Episode 356: Anti-Budget Culture with Dana Miranda
Doree and Elise chat about Doree’s birthday party hosted by Elise where friends were made, trivia was played, and the string lights shone bright!
Then, in the second episode of Money Month, Doree and Elise speak with Dana Miranda, a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF), personal finance journalist, and author of You Don’t Need A Budget. They discuss why budget culture is a parallel to diet culture, how having financial education doesn’t automatically level the playing field, and all the tenets of budget culture we have to unlearn in order to begin intuitive spending.
Mentioned in this Episode
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Episode Chapters
*Time stamps are approximate and do not include ads
0:00 Intro & chitchat
~13:10 First ad break
~13:45 Dana’s self care practice
~16:00 Dana’s relationship with money
~17:00 How Dana got into finance journalism
~19:00 Why you don’t need a budget
~22:00 The parallel to budget culture
~24:00 What to do instead of budgeting
~25:00 Second ad break
~25:50 Breaking down the tenets of budget culture
~29:00 Challenging the idea of intuitive spending
~32:30 Money Maps
~36:30 Intuitive Spending with impulse control
~40:00 Why having more financial education doesn’t solve everything
~42:15 What should we be teaching our kids about money
~44:30 Listener questions
~45:00 how to learn to relax about money
~48:00 Practical tools to manage our money with grace
~52:00 Intention Zone
Transcript
The transcript for this episode is Ai generated.
Doree (00:10):
Hello and welcome to Forever 35, a podcast about the things we do to take care of ourselves. I'm Doree Shafrir.
Elise (00:17):
And I'm Elise Hu. And we are two friends who like to talk a lot about serums,
Doree (00:21):
And this is Money Month. This is our second episode of our themed month of Money and personal finance related content. So today we have Dana Miranda, the author of the book, you Don't Need a Budget, and we will introduce her in a few minutes. Before we do that, we're going to catch up a little bit like we usually do
Elise (00:45):
And we have a lot to catch up on because we just saw each other. Well, Kate had her book event, so Doree and Kate actually just got together in person recently, and then Doree, Kate and I were all together for Doree's trivia birthday last weekend where you can hire a trivia caller to your private party. It can be a baby shower, it can be a birthday party, it can be anything. It turns out it can be a wedding. You could have can have a trivia color at your
Doree (01:15):
Wedding. You can have a trivia wedding. It sounds pretty
Elise (01:17):
Fun. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I had a friend who did that except the bride and Groom did the calling and they did general categories. Oh, that's cute. But then they also did categories about them, so it was like, how well do you know the bride and
Doree (01:33):
Groom? Oh, that's like a classic bachelorette party game. It's like the Newlyw game.
Elise (01:39):
Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to get caught not knowing enough stuff about your friends, but they made it easy. So it was good. This trivia call for Doree's birthday party was, I thought a lot of the questions were actually quite tricky. There was a round in which we had to list the elements of the periodic table that had five letters or less.
Doree (02:01):
I was like, Ari, are you serious? He often, often does a last round that is like that where you have to list a bunch of things. I think one time I remember it was something like all the countries that start with the letter J or something like that, you know what I mean? It's always something like that and whichever team is able to list the most gets the points. But yeah, this is a guy who used to work with my husband with Matt on a TV show called the Goldbergs. Ari was the script supervisor, so very detail oriented job, and he started doing trivia on the side just like for fun because I think he did it at bars and then he just started his own company. So we had actually had him at our house pre COVID to do a trivia night. That was super fun. And then when COVID started, he started doing trivia on Zoom and we did a couple of Zoom trivia parties, which were actually really fun, more fun than you would think because you would go into private rooms on Zoom with your team Oh
Elise (03:17):
Yeah, with your team,
Doree (03:19):
Remember those and talk about the questions and then you would all come back. And so it was fun. And so we have another friend who used to work with them on the Goldbergs Nicole, who every year she has an annual trivia holiday party with Ari. And for the last couple of years we've had Ari come do trivia for my birthday. And this year I cajoled Elise into hosting my party, which was so nice in her beautiful backyard. The string lights were perfect. String lights looked, looked amazing. Oh yes, because
Elise (03:53):
My string lights had broken. That's right. We talked about this Lio messed up my string lights. String lights were popping or no, I messed up my string lights and then I needed You had to
Doree (04:04):
Call Lio. Yes, exactly. And yeah, you had all this great food. It was just so lovely. And the other thing about Ari's trivia is the teams are random, so he goes around with this little bag with different colored gems and you all pick gems to see which team you're going to be on. So people usually end up on a team where, because my friends, not all my friends are friends with each other, so I think a lot of them know each other, especially from previous parties, but you're usually with people you don't necessarily know super well. So it's always fun, I think to sort of see the weird random knowledge that people have that you just don't know about. Yes,
Elise (04:52):
And also it's a way for your friends to become friends. Totally, totally. Because you really bond with your trivia team.
