t have dedicated money in schools. Teachers are unprepared and unsupported in teaching a subject outside of their expertise. They’re overwhelmed by the amount of personal finance resources available and say sifting through them to develop lesson plans is arduous.
So where do they turn? Deep breath in, restrain the eyeroll… Dave effing Ramsey.
Our schools deserve better than Dave Ramsey.
A Healthy Rich Education membership gives teachers what they’ve asked for: curated resources to build the lesson plans that work for their students. And for organizations serving people in need in their communities, I offer training to help them provide personal finance guidance with confidence — without being mean to people.
As a bootstrapped, delightfully tiny business, Healthy Rich is my livelihood and keeps me from relying on freelance work in the personal finance media that perpetuates budget culture. We charge a membership fee to access Healthy Rich Education resources, but the business is structured to give away as many memberships as possible for free — because, unfunded mandate. Your $7/month subscription supports sponsored membership for educators and keeps costs low for community organizations.
As a thank you, paid subscribers get access to my personal finance classes right here in Substack. But the vast majority of our content — and comments — are free for anyone, in keeping with the reason we’re here: to have a new kind of conversation about money.
If you want access to the paywalled content but the price doesn’t feel accessible for you, reach out to request a comp subscription — no questions asked.
If you want to support this work without a recurring payment, make a one-time contribution of any amount you choose.
Do your friends a favor!
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Contact
Email: hi (at) healthyrich (dot) co
Disclaimer
Dana Media LLC, d.b.a. Healthy Rich, does not provide tax, investment, legal or financial services. The information available through the Healthy Rich site and products is provided solely for informational purposes on an “as is” basis at user’s sole risk. The information is not meant to be, and should not be construed as advice or used for investment purposes. Healthy Rich makes no guarantees as to the accurateness, quality or completeness of the information and shall not be responsible or liable for any errors, omissions or inaccuracies in the information or for any user’s reliance on the information. User is solely responsible for verifying the information as being appropriate for user’s personal use, including without limitation, seeking the advice of a qualified professional regarding any specific financial questions a user may have. Neither Dana Media LLC nor the Healthy Rich brand are endorsed by or affiliated with FINRA or any other financial regulatory authority, agency or association.
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