I’ve been a personal finance writer since 2015. I’ve learned a ton of “rules” about money throughout my career, and they never seem to work for me — or a vast array of folks who aren’t like the typical middle-class dudes who peddle most financial advice.

I created Healthy Rich in 2021 to find and connect with the artists, queers, autistics, feminists, leftists, self-employed, marginalized, racialized, paupers, activists and other misfits who are tired of struggling and striving against a system that’s not made for us.

Through this community, we’re leading a new kind of conversation about money.

I wrote You Don’t Need a Budget to create a capsule for this conversation. Through this delightfully anti-capitalist personal finance book, I investigate our cultural relationship with money and offer a critique of and an alternative to conventional advice that’s rooted in restriction, shame and greed.

Typical financial advice offers up broad strokes and binaries, a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t leave room for the diversity of our relationships with money. Through Healthy Rich, I’ve had the benefit of learning from folks whose voices we don’t hear enough in conversations about money. And I realized, the world has a lot to learn from our misfit perspectives.

I wrote You Don’t Need a Budget to spread this conversation further and to explore the question: What if we didn’t have to follow their rules?

Through the book, I expose the weakness of common financial advice about budgeting, debt repayment, earning money, investing and more. I flip popular assumptions on their head and say hey, you don’t have to do it this way.

You DON’T need a budget.

You DON’T have to pay off debt.

You DON’T have to work so hard.

You DON’T need an investment account.

Is this sounding good? The book breaks down nine overplayed tenets of budget culture and offers an alternative, budget-free approach to help you stop worrying about debt, spend without shame and manage money with ease — in spite of a system that wants to make everything hard.

I’m so proud to share this book with you.

🎉 You Don’t Need a Budget is available NOW!

Get it wherever you buy books — if they don’t have it, ask them for it; they can order it. It’s available in hardcover, ebook and audiobook (which I read in my own voice!), so you can absorb the information however it comes best to you.

Buy YDNAB on Amazon

Buy YDNAB on Bookshop.org

A few people have asked how they can support this launch, so I’ll include some steps you can take below. I will love any help you can offer to get this book to everyone who needs it!

For some talking points, here’s a two-minute summary of the book:

📚 Help readers find this book!

All or any of these steps will help give the book a huge boost.

1. Buy the book: Get it from Amazon, Bookshop, Barnes & Noble or any of these other places that sell books.

2. Request it at your library and local bookstore. Most won’t carry it automatically, but they can get it if you ask for it. That’s good for you, and it’ll put the book on display for others to find.

3. Tell one friend: Forward this email, send a text or call a friend who hates capitalism but still needs to pay her bills. Tell her she’ll love this book.

4. Leave a review on Goodreads and Amazon. (More reviews encourages their algorithms to suggest the book to more people, I’m so sorry but it is truly powerful.)

5. Take a selfie with the book! When your copy arrives (even if it’s on your phone or tablet!), snap a selfie and share it on social media. You can use the hashtags #ydnab and #YouDontNeedABudget to connect with other budget-free buddies. Tag me @ justdanamiranda on Instagram and Substack and I will definitely cry when I see you.

6. Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram and/or Goodreads for book updates and giveaways (and to see what else I’m reading 🙃).

Want copies for your book club, classroom, organization or company training? Let’s bring this conversation to the people you’re already talking to!

• Reach at to hi@healthyrich.co if you’re interested in a bulk order discount, and I’ll connect you with the right folks at Hachette.

• I’d love to join your group virtually or in person to speak about budget culture and budget-free financial wellness, and I’m happy to waive my speaking fee if you make a bulk order.

• Grab discussion and instruction guides here.

Need a money management expert for your next story, podcast, radio or TV show? I’d love to talk to you! For media inquiries, please contact my Little, Brown publicist, Lauren Ortiz.

This post contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, so if you buy a book mentioned here, you support the author, local bookstores and Healthy Rich!

I don’t buy the capitalist mandate for competition — cooperation makes us stronger.

I was eager to share my book with these folks, even those who’ve written “competing” books. Their insight and feedback are very meaningful to me, and I know we’ll do much more good working together than we would separately.

I was extremely flattered by the kind words that came back to me.

Below are a few nice things some very smart people have said about You Don’t Need a Budget — but first…

Enter to win a free copy of You Don’t Need a Budget!