Doree (04:58):
Yes. And then
Elise (04:59):
You get competitive
Doree (05:00):
Together and all those things. One of Elise's friends ended up on my team and he's so funny. He was great. He was so fun, and I think at first was like, well, what have I gotten myself into? I'm sitting here with four strangers, he's the
Elise (05:17):
Perfect person at any party to just roll with it. And in fact, we met at a party, so I had invited my friend Sam because I hadn't seen him in forever, and he had texted me, I guess maybe the week before, when are we ever going to see each other again? I don't think I had seen him since maybe the holiday party circuit. And I was like, well, why don't you just come over this week? I'm having people over and Doree, as you know, you did not have to cajole me into hosting a party, any excuse to host a party. I'm like, great, come on down. I think I had hosted a party three days before that for Memorial Day, and then just yesterday I was like, oh, who are we going to have over? So I love it. I'm really thrilled to do it. I was glad to meet a lot of your friends and become closer with some of them who were teamed up with me on the other end of the yard. But yeah, Sam was really funny. He knows nothing about really most topics, but said that he knew stuff about space because he's a lobbyist for some space organization. So we're like, oh, great. Well maybe you'll come in handy.
Doree (06:29):
There was one question about planets like the A moon, and he was like, I have no idea. You were like, Sam, this is your one thing that you said you knew about. You said you knew about Space. He was like,
Elise (06:43):
Sorry. There was a round of just all clips from Broadway musicals and I would've been destroyed by that because I mean, I guess I would've known the main ones, but some of them that I just haven't seen or I don't remember. I didn't remember Rent at All because Rent was late nineties. All the theater kids were super into it, and then I never saw it, but I was on a team with your friend Danielle who loves the musical.
Doree (07:15):
She sure does. That was her round to shine. Oh my gosh. She gave me a look from across the room that was like, you're going down. I will say we got almost all of them on that round. There was one we missed, but I knew more of those than I thought I would partly because I did do Broadway dance class and there were a couple songs. The Good Morning Baltimore was always a warmup song, so I knew that song very well. And there were a few others. Zanne got the rent one immediately within one note being played. She's like, this is Rent. She also knew there was a round of a picture round of celebrities who have the same birthday as me, and she got the guy who was a kid at the end. Do you remember that one? You remember who
Elise (08:18):
Was Oh, yes. He was a kid in love actually.
Doree (08:19):
Yes, exactly. And she
Elise (08:21):
Knew the blonde, the sweet Blonde boy and love actually.
Doree (08:24):
Yes. She knew immediately his full name. You're like, great.
Elise (08:29):
There was one that was mayor, but
Doree (08:32):
You
Elise (08:32):
Thought it was somebody else. And so we were tripped up by some of those because it
Doree (08:36):
Was like, yeah, some of them were tricky.
Elise (08:38):
They were, yeah, it was like former Brat Pack members, but more of the outer ring of the Brat pack.
Doree (08:47):
Right,
Elise (08:47):
Totally. But I thought that you would really kill that round because it was people that you share a birthday with. And I know a lot of my birthday twins, I share a birthday with Randalls like Hal Holbrook, RIP, but also Laura Ingles Wilder, and that would've been a
Doree (09:07):
Really funny one to put on.
Elise (09:09):
Right, exactly. What does she look like? I don't know. I know her book. Which one's on there? Did you already know shared a birthday
Doree (09:15):
With you? I knew Janet Jackson, Tori Spelling and Megan Fox.
Elise (09:20):
Okay.
Doree (09:21):
I did not know I share a birthday with Tucker Carlson or Liberace. I did not know David Bo. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think I knew
Elise (09:35):
He was the Bones guy, right?
Doree (09:37):
Yes.
Elise (09:38):
No. Or Buffy
Doree (09:39):
Buffy. Buffy Buffy.
Elise (09:40):
Buffy Buffy. Yes.
Doree (09:42):
Who else was random that I didn't, well, I didn't know Mayor.
Elise (09:47):
Yeah,
Doree (09:49):
Thomas Brody Ster, that's his name. That
Elise (09:52):
Kid
Doree (09:53):
The Love actually Guy.
Elise (09:55):
We were able to bring that back around. Good. We were probably, there was some listener that was like, who is that kid? And then it became a thing for the last 90 seconds, but that's
Doree (10:05):
His name. I mean, I'm looking through, oh, Melanie Linsky. I did not know I shared a birthday with her.
Elise (10:11):
Yeah, she's sweet.
