Clean

No Budget Needed w/ Dana Miranda #914

Published Dec 4, 2024, 9:00 AM

For this episode we might need to adopt a new, honorary name for our podcast – maybe How NOT to Money since this is going to feel at odds with what we typically discuss here on the show! And that’s because ‘budgeting’ is almost synonymous with ‘building wealth’ and living the kind of life you want, but our guest today is offering an alternative to traditional personal finance advice in favor of empowering and flexible strategies. We’re joined by Dana Miranda, author of the new book “You Don’t Need A Budget” which comes out later this month. Dana is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance and is a contributor to the NYT, The Penny Hoarder, and The Motley Fool just to name a few. She is all about building a financial life that works for you as an individual – she’s flipping the personal finance script, ditching the budget, and reimagining your relationship to money entirely, enjoy!

 

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Best friends out!

Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt, and today we're talking no budget Needed with Dana Miranda.

No budget needed makes me think of like only add water, or like no milk necessary, Joel, we're eliminating certain elements.

Or no shirts, no shoes, no service.

Like I was almost thinking we should adopt like a new sort of honorary name for the podcast just for this one episode, right, like instead of how to Money, we should call it like how Not to Money? Since I think this is going to feel at odds with what we typically discuss here on the show, because budgeting it's almost synonymous with building wealth, with living the kind of life you want. But our guest today is offering an alternative to traditional personal finance advice in favor of empowering and flexible strategies. We're joined by Dana Miranda, author of the new book You Don't Need a Budget, which comes out later this month, and Dana is a certified educator in personal finance. She is also a contributor to the Times, The Penny Hoarder, Motley Full, Just a Ni a Few and so Dana, we're really looking forward to our conversation with you today. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to it too.

Of course, glad to have you. First question we ask everyone is what do they like to euplore? John. It lets us know a little bit about kind of what you're into, how you spend your money. But of course, at the same time you're saving and investing for your future. But what are you slurging on in the meantime.

Dana, I like to spend money on long term travel. So I like to travel just take you know, a couple of days or a week to go to a place. But my favorite thing is to go somewhere for like two or three months. And I live in Wisconsin and it gets very cold and dark here in the winter. So the last few years I've also been become a snowbird, so I like to travel somewhere at least a little bit warmer and less snowy for a couple of months over the winter and stay in an airbnb or some kind of short term rental. Very nice and yeah, and that ends up being pretty pricey.

Also known as slow travel, right.

Sure that sounds, or the slomatic lifestyle.

I've heard some folks refer to it are you Are you going domestic? Are you going overseas?

Like?

What's your preference just.

In the US right now? I'd love to do more overseas travel, but haven't haven't gotten there yet.

Well, okay, so you mentioned Wisconsin. We were kind of chatting about this before we hit record data. But like, it's a wholesome state, it's salt of the earth people, it's a it's a good group of folks out there.

I guess, what did you learn about money being out there in the Midwest.

The base of my relationship with money, and from what I see in the culture around me in the Midwest is very focused on work. We learned work ethic, which what I didn't know at the time is called the Protestant work ethic, which is really just it's basically your duty to work, to work hard, to work diligently, and that's how you earn money. I grew up in a working class town, so we were not talking about investment strategies and how to make our money work for us and turn our money into more money. You just had You needed money to live, and you needed to work to earn money, and so that was kind of where where your worth lies, and all of the kind of lessons that I learned about money came from that. So if I was working hard and earning money, then I was allowed to spend money where it was basically the extent of the rules that I learned, and just stay away from debt because you need to earn your money rather than borrow it.

So in some ways those sound like reasonable things to learn and kind of sort of true, right, Like the more you work, the more money you end up having. If you work. Matt and I had recently talked about this on a Friday flight. There was a study that said that, and I just think this makes sense, right that if you work more hours than your peers, you're going to have more money. You're going to be investing in your human capital. But that's also not the end of the story. Did you feel like that you kind of got short change in your financial education because it was too focused on the power of work.

It's really incomplete and not completely accurate either, because work, and especially you know, high paying work and work that you can do for a long time or work as many hours as you want, is not accessible to a lot of people. So some people might have to stay home to take care of children or family. Some people have disabilities that restrict how much they can work, health issues, chronic health issues. Some people live in areas where there just are not a lot of work opportunities. And our culture of work and money, when it stops and only measures your worth based on how much you work and how much money you can earn from working, we really cut out a lot of those people in those circumstances and devalue them quite a bit. And then when we give financial advice based on that basic premise of spend less than you earn, we're also cutting those people out, because if you're not able to earn enough to pay for your life, then we really don't have any advice for you.

Well, as we're talking about work, I guess maybe let's spend a second and talk about your career. Because you started working for a personal finance media startup, and during that time you were making more money. It sounded like you were enjoying your job. But I guess share a little bit about that experience as you've I don't know, maybe you found yourself in a season of life where it seemed like it was working out for you.