To celebrate the book’s upcoming release, I’m giving away five copies to newsletter subscribers! You can enter for a chance to win by answering this one-question survey:

Enter to win a free copy of YDNAB

Entries will be open through Sunday, Dec. 15 at 9 p.m. CST. Five winners will be selected at random and notified via email by Dec. 18. Hardcover, audiobook and ebook copies are available.

Sweet words from sweet friends about YDNAB

"Most personal finance books give all the same advice. Dana Miranda does not. In YDNAB, she offers a refreshing alternative unlike anything I've read before. It will make you question everything you've been told about money, and change your relationship with it forever."

―Cait Flanders, author of THE YEAR OF LESS and ADVENTURES IN OPTING OUT

“A radical take on managing your money in the modern age. If you've ever felt like traditional personal finance advice just didn't work for you—no matter how hard you tried—this book will help you see your money in a new light. Miranda's sharp storytelling is a comfort that asserts you're not alone in striving to build a life that's more honest and less transactional.”

―Lisa Rowan, author of MONEY HACKS

“In today's climate of increased openness about mental health, You Don’t Need a Budget is the personal finance book we need. Dana Miranda challenges the budget culture and debt shaming that's exacerbated the financial anxiety of many Americans and built media empires for some personal finance influencers, while overturning notions about budgeting, credit card debt and financial well-being. If you've ever felt disconnected from mainstream personal finance advice and crave a fresh approach, look no further than You Don't Need a Budget.”

―David and John Auten-Schneider, creators of Debt Free Guys and hosts of Queer Money podcast

“You Don't Need a Budget offers a fresh reset to the rigid rules of personal finance. I recommend Dana's advice to anyone who feels shamed or disheartened by budget culture."

―Chris Guillebeau, Author of The $100 STARTUP and TIME ANXIETY

"If you've struggled with overspending your budget, read this book before making another one! Dana Miranda gets to the root cause of why budgeting brings so much shame and offers practical advice for solving unique problems."

―Jen Smith, Co-Host of Frugal Friends Podcast & Author of Buy What You Love Without Going Broke

You Don’t Need a Budget investigates our cultural relationship with money and offers an alternative, budget-free approach to help you break free from the tyranny of toxic budget culture and live an ethical, stress-free financial life.

Buy the book

This is an exclusive for subscribers — you’re the first non-industry folks (besides my mom…) to get a look inside the book! As you should be, because the book wouldn’t exist without everything I’ve learned from the stories and conversations we’ve been able to share in this community.

Thank you so much 💖

Enjoy!

Download a Free Chapter

And if you’re ready to buy it, you can order your copy here. Thank you!

This post contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, so if you buy a book mentioned here, you support the author, local bookstores and Healthy Rich!

Yes, this is another reminder to order my book, if you please. And because I know a lot of writers and book lovers read this newsletter, I’ll also get into why I’m asking yet again and won’t stop asking until Dec. 24 — plus some of the other financial pieces that come with writing a book with a traditional publisher.

Why authors are obsessed with pre-orders

You might have heard from other authors that we need pre-orders because they’re super helpful to the success of a book. Here’s why:

• Best seller lists: Publications use enigmatic formulas to determine what makes a best seller list, but weekly sales are at least part of all of them. Even though we gather pre-sales over months before the book is released, they all count toward sales in the single launch week, giving a book a head start. And a book on a best seller list begets more sales, which could beget more best seller lists…

• Big retailers: Stores like Barnes & Noble want to see that a book will sell before they stock it. Pre-sales can give them that proof. And these big box stores can move books, because thousands of people walk through their doors every day.

• Amazon algorithm: Just like with published best seller lists, pre-sales can boost a book to best seller in an Amazon category, which gives it more visibility. Those sales also tell the algorithm things that could prompt Amazon to put the book in front of more eyes.

Bottom line: These early sales from supporters like you help get the book in front of people who, as of now, have never heard of me. Getting people to know a book exists is really tough when you’re a first-time author (who wasn’t a viral influencer first). And You Don’t Need a Budget is a book, I’m confident, that people will want to pick up if they just know it exists. So, thank you so much to everyone who’s already pre-ordered their copy!!

Author costs of launching a book

The massive benefit to working with a traditional publisher is that it covers the bulk of upfront costs to make the book. I don’t have to pay for anything out of pocket (because I’ll split royalties with my publisher down the road). But there are some not-quite-required-but-really-nice-to-have costs that fall to an author.