Doree (10:12):
I'm now looking through this list and there's many other people who I would not have recognized, so I'm glad he kept them somewhat mainstream. Alright, it's a tricky, well, Elise, should we get to our guest?
Elise (10:28):
Yes. Really excited to get to our guest, Dana Miranda. She is a personal finance author and journalist and a certified educator in personal finance. She's been writing about personal finance as a staffer, freelancer, author and creator since 2015. So for the past 10 years, she shares her innovative budget free approach, which recognizes the way financial education fails to meet the needs of marginalized folks and shifts the conversation toward a better relationship with money for everyone. So she is the author of a new book called You Don't Need a Budget, and the Creator of Healthy Rich, a newsletter about how capitalism impacts the ways we think teach and talk about money. She's the expert behind the nationally syndicated Dear Penny financial advice column, and she's a contributor to Business Insider, fortune Salon and more. But like I said, her book is, you Don't Need a Budget, and her whole argument makes a lot of sense if you think about it, but it is going to sound a little
Doree (11:30):
Provocative, it's going to sound radical, it's going to sound provocative and radical. So I just want to prepare you, and I think you don't have to agree with what she says, but I would say go into it with an open mind and maybe if you don't agree with everything she says, maybe there's something she says that you can take something from. I know she really encouraged me to shift some of my thinking and just examine things from a different lens. So I think that's the way to go into it
Elise (12:01):
And that's the way we thought about it too, right? Yes. That's the way we thought about it when we were programming this month. We didn't want to just have four people to help you with your retirement planning. Totally,
Doree (12:12):
Yes.
Elise (12:13):
We wanted this to be a wide ranging month where we thought about money in different ways and had practical tips towards the end
Doree (12:20):
In
Elise (12:20):
Which you're going to have some of your finance questions answered. So those questions and answers are still coming later this month, but yeah, there's going to be a lot of diversity in our guests and we're excited for that.
Doree (12:32):
Yeah. Alright, before we get to Dana, just a reminder that our website is forever 35 podcast.com. We have links there to everything we mentioned on the show. We are also on Instagram at Forever 35 podcast. Our Patreon is at patreon.com/forever three five. And just a reminder, if you want add free episodes, you can get those at the $10 level or above. Our favorite products are at shop my us slash forever 35 and our newsletter is at Forever 35 podcast do com slash newsletter. Also, please call or text us at five nine three nine and email us at Forever 35 Podcast gmail. And now we'll take a break.
Elise (13:09):
We'll be right back with Dana Miranda.
Doree (13:17):
Dana, welcome to Forever 35. We're so happy to have you on the show.
Dana Miranda (13:21):
Thanks so much for having me.
Doree (13:22):
Yeah, so we start off by asking all of our guests about a self-care practice that they have. So is there something that you're doing right now that you would kind of consider taking care of yourself?
Dana Miranda (13:34):
Something that I kind of pick up and put down throughout my life is that I'm picking up right now is playing my flute for fun. I am not good at it. I played through high school and so I haven't had any kind of training or anything or playing with a group in like 20 years, but I've kept the flute and every once in a while I pick up music and just play with it. And it's probably the only thing in my life that I do that I don't think of some way to monetize it or systematize it or whatever, optimize in some kind of way. It's just something that I'm like, this feels good to do and it makes me happy.
Elise (14:13):
Oh, that's lovely. I love that. I am also a former flutist, I guess I didnt know that.
Dana Miranda (14:20):
Yes. Well I think once a flues always, always.
Elise (14:23):
I also played the piccolo briefly for a band performance, but my flutes, I had two flutes and they were from high school, one was from junior high and the other one was from high school and they were both stolen in a burglary in Waco, Texas.
Dana Miranda (14:38):
Oh my goodness.
Elise (14:39):
So I don't have a flute to play. Maybe I should just go rent one and enjoy or just even experiment with whether I can still play a flute and I remember the fingering and all of that.
Dana Miranda (14:50):
Right. It's fun. It's kind of amazing how I can put it down for a really long time and still pick it up and just zip through a B flat scale, just its kind of muscle memory. So I do have to look up fingerings every once in a while
Elise (15:03):
Challenge
Dana Miranda (15:04):
Accepted. There are a lot of things that are still there.
Elise (15:07):
Love that. Love that. Okay, well let's turn to the book, which is called You Don't Need a Budget. Before we get into the argument, what is your own origin story when it comes to your relationship with money?
Dana Miranda (15:23):
My relationship with money is really based on growing up in a working class town, in a working class family where we didn't basically get a financial education and that was also growing up in the nineties where we weren't getting financial education in school and our parents didn't not talk about money, but they didn't give a financial education in the way that they just didn't know how a lot of products work and they didn't know how our financial systems work because we basically just worked for money and you needed money to get by day to day and that was the main lesson. It was just stay out of debt because that is just living beyond your means and we can't do that.