That's absolutely right. Yeah, Before I started working in personal finance media. I was a freelancer for about four or five years, a freelance writer, and I was making hardly any money. I was just scraping by. I just couldn't figure out how to really break into that career. It was also I started in twenty ten, so we were still kind of making our way out of the recession. I didn't know that because I had started broke to begin with, so I didn't didn't realize how bad the job market was because I was just getting started. But in twenty fifteen, I got a full time job working for this digital media startup that ran a personal finance site, and I was finally making a full time salary with benefits and saving for retirement and everything that comes with a good full time job, and at the same time getting this masterclass in managing money because I was writing about it for the site. I thought going into it that it was going to be really boring. I hadn't had any interest in personal finance before that, but I liked the idea of the job and the people that I would be working with and being a full time writer, so I gave it a chance. But I really fell in love with it. I really loved what I was learning about personal finance and the ability to break down really complex topics and make them kind of more accessible for people financially. I was learning a lot, but I don't feel like I went through the same kind of journey that a lot of people do when they first get into personal finance, which is everything that I'm learning is helping me to pay down debt and make more money and get my finances in order. What I really benefited from was just making more money, having a much more stable income, and access to resources that could help me kind of get everything else in order.

So you're writing about these topics and yeah, you're making more money from doing it, but you didn't feel like you were able to or you're actually implementing some of the things that you're writing about and kind of focused on.

I wasn't a lot of it. Even though it was fun to write about and to explain a lot of it, didn't feel like it applied to me all that much. We were sharing a lot of really nitty gritty at the time. It wasn't a ton of investment advice. Like I said, We were kind of at the tail end of the recession, so it was more about helping people kind of make ends meet and stretch the money that they did have, things like even just credit card points, or when to use a credit card when it makes sense to, you know, have a credit card that has an annual fee, like all of these kinds of things. It was really interesting for me to learn that stuff. But I was in a position where I had a terrible credit score because I had had years of debt and very little money to be able to dig myself out of it, and so I couldn't even qualify for a credit card. So I was like starting way back behind the starting line of what we were advising for people. And this was supposed to be kind of the accessible version of personal finance that was like kind of the common folk personal finance that was a response to the kind of like Moley Fool or even like CNBC where they were mostly talking about investment and things that seemed inaccessible to a lot of people.

Is that one of the problems in the personal finance space. I think, I think you're pointing out something that is real here. I think Matt and I maybe like to think that at times times, the education we're giving on how to money is a one on one, but it's probably not. It's probably a two to oh one or a twoho two class or something like that. And then there are things that are three to oh one or even more advanced. But is it just that we don't have enough people speaking to the most important things that like almost to speaking to people who feel like they're starting behind the starting line.

We definitely don't have enough of that, and I think sometimes when we do highlight voices that are speaking to those people, we're still not talking to people who themselves are in that position where we're often kind of theorizing. You know, we attempted to do We've attempted to do that in various personal finance sites that I've worked for. Is this idea of taking diversity of you know, diverse communities and diversity of experience into consideration, but not taking that too where you'd think would be the natural conclusion, which is to speak to people or higher writers to be able to speak to the actual experience of growing up in poverty or being exiled from your community because you're an LGBT person whose parents are no longer going to support you in adulthood. Experiences like that, we would sort of pay lip service to it, but don't hear enough from those people to hear what is actually practical advice that can help you based on your real circumstances.

Gotcha.

So you're talking aboutloved experience, and I will say that my lived experience was that budgeting helped me tremendously.

Dana, let's talk. I kind of want to get to the mission I guess of your book.

Yeah, because you say that you and a liberate folks from what you call budget culture, and so first of all, can you define that like what actually like what do you define as budget culture?

Budget culture is what I call the dominant way that we think, teach, and talk about money in our culture. It's really similar to what I see in diet culture, which people are a lot of times a lot more familiar with, in that it kind of defaults to restriction and shame, and we focus on individual responsibility rather than accounting for the ways that the systems that we're part of impact our financial circumstances.

I think you're right that shame has a big role in personal finance. So much of the time it has traditionally and some of the loudest voices often heap the most shame on people who have made mistakes, and so they ask for advice and then they're berated for having done the things they did when they didn't know any better. You're thinking of a certain guy from Tennessee that let's do this. I'm not trying to call, so I'm not pointing figures here in particular.

I'm I think it also happens to be the physically loudest voice in the room.

Sure, but I think there are other people this is this is a constant problem. I think in the personal finance space that shame is a cudgel that's used against people often when they don't have the resources, or the tools or the no house. I think you're pointing out something important there. Does it have to be the case? Though? Can there be a healthy approach to budget culture that doesn't involve those things where we kind of don't through out the baby with the bathwater.