The author’s optional costs include:

• Fact checking. Pretty astounding that publishers don’t provide this, but if you want a professional fact checker, you’ll have to hire a freelancer yourself.

• Sensitivity reading. If you write about a particular identity, community or experience that’s not your own, a sensitivity reader can review for any inaccurate, biased or insensitive portrayals.

• Marketing and PR. My publisher provides a marketer and publicist, but there’s always more to be done. Several PR firms have pitched me as the book release draws nearer, offering a more comprehensive book launch. One quoted me $8,000 a month — which was fair for the staff and effort they would provide but, boy, did they have no idea of my price range! Instead, I hired a VA friend to help with research and pitching, and I pay her $50 an hour for about 10 hours a month. (Yes, I know you can hire VAs for like $5 an hour, but that’s gross and everyone should stop it.)

The biggest resource an author puts into writing and launching a book is time (and, you know, her brilliance).

I saved up money and relied on my partner last year so I could reduce to very part-time paid work and spend most of my days writing something no one would see for two years. In this promotion era, my time goes toward being on podcasts, writing guest posts and articles, and creating social media content to get the word out about the book.

The work my publisher is doing

Especially among online entrepreneurs, a lot of authors opt for self-publishing and complain about the prospect of sharing money with a publisher. It’s true that publishers take a huge cut of book sales: I’ll get just 10% to 15% of the money from each book (and that’s before my agent’s cut). We could debate for hours about a more fair split, and I appreciate the people who do that.

But they do work for it, for sure. And the people who work inside publishing houses are notoriously underpaid for the talent, experience, wisdom, passion and effort they bring to their projects.

My publishing team includes a developmental editor, copy editor, publicist and marketer. The publisher handles 100% of the production, including cover and interior design, scheduling and printing; and the distribution. They make it easy for retailers to get the book. They’re printing and shipping galleys to early readers and reviewers. They reviewed the YDNAB website and have been advising on my social media “strategy.” And they have a host of big-time media contacts who wouldn’t look at me twice if I showed up in their inbox on my own.

How I get paid

No author will tell you they write books for the money. A select few can make a living just from selling books, but it’s very difficult and gets harder every year as competition grows and audiences get fractured into deeper niches.

But the book has added to my revenue and has potential to do even more in the future. Here’s how I get paid as an author:

• Advance: Little, Brown Spark is an imprint of the big-five publisher Hachette. Receiving an advance is a huge benefit to going with a corporate overlord of a publisher that even indie publishers don’t offer. An advance is a chunk of money paid out at certain intervals throughout the book-making process. I had a small advance, so it was just two payments: half on signing the contract and the other half on submitting an acceptable manuscript. Bigger advances might include payments upon release of the book, release of a paperback edition and other contingent milestones.

• Reading the audiobook: I’m reading my own audiobook! So I’ll get an additional payment for that, just like any other contracted voice actor would get.

• Royalties: When the book sells, I’m entitled to that 10% to 15% cut. But first, the book has to sell enough copies for the publisher to recoup the advance I was paid. Most authors never earn out their advance, but with a small deal, I have a chance of actually doing it in the first year or two (pre-order your copy and help me sell those books!). Once that happens, I could get a quarterly royalty check.

• Freelancing: Outside of the book, I make my living freelancing again. I’d be doing that regardless, but the book definitely gives editors an extra reason to consider me for their rosters. Coming back to freelancing with a book on the way has felt much more validating than building my freelance career from scratch the first time. I’ve landed publications that are a better fit for my approach to money, and I don’t have to hustle as hard to prove my expertise and earn a fair rate. (The book’s not doing all the heavy lifting; I do have almost 10 years of experience in the field! But the book is like a shorthand for what I can offer.)

• Substack: I make around $4,500 a year in revenue from this newsletter now. Added visibility from book promotion can help grow the newsletter, too. The very cool thing about promoting a book is you don’t have to go out and do a hard sell everywhere; you can get on podcasts and in newspapers and on public radio and talk about ideas. People who like those ideas might buy the book or check out other cool work you’re doing. That’s why, even for folks who aren’t primarily writers, a book is such a valuable marketing tool for growing a business.