Elise (16:09):
And this then drove you to become a personal finance journalist. How connect going from not knowing much and not having a financial education to doing it for a living?
Dana Miranda (16:22):
I just fell into personal finance as a niche, as a freelance writer, thought personal finance would be really boring because I didn't know anything about it and I hated talking about money. I was trying to be a writer to be creative and artistic, and so I committed to doing it just to kind of get the experience as a writer and be with the people that I respected. But I ended up really enjoying it. I really liked what I was learning in personal finance. It was all of that stuff that kind of growing up in that environment had always been presented as not for me or for people like me talking about investment products and how to manipulate different debt products to make them work in your life and how to use different financial products and things as simple as bank accounts. It was also a really kind of exciting time that financial technology and apps were really exploding. And so I was learning about a lot of money management apps and banking apps and investment apps and things that were really changing how we interact with money too. So it was really cool to start to learn about that stuff and learn how money can fit into people's lives in different ways.
Doree (17:31):
Can you talk a little bit about how all of this knowledge and experience led you to this idea that you don't need a budget?
Dana Miranda (17:40):
Well, I was broke for four years as an adult, as a freelancer was completely broke and I grew up working class too. And so I had a family that kind of lived paycheck to paycheck for a long time and I was looking at all this advice that we were sharing and realized none of this would've really been useful because we just didn't have enough money. That was kind of the main issue. I got my finances in order throughout the course of being in that job, but I didn't really follow any of those tactics that I was learning about and writing about and teaching to other people. I really was just making more money and that was what gave me access to improving my credit score and being able to shop with a credit card and to start to make more intentional financial decisions because I just had money to work with.
(18:27):
And that really was the thing. So that really started to get me to question who is writing this advice? Who is it being written for? What are the assumptions that we're making about our readers? And then I started freelancing again. I left that full-time job in freelancing in the personal finance space and realized everyone was doing that same thing. Everyone I was writing for was kind of sharing that same kind of advice. It was all coming from this place of, it was mostly coming from middle class, mostly white men. And so there was a very specific perspective and a very set of financial access and privilege that people had that they were assuming was available to the people that were reading their advice. And I wanted to expand from that and talk about money in a different way and talk to the people who that advice was not working for.
Elise (19:22):
So the title of the book is You Don't Need a Budget. This is kind of in response or an antidote to an entire school of thought that was started by this idea of you or I guess is it like a financial course or a financial guru whose whole brand is you need a budget,
Dana Miranda (19:43):
There is a brand, YNAB. I'm not specifically countering that, but the name is a play on that for sure. But the idea is countering all of that kind of cultural approach to money that I see, which I call budget culture, which is a parallel to diet culture, which I think people tend to be a lot more familiar with. The way that we restrict the food that we're allowed to eat, the way that we restrict our bodies rather than listening to what our bodies need. And I see the same thing happening in budget culture in our approach to money, which is to take this individualistic approach to look at any kind of financial challenges that somebody is having, assume that it is the result of their individual choices and then to prescribe individual actions that they can take to fix it. And that usually starts with restriction, which is where the budget comes in. The budget is often the first step and that's kind of that attitude of you need a budget, whether we're talking about the brand explicitly or just the kind of attitude in our culture that the approach is what you need to do first is to look at what you are doing, figure out what about it is wrong and figure out what you can reign in.
Elise (21:01):
Well, and just like diet culture, if you fail and you remain financially stressed, then somehow it's your moral failing or your personal failing, right?
Dana Miranda (21:11):
Exactly. Yeah, we continue to put it on the individual and just like diets, there is research and tons of anecdotal evidence and everybody's experience to show that budgeting also doesn't work. It doesn't really reduce your financial stress, it doesn't help people meet financial goals. Certainly across the board it's not a one size fits all thing. It tends to add stress to people's lives just like dieting does. And it tends to be unsustainable because it's restrictive. So in the same way as with diets, people will ultimately fail at a budget and then consider that a personal failing and then try maybe the next budgeting method and try something new and continue to try to find some set of rules that will actually help them meet their goals rather than looking at what's happening around them systemically that put them in the position they're in the first place.
Elise (22:03):
So if we don't use a budget or a budgeting method, what should we be using instead or what should we do instead?
Dana Miranda (22:11):
So I take this from anti-D diet activism and journalism as well where people talk about intuitive eating. So instead of looking to an outside set of rules like a restrictive diet, you are listening to your body and eating. This is a very basic distillation of the idea, but eating what you want when you want. And I say the same thing with getting rid of a budget. So I recommend people try something called intuitive spending and there's not a method to it, there's not a set of rules to it. It is just listening to yourself, listening to your body, buying what you want when you want rather than setting restrictions on the categories that you can spend or restrictions on how much you can spend in a day or a week or a month using money in the way that you need to support the life that you want today.