I think that any way of managing money that works for you, Like you said that, you feel like your journey involved budgeting and that was really important for you. I would never tell somebody, First of all, I would never say, well, actually that probably didn't help you, Like you know, your experience. And I would also never say, like, if you're doing it and it feels good for you, I wouldn't push you away from keeping a budget. I definitely wrote the book for people who are constantly being told you need a budget and that it has to be where you start your money management, and it's just not making sense for them. We need that variety of voices and people need to hear it's okay if the majority of the advice that you're hearing doesn't work for you. There are other ways to do this, and you can listen to what makes sense for you. So I know a lot of people who read the book will probably still come out of it following a lot of really traditional financial advice because it's hard to go against the grain with the systems that we're part of. But it's important to have that voice in the room that says, when something doesn't make sense to you, it's okay to try something else.

Sure, yeah, maybe there's an alternative path. And I mean this is I don't have to keep trying to jam a square peg in a round hole.

And I think that's one of the reasons we were most excited to have you on too, because so I tend like I'm like that personality type that I literally still budget Dana, and I do zero some budgeting, Like literally I'm accounting for every single penny and I know where every cent is spent. But I'm also maybe a little what do you call that, adh not adhd ocd that's the actress looking for Whereas with.

You, though you're you're a little more like shooting from the hit. I'm more free spirited, and I also have been pretty frugal over time, so I kind of generally know where I'm at most of the time. But I don't pinch pennies, and I don't micromanage where the money goes, and I don't say, oh, my grocery spending was twenty bucks over this month. Guess I got to get that in line. I just I don't think about money in that way, and as long as I am doing the you know, paying myself first and moving in the right direction when it comes to building networth, I'm just not stressing about the details.

But for you in particular, like you are great at like ballparking figures like that is a gift, and I've seen you do this, whether it's estimating, I don't even know what, but like you are the.

Number of jelly beans in a jar map, Yes.

Like literally, it's everything, like anything from that's like physical like that, to just kind of ballparking, like how much something should cost? Like you are so dang good at ballparking figures, that's.

Why should go on the price is right, Oh, that's why. Yeah, you grow up watching right with your grandma. Right, Oh, yeah, I get it.

But there are a lot of folks who don't have that skill or that gift whatever it is that you want to call it. And so Dana, like, how would you recommend for folks to improve their finances without the framework, without the structure that a budget allows you.

Well, you mentioned the paying yourself first, and I think that's a really good approach to kind of manage your money in a way that feels safe but also kind of empowering and affirming and non restrictive. So I lay out in the book kind of a series of exercises that I call a money map that can help you basically get the lay of the land of your finances and understand what the income you have coming in, the resources you have access to, the financial commitments that you have to meet every month, and the financial goals that you want to work towards. And once you know that, you can take that information and see then what is essentially left over to spend. If you follow all of those kind of steps, if you meet all those commitments, and you work toward those goals in a certain way, you can see what you have left to spend. I call that a yes fund, because when you're wondering whether or not you can afford to buy something, I want the answer to be yes, and so you can then turn to your Yes fund. It's inspired by a bank account that I used to have called a safe to spend account that no longer exists, unfortunately. But the reason that I recommend something like this instead of a budget is a budget tends to be a way to plan for how you use every dollar a lot of times, encourages you to track all of your spending and encourages you to set restrictions on how you spend money. And so a lot of times the answer is no when you're wondering if you can spend, and a money map is a way to when you're If you're not good at making those ballpark estimations, you can get it all sort of laid out and see what your financial circumstances are on paper, in the numbers, so that you can really understand if you start to move things around, how certain financial decisions and how certain spending decisions are going to impact other parts of your financial plan. So you can see if certain financial moves are going to mean you can't pay your rent one month, or if moving into a new place that has higher rent, how is that going to impact your savings goals or you're spending things like that. It just kind of gives you that information if you're not able to kind of visualize it yourself.

Sure, Okay, Yeah, so I like that because what it sounds like. It sounds like a creative way to solve problems that are being presented by just not having an unlimited bank account, right, and so is a part of the Yes Fund getting creative and finding ways to fund some of the spending that you are looking to prioritize.

Yeah, the purpose of it is to not have to think about what you're spending so much of where your money is going, because you will do the pay yourself first method by funding your commitments and funding your goals, and then the money that you have you can just spend, So as long as there's money in your account, you can spend that money without having to think about how it's impacting your goals and financial commitments. And for me, it's just a way of getting money off your mind, which is kind of what I'm always looking for, is to not have to think about money all the time. It sounds like a lot of people I think who really like budgeting or spend tracking maybe enjoy that more or feel a little more kind of orderly or in control doing that. I just prefer to not think about whether or not I can spend money, and so I like to set up my finances in a way that I don't have to worry about that.

Well, that's so fascinating because, like so the reason I budget, and this is one of the ways that I think I was able to actually vocalize it when my wife and I when we're dating or engage at the time, but that we were able to get on the same page was that I was able to realize that by budgeting, that was a way for us to not have to think about it because we've sort of siloed it, right, like we've quarantined it, and it was in this part of our brain where we would intentionally proactively talk about it, but then after that we didn't have to worry about it. And so I guess we're arriving at the the same solution in two very different ways.