• Speaking: Except for a few outliers, nonfiction authors who make a living “as an author” mostly make money from speaking. Keynote speaking can bring in a helluva paycheck, even if you’re not close to famous. The book gets your foot in the door, and you create a presentation that distills its best ideas. Keynote speaking is also intimidating and exhausting, but virtual events open up a world of possibilities for neurospicy authors 😃

There’s a lot more an author can spin off of a book to get paid — consulting, courses, licensing, coaching, products, conferences, get creative! But, as for me and my house, I’m consciously building a career where most of my job is writing. So I’m concentrating on making money from book royalties (and advances on future books??), Substack and freelancing.

This post contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, so if you buy a book mentioned here, you support the author, local bookstores and Healthy Rich!

As part of healing in your relationship with money, I encourage everyone to find good work — work that supports your overall financial wellness. That means it supports your:

• Goals: Salary, savings, promotions, titles, etc.

• Values: Making an impact, caring for people, etc.

• Best interests: Health insurance, work/life balance, inclusivity, etc.

Grab a notebook (if you’re a journaler) or a friend (if you’re a talker), and work through these questions to determine whether the work you do now supports your overall wellness.

Does your work…

• Respect and utilize your strengths?

• Offer opportunities for learning and career development?

• Make room for personal goals and interests?

• Support the kind of business you want in the world?

• Serve people you care about?

• Make the positive impact you want to make?

• Avoid or prevent outcomes you’d consider bad?

• Pay fairly?

• Provide benefits like health insurance, paid leave, and retirement contributions?

• Enforce health and safety measures?

• Offer flexible and remote work, so you can determine how to make your best contribution?

If you answered no to any of these questions: Imagine work that would check all of these boxes. What would have to change at your current workplace? Where might you look for work elsewhere to meet your needs?

📘 Want more like this? You Don’t Need a Budget is available to pre-order now — and already discounted! Grab your copy for 7% off on Amazon.

The only drawback, I thought, was that I’d be writing about personal finance.

Money seemed like such a dreadfully boring subject to me at the time: I was 29 years old, had lived paycheck-to-paycheck for 10 years, was ignoring my credit score and retirement planning, surviving on the strength of my dream to be a writer.

I was a creative soul. Of all the jobs my writing path could have led me to, why did I have to end up in finance?

But I went after the job because I loved the editor who hired me and the team of other smart and creative people I’d get to work with. Plus, they didn’t need me to know anything about money to report on the topic! My ignorance was kind of an asset in those days, when personal finance blogging was all about young millennials talking like a friend to other young millennials.

I got sucked in, and to my utter surprise, I came to love writing about money.

Before that job, I’d assumed I was destined to be Bad With Money. I grew up working class and didn’t have a financial education. And I wanted to be a creative, a class of folks I was told don’t find much financial success.

But as I learned about our financial systems through the work, I realized the problem wasn’t that I was “bad with money.” It was that our financial systems and media weren’t made with people like me in mind. I loved learning how financial products and systems work, because it let me see how we can each make them work for us — and where we need to make changes to make our approach to money more inclusive for everyone.

I ended up staying in that job for four years and continuing to write about personal finance after I left — and now I write this whole newsletter on the topic and I’m about to release a book all about our cultural relationship with money.

My 29-year-old self would be astounded to hear me rattle off opinions about bank accounts and investing apps. She wouldn’t believe I can explain how loan amortization works or how to file taxes as an S-Corp.

But I’m so delighted I wound up on this path! Every part of our lives is impacted by our relationships with money. I’m so proud to be building a career around making that relationship with money better for everyone.

📘 Want to learn more? In my book, I share the full story of getting started in personal finance media and how I learned the industry isn’t speaking to most of us. Pre-order it now wherever you buy books! And, if you’re a reviewer, librarian or educator, look for YOU DON’T NEED A BUDGET on NetGalley!

Order YDNAB

Budgets don’t do that. They bombard you with money stress and financial decisions, add tasks to your plate, make you do math when you’re trying to have fun, and plague you with unhelpful progress reports and personal assessments.

In You Don’t Need a Budget, the first step I recommend for stepping away from budget culture is dropping the personal budget. Instead, you can automate your finances to get money off your mind.

Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll find in Chapter 3 — an exercise to help you automate the most vexing parts of money management and a quick list of ideas for automating your finances to get your creativity flowing.

Make money easy

Did I ever mention my original outline for the book included a money management method called EASY Money, and yes that’s an acronym that lends itself nicely to four distinct sections of a book? (You might recognize it if you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while…) I abandoned that approach, though, when I realized it’s just another prescription nobody needs.