Elise (23:06):
Okay. Let's take a break and we will be right back.
Doree (23:15):
In one of the first chapters of your book, you kind of go through these multiple, I guess I don't know, reasons for why you don't need a budget, and a few of them were pretty surprising to me, you don't need to pay your bills. And I was wondering if you could kind of unpack some of those things that people reading might be like, whoa, whoa,
Dana Miranda (23:41):
Whoa. Yeah, absolutely. That's a
Doree (23:44):
Step too far,
Dana Miranda (23:46):
Right? Yeah. So I set the book up as kind of a counter argument and breaking down these tenets of budget culture, things that we assume are true about money and finding the counter argument for them. It starts with you don't need a budget, so if budgeting doesn't work, you don't need a budget. What is the argument for that and what do we do instead? So then I talk about you don't have to pay all of your bills, you don't have to pay off debt, you don't need an investment account, you don't have to work so hard, you don't have to earn a living. So I'm breaking down these things that seem like they're things we sort of just take for granted in our culture of a bill comes in and you have to pay it. And of course there is sort of a rule to that there's a deadline, there's a consequence to not paying a bill.
(24:37):
But anyone who has ever lived paycheck to paycheck or been strapped for money then broke knows that there's more to that story because sometimes you can't pay that bill and so you have to figure out what to do. So you have to decide what happens if I don't pay this bill and is that a consequence that I can live with? What can I do to live with that consequence in my life? So maybe it's something like my electricity gets turned off and if it's the middle of winter, I probably want to really fight hard against making that happen. So that's going to be a high priority, but maybe if it's April or May, it's this kind of weather, maybe that's not as bad because I can live with that for a day until I get my finances sorted out. There's different things that you can kind of work around.
(25:28):
Certainly debt bills are something that's a little bit, there's a lot more probably leeway there because it doesn't have that immediate, you're going to have your house taken away, you're going to have your electricity turned off kind of thing. But there's also just things to know about those consequences too. In Wisconsin, and I know in a lot of states we have laws where your power can't be turned off between November and April because people could freeze to death if they don't have access to heat in their home. And so that is something that you can take into consideration if maybe you make more money in the summer months because you work as a contractor, you can pay that bill when it comes in April or you can set up a payment plan with your provider. There's kind of different things to do that aren't just the bill shows up and I pay it. What are my options for how I can use money in the moment? What are my options for resources that I can draw on and not thinking just like I have to work hard, I have to earn money, I have to pay my bills and earn my right to a living to basic needs. What else is around that can kind of make that happen and start to just complicate that conversation.
Elise (26:38):
Have you been challenged on this idea of intuitive spending in that could a skeptic say for example, some people's intuition might lead them just to spend all of their money on frivolity or what we might consider frivolous? Are you making the bet that we will spend rationally essentially if given if no restrictions without restrictions on our budget?
Dana Miranda (27:06):
I have heard that question a lot and I think just with intuitive eating, it's a matter of trusting yourself and there's a lot of undoing to do too. A lot of our spending decisions are a result of this culture of restriction. So we restrict and restrict and restrict and then if we get a windfall or it's a holiday or we're on vacation or something, then we allow ourselves to splurge. So it's this restrict and splurge cycle or we're budgeting and we do really well, do good on our budget one week and then splurge the next week. So it's this constant kind of back and forth with that. And we see the same thing when people are dieting is that back and forth, but if you are allowing yourself to spend intuitively, I think that urge starts to go away.
(27:59):
That's something you have to train, you have to train yourself out of that just like with any kind of mindfulness practice of learning to listen to yourself, learning to listen to your gut, also learning to just understand your finances and the resources that you have available and spending accordingly. But I am taking the bet that people will spend I guess rationally and there's kind of a lot of budget culture tied up in that even kind of that question or that assumption or that defining something as spending rationally or frivolously, something like that. So I think it's really important to push back on the restriction because that's like all of financial advice is coming at us with restriction and judgment and shame. And so I can push back on that really hard and people are still going to be working through a lot of internal restriction. But yeah, I think you don't want to bring financial catastrophe into your life. So if you're buying what you want, when you want it, when you really kind of get down to it and listen to yourself and you're really thinking intuitively, you're not going to make decisions that are going to bring catastrophe because that's not something that you want in your life, if that makes sense. I think that people can trust themselves to do what's right for them if they can quiet all of the noise that's outside of us.