But but yeah, I could. I guess I could see how your approach there also does.

That by kind of being like, all right, I can do whatever I want with this money because this is the yes fund, this is the safe to spend money. I don't like there's no second guessing after. In your case, I guess you're talking about setting that money aside to build wealth.

Yeah, And I love that too, that you said you sort of siloed it. You created a space to make financial decisions, and then you could just go about your life and not have to constantly be making financial decisions, because when you are doing that, you realize that every single thing you do throughout the day it has something to do with money. Whether you're making decisions about how you work, or you're spending money, or even just making decisions about how to spend your free time or even just having free time, there's always this thing in the back of your mind that's like, I could be more productive right now, you're never not thinking about money. So anything that works for you and your family to set that burden aside, I'm all for ye.

You're in that you have that some of that free time and you say maybe I should go do this thing. Oh wait that costs money. Should I spend money? Or should do something you know that less expensive with my free time? Like going? I like those are the kinds of I think decisions. We're like, I don't know that confront us all the time as just humans living this life. Or We've got more that we want to get to with you, Dana and including we want to talk about budgeting non budgeting tips that you have in the money space. We'll get to some more discussion with data writing for this. All right, we are back.

From the break talking with Dana Miranda and why no budget is necessary. And Dana, let's talk about a few lines of attack some of the different chapters in your book that would be considered I would say heresy most of the personal finance, Well, you write that you don't have to earn your living?

Can you explain what you mean by that?

So is going off of what I was talking about earlier with work ethic when you really break it down, when you break down the idea that when we talk about earning a living, it is suggesting that you have to do something to be worthy of having a life, of having shelter and food and comfort and healthcare and the things that keep you alive. It's kind of an absurd concept if you really think about it, and it's the way that our economic system is set up under capitalism, that resources exist separate from us, and we have to do something to be able to purchase those resources and have access to them. So the idea that you have to earn a living, I really want to push back against and break that down again because that's not accessible to a lot of people. And we have to separate our personal worth and the way that we value other people from the work that they do, especially the work that they do to earn money, so that we're not devaluing people who are unable to work or choose not to work outside of the home for any reason.

Yeah, and I totally get what you're pointing out here. It also just I'm thinking for some reason about hunter gatherer societies or early agricultural societies and how just to stay alive life was work in a lot of ways. So do you think I guess in my mind, work and human existence are inextricably tied together. Do you think that that shouldn't be the case in modern society.

There's definitely a difference between the work that it takes to kind of live a life and you know, maybe keep yourself fed or safe for whatever. When you're talking hunter gatherer societies and working to earn money. So when you're working a job to earn money to buy those things, you're essentially having to prove to probably a corporation or some kind of company that is holding all the wealth. You're having to give them some of your time and skills and energy in order to get just a little bit of that wealth in order to be able to buy the things that those companies are selling. And so it becomes this kind of weird cycle of just needing to work for a living. So I think the you know, the idea of the Protestant work ethic that I mentioned is newly named thing, but it's kind of an ancient idea and it probably makes more sense when you're in a society where people are just taking care of their families and communities and themselves day to day and that's the work you're doing. Certainly as a human or any animal. You can't just get through life literally not doing anything, you know, getting up and moving. But most of us wouldn't want to either. But the difference comes when there's that line of like you have to work to earn money to buy that life, and that that option is restricted from a lot of people in various ways.

Well, I like that you said that it's not that we should not have to do anything, because I think somewhere some of your booky you wrote that money should be easy and even you know, kind of going back to whether it's we're talking about work ethic or even when it comes to budgeting, And I mean, I think it's great to look at some of the different If you have a current model that's laid out before you and it's not working, certainly consider something different. But like, if I think to anything in my life that I was proud of, it oftentimes took a whole lot of work. Even as a kid, I can think back to like coming across some cheat codes on this video game and you'd enter in the cheat codes and all of a sudden you got I don't know ninety nine lives or.

Something like that. There was no like satisfaction there's and I don't know if beating the game isn't nearly as fulfilling.

As opposed to like having slogged through with your friends over the course of weeks and months. I guess what are your thoughts there, just as far as the and maybe this is a part of that Protestant work ethic, but like I would say, an inherent goodness that comes from the sort of struggle where we are required to sweat and you know, sacrifice as well, Like that's a massive part of being able to achieve different goals, and there isn't the same kind of satisfaction in my view when you bypass that.

Absolutely, I think you have to think about what the purpose is. You know. The video game example is a really good example of kind of how we approach money in our culture too, because when you use cheat codes and you just basically skip ahead, you're considering the purpose to be beating the game or beating what's the thing at the end.

Called the ultimate boss, beating.