But I didn’t lose the intention behind that original idea. The E (earn) became an opportunity to talk about our cultural relationship with work and worth. The S (save) expanded into a more useful conversation about financial goals. The Y (yield) became my conscious spending approach. And the A (automate) became my mantra to get money off your mind.

And, it’s still about automation.

Here are three questions I encourage you to answer to suss out the financial decisions that live rent-free in your head and find ways to put them on auto pilot.

• What's a financial decision that frequently causes you stress?

• What makes it hard?

• How could you automate it to remove the need to decide?

9 ways to automate your finances

Now brainstorm automations that would reduce friction or take this decision off your plate. Here are some ideas to get you started:

1. Reverse your budget (i.e. "pay yourself first").

2. Direct deposit your paycheck.

3. Set up autopay for bills.

4. Schedule transfers from checking into savings.

5. Set calendar reminders to pay bills.

6. Set a reminder to save for and buy birthday/holiday gifts.

7. Use a password manager for your financial accounts.

8. Document processes you might repeat in the future.

9. Set a weekly money date to review your financial goals.

📘 Want more like this? My book You Don’t Need a Budget is available to pre-order now — and already discounted! Grab your copy for 7% off on Amazon.

Today through Wednesday, July 17, Barnes & Noble is running a promotion called “A Sale for the Pages”1 for their Premium and Rewards members — and my book, You Don’t Need a Budget, is included in the sale!

(Cue squeals from the young adult inside of me who was once a B&N barista dreaming of writing her own book one day…)

B&N Premium and Rewards members will get 25% off if you preorder YDNAB online this week with code PREORDER25 at checkout. Premium members also get double stamps and an additional 10% off.

You can get the discount on the hardcover, ebook or audiobook version of YDNAB.

Pre-order from B&N

Plus, if you order from Barnes & Noble this week, we both win: You get the book at a discount, and you let the big box store know readers are excited for You Don’t Need a Budget — so they know to stock it on shelves when it comes out in December. (Oh, and you get an incredible book that’ll change your relationship with money… win-win-win!)

FYI, a B&N Rewards membership is free to join; you just need an email address. So if you’re not already a member, you can sign up for free and get the discount on YDNAB today.

Please pass this on to your fellow B&N fans2, and thanks, as always, for your continued support!

Cheers,

Dana

2

B&N’s crack marketing team suggested an animal photo is good for engagement, so here’s a couple o’ cute little guys who’re waiting in line to buy my book:

I encourage you to check with your favorite local bookstore first — most of them can take preorders for you now, and if you let them know you’re interested, they might carry the book on their shelves to help others find it after the book is released.

If you don’t have a nearby store (hi, fellow rural dwellers!), you can order a SIGNED copy from my favorite bookstore, A Room of One’s Own. Or Bookshop lets you shop online and shares proceeds with local bookstores all over the country. I love this option, too!

Pre-order the book

If you want free shipping, have other shopping to do or want to buy the Kindle version (and want to help the book show up in the algorithm gaaawwwdd), you can also find the book on Amazon. Or if you have big-box loyalties and want to encourage the biggest stores to carry the book next year, you can pre-order it through Barnes & Noble, Target and Walmart.

Find out anywhere else the book is available through my publisher, Little, Brown Spark.

And don’t forget to add the book to your “Want to Read” list on Goodreads and Tertulia!!

Thank you so much for following YDNAB updates, and I appreciate your support leading up to the release of my first book 💖

Whether you order today or not, you can help out the book and yourself by adding it to your To Read list on Goodreads.1 That’s an easy way to help others find the book, and it lets you get updates when the book is published, when we host giveaways, etc.

And, because it’s out in the world now, I can finally share the cover. We finalized this a couple of months ago, and I’ve been chomping at the bit to share it with you! (After the paywall below, I’ll share a look into the process of designing the cover for anyone who’s curious…)

Here it is!

Pre-order your copy

Follow (or unfollow) YDNAB updates

We don’t have anything major coming soon, but I’m working with my team at Little, Brown Spark on the book’s roll out in the second half of this year. We’ll be promoting pre-orders in earnest a few months before the Dec. 24 release, and once the book is out, I’ll be trying to reach everyone who wants to strike “budgeting” from their list of self-improvement chores next January.