Elise (29:37):
So since our situations as you write are quite unique and individual and yet we are all kind of falling prey to the system of capitalism, which drives this budget culture and makes us feel shame and blame, you specifically don't offer targeted advice or rules in the way that other financial books or experts might, but you do encourage some approaches like we've been talking about and something called money maps. Can you talk us through a money map, how to make one and how that might help us in our journey to be more intuitive spenders?
Dana Miranda (30:15):
Yes, I think this is really helpful. It's kind of an important base and I do offer, I have a money map, PDF you can download from the book's website and I have a set of questions that are in the book to guide you through this, but the basic idea of a money map is just getting the lay of the land of your finances to help you make financial choices. So like a map, it offers you kind of direction, it's a guide. The idea is it starts out in kind of the same way that we often start with a budget, which is looking at your resources and looking at your spending. The reasons that a lot of people start budgeting are the same, that you might start using a money map because you just maybe don't know where your money's coming from, where it's going, how often you're spending, how much you're spending and you're feeling out of control.
(31:03):
So a money map can help you get that understanding by listing your income and other resources that you have access to, including community resources, debt resources and credit, anything that you can use to access the things that you need. And looking at the financial commitments you've made, so are those monthly bills that we're talking about. And I use the term commitments because of what I was talking about earlier because I don't want anyone to think of those expenses as an inevitability. They are things that you can cancel or negotiate or things that you can drop, bills that you can cut, things like that. So you can commit to an expense and you can also uncommit from it. So getting the lay of that, what are the financial commitments you've made, subscriptions bills, you're paying debt payments that you have to make. Of course, housing, mortgage and rent, things like that lets you see what you want to continue to commit to what you might want to uncommit to free up some money each month.
(32:13):
And then there's also space to list your financial goals. So things if you want to invest, if you want to save, I encourage people to save comfort fund, which is kind of your rainy day fund if you want to be able to take advantage of some opportunity like leaving a job or if you run into unexpected financial circumstances like being laid off from a job, something like that, that money is available for you but I don't prescribe a certain amount that you need to save a lot of financial plans. Do I just give the space for you to think about that goal? And then finally, the money map all kind of leads to what I call your yes fund, which is a very cheesy way of saying you're spending money, it's kind of your safe to spend fund so you can use all of that other information to understand what you have available to spend.
(33:06):
And you don't have to restrict that the way you would with a budget. You don't have to say, this is the bucket that I have available to spend because I had to save 10% and I have to spend this much on bills and et cetera. You can say, I want this much to be able to spend each month and where can I tweak everywhere else? Where might I deprioritize some bills? Where might I deprioritize some goals because I want to be able to spend. So it's kind of a fluid thing, but the idea is just to get the lay of the land, where is your money coming from and where is it going so that you can make financial decisions with a clear
Doree (33:41):
Head. How do you suggest people who might have, let's say an impulse control issue like a DHD where the idea of an intuitive budget might be appealing, but they have a problem controlling their spending and if you give them free reign to spend, they will spend, it's a brain chemistry thing. And so are there people for whom intuitive budgeting doesn't work or is there a way that this can work for people like that?
Dana Miranda (34:17):
I recommend it for anyone and I'm a financial educator, not a psychologist either. So I think people have to work with, if you're having an impulse control issue, I think that's an additional layer of things on top of money management. So work with someone who understands A DHD. So I do want to make that caveat too, but I think it can work for anyone. I think the same thing could be said for intuitive eating and we've sort of worked through that. We're a little further down the road with fighting diet culture and have a better understanding of that. I think we can get to that same place with intuitive spending. Again, it's kind of an uphill road because all of the cultural forces around us are fighting against that and pushing us toward that restrict and splurge kind of cycle. So it is right now, it's a lot of work that you have to do individually around mindfulness.
(35:10):
So if someone has any kind of impulse control concerns, I think anything that you're doing to rein those in general applies to your relationship with money as well. And I think that's kind of the bigger message and why I make the parallels with diet culture too is that we treat money the way that we talk about and teach about money. We sort of treat it like it's this siloed separate thing that we can just apply a set of rules and a set of spreadsheets and a set of methods to that's sort of outside of all of the other things that impact our lives. So like you mentioned having a DHD or something, right? That we need to have that conversation with how we're talking about money and we tend to not do that. We tend to not talk in any real way about how things like psychology and trauma are impacting our relationships with money. We kind of silo that off and just say, if you just follow these rules, you'll be fine. But if you have other things that you're dealing with that needs to be factored into the conversation, that really would be the case too. If someone with an impulse control issue is trying to maintain a budget, it's not really a different, they're still fighting the same, totally the same thing. So the budget doesn't make that issue go away. So we need to be more holistic in the way that we are incorporating money into our lives.