The boss at the end. But that's not really the purpose of playing video games. The purpose is to you know, have fun with your friends, or spend the time strategizing or discovering things in the world of the video game. If everyone can just jump to the end, then there's really no reason to have the game. There are other ways to do that. So I think a lot of times we approach money in that same way of like, all we want to do is a mass wealth and a mass the most wealth and hold on to it as much as we can. But that's really skipping to the end. The point of having money is to be able to live the lives that we want, and if we're not doing that, then we're really missing out.

It sounds like you're poking a finger in the eye of the Fire movement there a little bit, which, oh yeah, I'm kind of I'm with you on, like, oh yeah, I think there is that sort of element let me gather as much under my wings as I can, and often without the thought process for what a life well lived looks like. And not that every one of the Fire movements like that, not at all. We've had a lot of friends who ascribe to that, and there's some wisdom I'm gleaned from that movement. But I think, yeah, you're right, Like, what's it all for is an important question to ask along the way.

There's a ton of variety in the Fire movement, and I think the conversations there are really interesting. It certainly started with that idea of just make as much money as possible with as many sacrifices as you can handle. Yeah, and then sort of branched off where a lot of people I think, started to see this idea of financial independence sounds really great, so that they don't have to work for a living, which is a great concept. But then they thought, but I don't want it to be at the expense of my life for five or ten years. I don't want that to be the only thing I'm thinking about. And so then we have Slow Fire and other movements that have come along to kind of expand that idea, and I think it's bringing up really interesting things in the way that we relate to money and work.

I agree. I think, yeah, the healthiest part of the Fire movement has brought up in the past five years, and it's been around those kinds of conversations and it's created different paths towards financial independence and a little less of an adversarial relationship to work. I think maybe that was at the beginning that was kind of the moniker, but that's changed. I want to ask you about debt. There are a couple of things that you write about that I think also would be kind of if it was a personal finance textbook, they'd be like, sorry, I don't know if we can include that. Right. You talk about leveraging debt to improve your financial situation, but can't take me on more debt create more money problems for people down the road. How do you think about the role of debt in people's lives.

Sure, yeah. I talk about debt products as a resource that's available to you right in line. Like when I talk about making a money map. There's a column for your income, there's a column for your assets, column for community resources you have access to, and there's a column for debt resources, so credit and loans that you could tap into. And I think it's really important to see debt that way, because if we just approach debt with fear, we could be restricting a lot of times the resources that we have access to, especially if we're not able to or for some reason don't want to expand what we can earn in income using debt. It can help you live the life that you want to live, or access things that you need that you might not otherwise be able to. And we know that we talk about it with businesses a lot leveraging debt. Almost every business is based on some kind of debt that they're leveraging and they're just kind of managing it. Business businesses as an entity or business owners don't tend to have this idea of needing to get out of debt as quickly as possible. It's just kind of one of the resources available to them. And we don't extend that same grace a lot of times to individuals, especially working class or middle class individuals, but we do tend to extend it to like really wealthy individuals a lot of times. But we could kind of use it in the same way.

Why do you think that is?

That's actually I think that's an interesting point that you bring up the fact that, I mean everything that you just said, the differences between an institution or a business and their ability to take on debt, and it just hanging out as opposed to how it is that we as individuals approach our debt typically. Is it because our finances are simpler? I'm curious if you have a theory as to why it's more acceptable for businesses as opposed to individuals.

I think it's kind of a broad systemic thing. So when we look at sort of the way that our financial systems and our sort of society and culture in general are organized, it's really to favor people who are already wealthy, individuals who are already wealthy, and to favor businesses amassing more wealth, and so we give them the tools to do that. And all of our financial products and services are crafted through legislation that we create and regulation, and so those entities are able to appeal to the people creating those regulations that can kind of shape and craft those products, and individuals don't have that same kind of leverage a lot of times to influence that regulation and legislation. And there's also in that sort of system where we want to just where wealth is kind of a mass in a very small sort of portion of our culture, it doesn't benefit that system to have a lot of individuals be able to tap into a lot of resources, because that kind of has to go one direction in order for those financial institutions to make money off of us borrowing from them. If we were able to borrow just as easily. The system wouldn't work in the same way. So I think it's kind of a broad sort of critique of our financial systems and of capitalism that is a little bit beyond kind of what I get into as a personal finance educator. But when you're thinking about why do we have that distinction, I think it's important to kind of ask those systemic questions.

Another thing you say at one point in the book, you say, you don't have to pay all your bills, and that would be like a personal finance one on one course. It would be like, pay your bills on time every single month would be the advice given. Why why do you maybe think that's not quite on point?