In the Healthy Rich community, you’ll be the first to know about book news, events, promotions, giveaways, places to buy the book and whatever else comes up in the journey of releasing a book. I’ll tuck all these updates, plus a press tour playlist you can follow, under a new YDNAB category, so it’s easy for you to find them if you want them, and to opt out (like, if you’ve already ordered your copy and don’t need anymore information 😉).

You can manage which categories of emails you receive in your account under “Notifications.”

Alongside book updates, I’ll be sticking to our regularly scheduled programming for Healthy Rich: essays from me and other smart and interesting folks about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money. Keep “Healthy Rich” checked under “Notifications” so you don’t miss these regular newsletters!

Designing a book cover (should I have had to work harder than this?)

Read more

Last year, I wrote a book proposal for You Don’t Need a Budget, a book investigating budget culture and introducing readers to a budget-free approach to personal finance, and I got a deal with Little, Brown Spark to publish that book.

This year, my job was to write that book, and in a couple of weeks, I’ll turn a draft in to my editor as promised.

Predictably, I didn’t write the book I proposed.

The timeline and sheer volume of content that goes into writing a book makes the process an opportunity for nonfiction authors to learn as much as it’s an opportunity to distill our knowledge and wisdom for readers.

Contrary to the confidence I displayed in the proposal, writing this book was a process of discovering what I think and feel about money after realizing the way I was thinking and writing about it for years was all wrong.

Tons of brilliant people aided in that discovery through their own work or through direct conversations with me as I wrote. As I’m preparing to turn the draft over to my editor, I’m reflecting on some key lessons that transformed this project from the book I thought I was writing to the book I needed to write.

1. What you own isn’t truly yours

As I was researching for the book early this year, I was also working with a client to design a college course on personal finance basics — in a Christian theology department. As an atheist, I could only supply the financial education; they brought the (progressive, inclusive, don’t worry) theological perspective.

I designed a course around the budget-free fundamentals, and the only revision they asked for was to cut the “your” in references to “your money.”

I’d heard of the concept of stewardship, but mostly filtered through personal development experts, who budget-cultured it into a set of rules for using money in altruistic ways. I researched the Christian teachings of stewardship to get it right for the course, and I learned the foundational concept is simply that we don’t own resources; they’re only in our care for now.

Embracing this idea necessarily transforms your relationship with money. You might believe these resources are bestowed by whatever you believe god to be, or you might believe they’re collectively shared among humans and/or other earthly creatures — the specific spiritual interpretation doesn’t matter. The point is that resources don’t exist for you to own; they’re just available for you to carry through the world. That frees you from making financial decisions based on how they’ll best help you gain and keep money, and lets you make decisions instead based on how a money move can serve the highest good for all involved (shout-out to for that lovely phrase!).

2. The worst-case scenario is rarely (actually) that bad

I interviewed Meredyth and Jennie Mustafa-Julock, the coaches and owners of , to share their story of leaving behind their life in L.A. and moving full-time into an RV after Meredyth left her career as a school administrator.

I wasn’t surprised to take tons of gems from a conversation with two coaches, and only a fraction of it could make it directly into the draft. One snippet that won’t be in the book but that colors the way I approach money (and everything) is the way they analyze “worst-case scenarios.”

Jennie and Meredyth teach this in their coaching practice, and they’ve had to do it to make major decisions in their own lives, too. They were, of course, terrified to make the leap from two predictable incomes and into life on the road as business partners. But they asked, “What’s the worst that could happen?”

The way they teach it, “what’s the worst that could happen” isn’t an opportunity to write a horror movie for your future. It’s an honest look into the worst likely outcome of a decision.

And that’s the key. You can imagine every decision you make following your gut could dubiously “ruin your life,” but what might actually happen? Maybe your worst-case scenario is moving into your parents’ basement or declaring bankruptcy or going to college for an extra two years or draining your savings account dry. Whatever it is, calibrate your risks toward a worst-case scenario you can get through.

Whatever decision you make today isn’t the last decision you’ll ever make. You don’t have to follow budget culture’s rules because everyone treats them like they’re the only safe bet. You can make the moves you need to take care of yourself now, and know you’ll be able to make a different decision later if you need to change your circumstances.

3. Divesting isn’t the only way to reject a system

When I committed to taking an explicit anti-capitalist stance, I struggled with how to discuss topics like investing and property ownership in the book — even though they’re the subjects of some of the most popular questions in personal finance.