Elise (36:40):
Speaking of holistic, you mentioned you are a financial educator and a lot of folks in financial media and financial education actually talk about this paradox that the folks who need more financial education the most are the ones who are least likely to have access to it. And if we were just more educated and understood how interest rates and credit scores worked, then that might solve some of our financial problems. But you say that having access to financial education doesn't improve circumstances. Why not? It seems like intuitive. Speaking of intuitive, it seems intuitive that if I knew how to balance my checkbook, this is a really old timey phrase, balance my checkbook, but if I knew how to balance my checkbook, then maybe it would be balanced,
Dana Miranda (37:31):
But it still can't be balanced if you don't have enough money. So I think that that is the piece that's missing and not only not having enough money where the actual cash itself is not adding up, but having access to a bank in your neighborhood, having access to a bank where people speak your language, having access to financial services with service providers that understand your culture. There are a lot of barriers to people having that kind of equal access to money and a relationship with money in our culture that financial education is still not good at addressing. There are a lot of really amazing people in financial education who recognize that and want to change that, but we're starting at such a basic level, which is that in about half the states we don't even have a financial education mandate, so we don't even have a guarantee that people have any kind of access to financial education.
(38:27):
So we're starting really pretty far behind the starting line on just getting that information out to people. But at the same time, there are people who are trying to improve the information that's getting out there and understanding that information itself is not enough. People also need access. People also need the resources. Like I said, I went through that financial education in writing and personal finance media and the information that I was learning was not useful to me until my income reached a place where I could put that to use the debt snowball method is only useful if you have extra money to put toward paying down debt every month, then you can put it into place. But if you don't have enough to pay those bills, then all of the financial education in the world isn't going to help you. So we have to start there and start with that understanding for people. And even in places where financial education has been guaranteed, there's been some audits of the effectiveness of financial education in high school and the outcomes, the inequality and outcomes tend to persist. So in students who went to high school in a lower income community or people of color, anyone who kind started out with those disadvantages, those disadvantages continue regardless of their access to financial education.
Elise (39:57):
So what should we be teaching our kids and the next generation about money and what do you wish you would've learned as you were growing up?
Dana Miranda (40:06):
I want our education about personal finance in our culture to help people better understand our financial systems and that's top level. What is capitalism and what is the position it puts you in? How does that work? But also, why do we all rely on a workplace 401k to plan for retirement and what does that mean? Our money is being invested, right? What does that mean? What is the risk that's actually going into that? Why do so many people rely on credit cards to fund day-to-day needs and what does that mean? Who's holding that money and why are they holding that money and why do we have to pay to have access to it? A better understanding of how those products work and how they fit into the larger system, I think will one reduce a lot of the shame that exists in personal finance because in our relationships with money, because when we're just given a set of rules that most people can't follow, that just leads to most people feeling ashamed of how they're handling money.
(41:18):
And it leads to us just continuing to seek those kind of individual solutions to what is very clearly systemic problems. But in financial education, we're not giving enough time, I don't think, to systemic issues and how to, that doesn't mean we already have economics and social science classes that are talking about those issues. So it doesn't mean that we have to talk about 'em at that level, but we have to talk about here's the reality. How do you as an individual survive given that reality, right? Not just let's ignore this entire reality and just hand you a set of rules to follow and not question, which is sort of how we teach personal finance right now.
Doree (42:03):
Dana, we have been asking our listeners for their questions about money and personal finance, and we got a couple that I thought you might be able to answer if you're up for that.
Dana Miranda (42:13):
I'd love to try.
Doree (42:14):
Okay. This is from a listener. I was just thinking on my stupid walk for my stupid mental health this morning. I wonder if they would take a money question that's about having money. I'll throw it in the ring. I grew up without money, periodically on welfare, paid my way through higher ed by working in a factory, et cetera. Fast forward to today where I have both worked hard and been incredibly lucky and these factors have landed me in a place where I can work at a reasonable pace, take regular vacations, and no longer live on a budget at 42, I could retire in a low cost place in five years if I wish. Despite all of this, I'm incredibly stressed about money at all times. How could I start to relax and accept my life as it is today?
Dana Miranda (42:56):
Ooh, that's a big question and that's a tough place to be in to be able to recognize that things are okay with money, but to still have, and I'm making a big leap of assumptions here, but to still have a lot of that trauma from growing up without enough money from having to work so hard probably compared to their peers to get through school and to get to the place that they're in. A lot of that still kind of constantly creating stress around money and even regardless of what your background is and what your situation is, we all have a lot of that pressure constantly. Just every headline is talking about the economy right now and what's happening in the stock market and what is going to happen with this administration, what's going to happen next in the next few years. So if you're thinking I might be able to retire in five years, a lot of that could be up in the air and it could be very scary and very stressful.