Yeah, And my editor really pushed me because I originally said you don't have to pay your bills, and she said, maybe just you don't have to pay all of your bills. She's oftened it a little, which is probably a good idea. The idea is less that you can just let your bills pile up and become overdue, and more of looking at your kind of living expenses, which we often think about as fixed expenses, looking at them as more changeable and considering them as financial commitments that you've made, So you have to actively make a commitment, which means you can also choose actively to uncommit from something. So I mentioned earlier, you know, thinking about how the amount of money you're putting toward housing in rent or mortgage or something impacts the other things that you're doing in life. So if you're living somewhere and regularly paying really high rent, that is impacting your ability to save for something in the future, or it's impacting your ability to spend day to day in the way that you want to. You don't have to feel like you're just stuck with that expense. You can get creative. And I share a story in the book about a couple who was living in LA with really high rent and they wanted to make a change in the way that they were working. So their income was going to be cut way down, and in order to accommodate that, they ended the lease early on their LA apartment and they bought an airstream and moved into that and now are years later, are still living in an RV and traveling around the country, so they have much lower cost of living to be able to accommodate that. So that's a big, extreme kind of lifestyle change. But I want to encourage people to look at financial commitments and think about what kinds of commitments can you cut if you need to, and also sometimes what can go overdo? What can be left to sit or pile up or whatever, and what are the consequences if you let that happen, and can you live with those consequences?

Like some bills are more important than others, the mortgage more important than the credit card payment. Yeah.

Well, and as you are explaining to this, Dana, what I'm hearing you say too is that, like we have more agency and control over our finances as individuals than maybe your chapter headings would make you think that you believe, which is honestly refreshing, right, Like the ability for us as individuals to choose, you know what, I.

Don't giving up the expensive apartment.

I don't want to live here anymore because this is an important to me anymore. Like to me, like, that's the empowering message that I can totally get behind. And so I guess in a similar vein one of your chapter headings talks about not needing investment accounts, is there like a silver ligning that's gonna make Joel and Matt happy about it, all right, talking about that one.

Make So the stance that I come into that conversation with is that investing is by necessity an ethical dilemma, depending on where your values stand. But where my value stand is that in order to make money from investments, the underlying companies have to make a profit, and in order to make a profit, they need to exploit something in the equation. So there are exploiting people for labor, they're exploiting environmental resources, they're exploiting consumers with unfair pricing, things like that, and that's how we make money from investing. And so just sort of that underlying system of extracting capital comes with an ethical dilemma. So I kind of start there, but then also talk about the reality that we don't have a strong social safety net in this country that allows you to age and stop working at some point very easily if you don't have an investment account. So the message in that chapter is investing is unethical but maybe inevitable.

Do you think exploitation has to be part of it, or is every business built around exploitation, or could you reframe it and say that many businesses are built around service, and they have a duty to serve their customers and their competition with other people to serve those customers, and that they know if they want to stay in business and continue to stick around, they have to please the people they're trying to reach. Like, do you think there's an element of that too, or is exploitation kind of the only.

Thing you see technically under capitalism, Like if you're getting into sort of a philosophical place, exploitation is built in because that's where profit comes from. If a company is making profits, that money is not going to the people who created the value necessarily. But that is a technical detail, and I don't think you need to make financial decisions based on that. I do talk in the book about considering investing in local businesses or building your own business, And there's a lot less of what we think of as exploitation in the way that those businesses tend to run because the people who are running them are stakeholders in their community. They have a much closer relationship with the workers that are adding value to the business, They have a much closer relationship with the consumers and the community that's being affected by it, and so the decisions that are being made there are going to be a lot more ethical and you can get a lot closer or to something that kind of makes sense. The problem with the way that our systems are set up is that it's pretty tough to make a retirement plan that's just based around investing in those kinds of businesses because you know, we have tax advantages.

All businesses aren't taking investors most of the time.

Yeah, yeah, a lot of or building your own business can be really tough and you end up putting a lot of money into it and like I said, taking on a lot of debt rather than just accumulating money like you could in an investment account. And we also have again regulation and legislation set up to steer people toward retirement accounts and investment accounts.

Well, I think we can agree though that the more local you get, not to say that there isn't fraud that takes place on a local level, but just waste, right, Like the higher up you go and the more global you know, like not just national but even global, but something gets like there is a lot more room for there to be practices that are tough to.

Tough to get behind. Regig just greater levels of bureaucracy and overhead and a distance from the customers. Yeah as well.

Yeah, so I think that's certainly a massive argument for things more at a local level. But Dandy, you've shared some critiques with the I don't know more of the traditional approach to personal finances, but we'll get to some of the different alternatives that you mentioned in your book as well'll get to that more right after this.

All right, we're back. We're still talking with Dana or Randa. Her new book is you Don't Need a Budget, and that I think it, Matt, When you first read the headline or where you first read the title of that book, you cried, a single tier. A single tier went down your face because you love budget so much. Me, I was like, I kind of agree with her, but I think I think it's situationally dependent at least. And data one of the things you talk about in your book. You say that the head, the heart, and health should be motivating factors for how we make financial decisions. Do you think that traditional personal finance advice minimizes those elemental parts of who we are?