I gained an important perspective from my interview with K. Kenneth Davis of The Trans Capitalist, as well as from following other Black financial educators, including Tiffany Aliche of The Budgetnista, of and Kiersten and Julien of Rich and Regular.

All of these folks speak directly to marginalized people, and they talk a lot about traditional ways of building wealth in budget culture. It’s always irked me: Why encourage people to participate in a system that intentionally hurts them?

What I learned over and over again (from asking this question directly! to people whose experiences are different from my own!) is sometimes the best way to fight a game that’s rigged to make you lose… is to win it.

Capitalism has been built and grown on the backs of Black Americans and other marginalized people for centuries. It’s working as intended when so many people face staggering, systemic inequality. If those people beat capitalism at its own game? The system is necessarily breaking — and that’s a step forward.

(That’s all in addition to the fact that constant resistance is exhausting, and people deserve a chance to rest and survive in whatever way they can. You don’t have to be an activist just because you’re oppressed.)

4. Work isn’t an ethic

I honestly conceived this book with “making money” as a prominent step to divest from budget culture. Restriction-centric budgeting advice never talks enough about the money you earn, so I thought my differentiator would be to focus more on work.

Reading Tricia Hersey’s Rest Is Resistance (another Spark title!) and other anti-racist literature, including Emma Dibiri’s What White People Can Do Next, helped me understand how that line of thinking fed directly into budget culture.

Both writers talk about how race (along with other ways of classifying people) was invented as a justification for capitalist exploitation, that believing in our need to “earn a living” feeds not just budget culture but white supremacy, patriarchy — the whole shebang.

Earning money isn’t a necessary place to start a conversation about money management, because productivity is by no means a reasonable standard for humans. My Protestant Midwestern brain has to flex hard to hold onto that truth, so I’m grateful to have these books on my shelf when I need a reminder.

Another good perspective on this, from :

What Works

"All Parasites Have Value:" Why Valuing Those Who Don't Work is Key to More Sustainable Work Practices for Those Who Do

"I haven't worked my whole life to pay for somebody else," said the woman in line at the antique store ahead of my husband. At the mention of the sales tax she owed, she began to complain about "moochers." The next day, we walked past a car with a bumper sticker that professed the same sentiment. Behind us, I could hear another shopper tell the car owne…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · Tara McMullin

5. Habits aren’t for everyone

I include a whole section in the draft about “changing your habits around money.” It’s pretty standard personal development stuff, though I include some caveats about not feeding into budget culture, etc. etc. But I had to revisit it entirely after hearing several pieces of criticism directed at popular habit-forming advice, namely the stuff from James Clear’s mega-hit book, Atomic Habits… which I cite in the draft.

An episode of the podcast finally pushed me over the edge to revise this section. I didn’t remove it completely; habit-building advice is immensely popular because it’s encouraging and useful for a lot of people. But its typical all-or-nothing approach ignores neurodiversity.

On Autistic Culture, hosts Angela and Matt point out that autistic brains form and use the pathways that make habits differently from the ways neurotypical brains do. “Everything we do has to be a conscious effort,” says Matt. “Every action we make is somewhat deliberate — including breathing…which is why so many of us have non-obstructive sleep apnea, because we forget to breathe, because we can't even make a habit to breathe.”

I feel this truth, and I appreciate them for putting words to it (and explaining why habit-building exercises have just never clicked for me).

Turning financial behaviors into habits is a great way to make money management easier — for some people. For some of us, we instead have to find ways to build a life around how our brains work. Our culture’s obsession with habit-building is ableist and perfectionist, and advice that centers on habits is alienating and shaming for tons of people. My work is about expanding the conversation to invite in those who’ve been left out, so I expanded this section to include more diverse ways to approach money management practices.

💡 Want to have your own aha! moments about work and money?

My Budget-Free Fundamentals series gives you everything you need to gain a fresh perspective on your relationship with money. In a few short lessons, you’ll gain tools to use money the way you want without relying on restriction, succumbing to shame or following advice rooted in greed. Paid subscribers have full access to this and all Healthy Rich classes.

Subscribe now

This post contains affiliate links for Bookshop.org, so if you buy a book mentioned here, you support the author, local bookstores and Healthy Rich!

Image by Lisa Fotios via Pexels