Here’s some unexpected financial advice: You don’t need a budget, don’t pay all your bills, and pay less attention to that investment account.
One personal finance author is serious about offering similar advice to her readers—although it might be more fair to say that she’s provocatively suggesting that there are good reasons to question the truisms that call on people to track every dollar they make.
Meet Dana Miranda, the author of “You Don’t Need a Budget.” Some of her ideas might raise your blood pressure, but she believes that her provocative advice offers a wake-up call for people to live a more ethical, stress-free financial life.
“Regardless of what your financial goal is, whether you’re trying to pay off debt or save up to buy a house or go to school or whatever it is you’re trying to do, we often start with giving people the advice to make a budget—which defaults to restriction,” she says.
Rethinking personal finance advice
A recent MarketWatch survey found that more than 66% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, even people earning six figures. Nearly half of adults said they were broke. These dismal statistics come as no surprise to Miranda, who believes that one-size-fits-all approaches to personal finance are unrealistic and are grounded in restriction, shame, and greed.
“Sometimes you just can’t plan out every dollar,” Miranda tells Fortune. “If you don’t know where your next dollar is coming from, you can’t make a plan for how you’re going to spend it.”
Miranda equates budget culture to diet culture, where individuals face unrealistic pressure to conform to the rules. For anyone who’s struggling financially, the default is often to tell people to spend less money or spend it differently. If they don’t, they are shamed.
“We just take it all on individually and think, if I can’t afford my housing, I need to be working harder,” says Miranda. “I need to be spending less on lattes and avocado toast, those kinds of tropes, there has to be something that I can change about myself, and as long as I’m not doing that, I’m feeling ashamed.”
According to NerdWallet, three-quarters of all Americans have a monthly budget, yet credit card balances are at a record high of $1.14 trillion.
Moving from budgets to values
In their book, Miranda encourages individuals to think more about the broader economic system and the value placed on the numbers in one’s bank account.
“We take it back to this individualistic mindset of thinking that anything that’s wrong, it’s our fault, and so we feel ashamed about it, rather than looking at the larger system and understanding how systemic forces have put you into the situation that you’re in, how those forces have created,” Miranda says.
Instead of accepting restriction, shame, and greed—themes associated with budgeting, paying off debt, investing, and more—she proposes alternate ideas:
- From restriction to conscious spending: Make money decisions that make sense for you, instead of looking to an outside set of results for what you should do.
- From shame to self-trust: Know that the decisions that you make are the right ones for you at the time, even if doesn’t sound like what other people are recommending.
- From greed to embracing generosity: Feel good about giving away money.
Talking about money in terms of resources, commitments, goals, and spending can also help one have a healthier financial relationship, Miranda noted in a 2023 essay.
Personal finance’s one-size-fits-all recommendations
Miranda spent the last decade as a freelance personal finance writer, but at times, her annual income was barely $12,000—four times less than today’s average pay of all workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. During her experiences, she realized that published financial advice was largely all the same: budget, save, and invest.
In her book, she takes aim at popular personal finance gurus like Dave Ramsey and YNAB’s Jesse Mecham for their optimism—that after taking a few corrective financial actions, someone can be on the path to becoming rich. Miranda argues that budget culture promises a “singular path to a good life” that’s defined largely by wealth.
“In my experience—and anytime I talk to someone who is living paycheck to paycheck—a budget doesn’t automatically give you more money,” says Miranda. “You don’t just make more money because you’re managing it in a certain way.”
“You Don’t Need a Budget” was released late last year and reviews on Goodreads are mixed. Miranda’s words about money’s relationship with capitalism are exactly what some people say they’ve been trying to express for years, but others say they plan to stick with budgeting.
Miranda says she isn’t expecting readers to necessarily revolutionize their finances overnight, rather she hopes people can ponder differing perspectives.
“I think it’s important for us all to always be questioning the messages that we’re hearing, especially about something as impactful as money, so that we can make sure that we’re not participating in perpetuating that system, that we can make sure that we are doing what we can to make sure that it is working for everybody,” she says.