Very much? I do. Traditional financial advice I think focuses very much on the head, which is your sort of more financial goals, the numbers, the spreadsheets, the way that you're thinking and making decisions. It's very much focused on just that part and minimizes a lot of times heart and health and heart is what I think of as like your passions and your values and sort of the core of who you are and your health is your best interest living life in a way that supports your physical and mental and social health. And we've sort of moved in recent years, maybe in the last five or ten years, to focusing a little more on financial wellness and thinking about how our financial decisions have that impact on the heart. We think about choosing work that we're passionate about. We think about how we can use money to support joy and peace and ease in our day to day lives, and not just towards amassing the right amount of wealth in the right amount of time or something that's very head focused. But I still see that we don't think much about our health, our physical and mental health and well being in the way that we teach personal finance. That kind of is still left out of the conversation.

It's almost like someone needs to start a healthy, rich substock or something like that.

Yes, Yeah, someone needs to get that conversation going.

Someone needs to jump on that ur L. That's the name of Data's site. You know what.

Like, what keeps standing out to me, I guess is the fact that a lot of what you're saying we actually do agree with, as far as maybe the mechanics right or in this case, the way you're framing it here the head, like how the numbers work, this is how interest works. This will you have more money or less money at the end of the day if you're doing X, y Z. But it's almost as if the general mindset, like the overall attitude towards how you're thinking about your relationship to money. It's like maybe that's what's changing. Do you think that that's an accurate way to maybe summarize some of the different approaches to personal finances out there?

Yeah, definitely, all three of those things are important. I'm not saying that we're currently focused on the head and we need to move into you know, heart and health, but that you have to consider all three of those elements of financial wellness and rather than just focusing on the advice that helps you achieve specific financial goals, so it's important to see all of those layers in the financial decisions that you're making and to understand what you need to support all of those elements of your well being.

Daniel, you've levied some critiques against the system, right, and I think we're particularly talking about the American system of economics capitalism in particular. I'm curious, though, when you look at the numbers. We live in the most prosperous country in the history of the world, and there is I think a reason that people are lined up to immigrate to the United States. Typically that's because they believe it's the land of opportunity. They have more ability to move up and down the income spectrum. Typically move up the income spectrum from wherever they are coming from, they have a chance at a better life. I even heard someone the other day who's from Canada and they said the best move I ever made was coming to the United States. And I was like, Oh, that's really interesting because it's not like Canada is not a prosperous country. You have a lot of opportunity there as well. So I'm curious. I guess when you see that and you see that there's a lot of people who want to come here and see this as the land of opportunity. What does that say to you? I guess about the system and how other people perceive it.

We have a really effective story in the United States about the opportunities that people can have under capitalism, and that continues to motivate people to essentially feed that that system and do things like support tax cuts for the wealthy or something because of promises that are made under the system. But more and more, as we move through history, more and more the decisions that we're making are making that kind of mobility harder. And I don't have I don't have the numbers behind this in my head, but it is getting harder since you know, about the nineteen eighties, as we really started changing the way that we regulate financial products and companies and work. It's getting a lot harder to have that kind of class mobility that we lionize in the United States, and the gap between classes of people is getting bigger and bigger, and so a lot of that benefit that is part of the American story is going to a very small percentage of people in a really kind of profound way, and it's getting a lot harder for the rest of us, like the vast majority of us to really be able to tap into that, and so we're kind of actually stuck without a ton of mobility. We're sort of stuck in wherever we whatever kind of class we were born into.

I think when you look at home, affordability, that's something that probably I bet a lot of folks look to as like, man, my parents and my grandparents, they all have the ability to afford I guess at the time the housing boom, like they're all the ranges that were being built, so like everybody had the ability to buy their own home. But still I can still not think of a country I'd rather live than myself, even with the US and all of its flaws and all the flaws that capitalism has, I mean, certainly not perfect, but man, it's tough for me to look past like the innovation that takes place here in the US, Like even like healthcare as busted of a system we have, Like if folks are looking for like the very best health care, like when it comes to you know, just think about vain know the vaccines that we were able to roll out and stend out to the rest of the world. But even certain things like it makes me think of like cancer research and treatments, like people come from all over the world because of I certainly don't want to make an argument for that. Our healthcare system.

Is it only costs twice as much as every other developed country, and what could be wrong. It is not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we are because of the way we're structured. We are incentivizing the cures for a lot of these diseases and treatments for a lot of these diseases that aren't getting made anywhere else. And so in some ways, some of these other countries are riding our coatails. And so there's that element too. So I don't know what to do to fix a busted system, but I feel like, Dana, you pointed out some of the flaws incredibly well, and specifically some of the flaws out of the ways that we think about personal finance. Your perspective is an important one. So thank you so much, Dana for joining us on the show today. And where can our listeners find out more about you and your new book?

Yeah, thanks for having me, and I also really appreciate you being willing to have the conversation and look at that kind of counter countercultural perspective. So you can find out all about the book at youdn'tneedabudget dot com and you can follow me on substag or to subscribe through email to healthy Rich at healthy rich dot co.

Heck, yeah, we'll make sure to link to all that in our show notes as well. Dana, thank you so much for speaking with us today.

Yeah, thanks for having me all right, Matt, that was a really interesting conversation with Dana. Miranda and I think she comes from a different perspective than you and I typically do, but we wanted to hear from her, and I learned a lot talking to her, and I really loved kind of reading her book and hearing her approach. I'm curious, what was your big takeaway from this conversation. Well, say, I was encouraged.

I guess Towards the end of the conversation, I realized that it seems like we've got more in common than maybe the title of her book or the chapter headings in her book might make you think. And when she was talking about choosing what bills to pay, you can have those clickable headlines, Matt and I totally understand that. But when she was talking about certain bills being more important than others. Like the root of what she was talking about and what she said was that, like, you have actively committed to taking on this financial obligation, this expense, and you can actively uncommit to doing that too. And so what is at the core of that is autonomy, an agency, and an ability for us as individuals to choose how it is that we want to live our life, as opposed to being like taking a more passive approach or posture towards your our personal finances where we're counting on the government to bail us out or to take care of this, or for somebody else, or not even the government, but even like some nonprofit where we're just sitting on the sidelines waiting for them to come along.

And sometimes that's necessary, right, There is not a hard times. There is a.

Place for organizations like that, for churches, for just some of the systems that we've even set up through our government. Like I'm not I'm not one to say to burn it all down in that we need to be completely abolishing our garment. I'm not advocating for anarchy. Matt doesn't want kids to school lunches. We need we need rules for our government with the kids eat, I say, Matt.

To function, but I guess yeah.

I wanted to highlight the fact that I was encouraged that at the end of the day, we do have power to direct our lives, not only by what we choose to do, but what it is that we choose to spend our money.

On and what we choose not to spend our money one. So, I think my big takeaway was when we were talking about debt and she was talking about nuanced in Shades of Gray in how we think about debt and which debts we choose to pay off and win. And I think there's a lot of wisdom in that this is something I think maybe she comes at it from a slightly different slant than you and I do, but I think she's spot on like you and I are.

Not.

Debt is bad. Payoff debt as quickly as possible, short of people. Some debt can be good debt. Some debt can actually fuel your financial journey at times. I think if we be really really careful, because there are a lot of nefarious forms of debt that can derail your financial journey, they might get you something that you want now that maybe you should have waited for and saved up for. But there are other times where taking on a measured amount of debt can help you make more progress. So just maybe we need a more nuanced discussion about debt. That's something we try to do here on the show. Yeah, and we always have Yeah when people ask us questions about it. Well, yeah, don't take out a personal loan. Personal loans suck. Credit card debt sucks. But then there are other forms of debt that can be beneficial to your ultimate ability to earn more, to buy a house that you don't have, you know, cash to pay for the full thing for, like a mortgage can make sense, right, So just be thoughtful about debt, but maybe don't rule debt out of your life altogether. Totally.

Yeah, this is one of those instances where I feel like we are in the extreme middle. We're kind of like refereeing a fight between Dave Raims and Dana Miranda when it comes to different things like this. But yeah, in the end, certainly glad that we were able to spend a minute and talk with Dana Miranda. Joel, Let's get to the beer that you and I enjoyed during this episode, which was a silent accord is what this was by Six Bridges brewing out of John's Creek. And I don't know if you've ever had a beer by these guys on the show is different Georgia or Atlanta suburb And no, I don't think I ever had any beer by these guys.

But I picked this one up, saw it on the shelf, and I was like, that looks interesting. And this to me, I like the Matt label. Yeah, it makes me want to scratch up with my fingernail. This beer reminded me of a beer by another local brewery, Creature Comforts. They're Cocoa Bunny. Oh, because it's got the coconut and vanilla thing going on in This is in a milk stout. They do a milk porter, but this is a milk porter. Yeah, Okay, this is good, but Coco Bunny's better think so. Yeah, it's just got such good roasty like this.

Is the kind of beer that you can enjoy in the afternoon, like after lunch, if you're wanting some of those coffee like flavors but you're afraid of like getting that ninety milligram hit of caffeine this close to your bedtime. That's what's going through my head at least when I'm like, yeah, I really shouldn't have any coffee this afternoon because it's gonna impact me instead, that's when you reach for a delicious stout like this.

So I need to do more research on this. But I've read that coffee impacts people differently based on their genetics, and I'm pretty I'm pretty sure I'm one of those people who coffee doesn't have nearly as much of an impact on as others.

Or maybe it's because you sleep so poorly all the time. That could be that, Like your body's just like extra hit of caffeine.

That's nothing, all right, But we got a jet for now. That's gonna do it. For this episode. We'll put links to Dana's book into her substack in the show notes up on our website at howtomoney dot com. You know it. That's gonna be it, though, So until

Next time, best Friends Out and best Friends Out

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