(43:51):
Even just living under capitalism kind of adds that pressure regardless of the political situation that we're in. There's always a lot of questions about how hard you're working and how much money you're bringing in and how far will it go given whatever's going to happen with inflation in the future. So it's kind of just the situation that we're thrust in and the water that we're swimming in. And so if you're asking how to relax, I think you're getting a really good start by taking stupid little walks for your stupid mental health. That's generally where I recommend people starting is with any sort of those mindfulness practices, so any of the self-care practices that you talk about, the beginning of every episode, right? Anything that's helping you better get in touch with yourself, your needs so that you can have a little bit of that kind of quiet and space to start to recognize if you're feeling financial stress, where is that coming from? Is it something that you need to hold onto and address or is it something given the way you're describing your situation, is it actually something you can let go of because it's coming from a complete third party source and you don't need to live with that.
Doree (45:02):
I like that. It sounds like you're also saying give yourself some grace.
Dana Miranda (45:07):
Absolutely. If you could just open my book and it was just blank pages and just one sentence that said, give yourself some grace. That's kind of the message is this is really hard and none of us are given any of the tools to survive it, regardless of the socioeconomic situation you're born into. Yeah, we're all in a terrible situation and we're all just trying to do our best.
Elise (45:31):
Alright, Dana, without succumbing to budget culture, what are a few practical tools that you can leave us with to help us manage our money with more ease and more grace for ourselves?
Dana Miranda (45:45):
Start with those personal mindfulness practices and self-care, like real self-care kind of practices. I do personally a lot of journaling and that's probably because I'm a writer and so everything I do kind of ties back to writing and I do recommend that for people or meditation walks, like anything like that that works for you to help you process your thoughts and experiences, start to incorporate your relationship with money into those things because that's what's going to help you see that more holistic view of your relationship with money and understand how it fits into your life. And you need to do that to be able to start to ask that question of what do you want to buy? What do you want money to support in your life? And so in order to spend intuitively, you have to be able to get in touch with that intuition.
(46:36):
So start with that. The money map is a very practical tool that I think is really helpful, especially for the people who come to me who are saying, if I get rid of a budget, I'll have no idea what's going on with my money, and that's very scary. Or they come and they say, I'm not doing anything. I have no idea what's going on with my money. What can I do? Use the money map to just walk you through a series of questions and start, it's basically a journaling exercise that I made up for myself now that I describe it, but get an understanding of what's going on with your money and then follow resources in personal finance because like I said, many of us, especially folks my age, kind of mid millennials did not have financial education in any formal way, and so we're just figuring it out.
(47:25):
There are a lot of blogs and social media accounts that are talking about money, and a lot of those offer a ton of really bad budget culture advice that I would say filter out, but a lot of them also can help you start to get some of those basics. What is a high yield savings account and what is the difference between that and the savings account that I have now? What kind of credit card do I want to get? Those kinds of things. They can give you some of that basic information. So if you go into it understanding that they're coming at you with this budget culture advice, you can kind of filter that out and still take the information that is just kind of what we have access to right now. Hopefully more people will read, you don't need a budget and start to offer budget free financial advice and start to be able to answer those questions without the shame and blame and restriction added in there. But until then we'll just filter it out ourselves.
Elise (48:18):
Well, I have to say as somebody who has not had a budget and always felt sort of guilty about it, I have always felt sort of chaotic as a result of not budgeting, but I also don't want to put my mental energy there and psychic energy there. And so I appreciated it. I appreciated the message that we're all part of this bigger system and that we don't need to feel
Dana Miranda (48:43):
That kind of shame. That's very much where I came from too, was all of this sounds like I'm just going to spend all of my days thinking about my money, and that's the last thing I want to do. How can I just enjoy my days more and not be super stressed out about money? So that's what I'm always trying to, how can we find ease in money management?
Doree (49:01):
Where can our listeners find you if they want to follow along with your work?
Dana Miranda (49:05):
The best place to follow me is through my newsletter, healthy Rich, and you can find that on substack or@healthyrich.co and you can learn more about the book at you. Don't need a budget.com.
Doree (49:16):
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, this was great. Well, she was certainly interesting. I really learned a lot from her and I loved her book.
Elise (49:30):
And I guess it wasn't until I read her book that I realized there were so many personal finance gurus out there that sells so many different methods and plans and things, and it is easy to get lost in all of that and feel that scarcity mindset. Totally. So thank you Dana for coming on. And now we enter the intention zone.
Doree (49:53):
The intention zone. Okay. So last week I was talking about how this week is the last week of school. Henry's last day is actually tomorrow. I told him that tonight after his soccer practice, we could bake cookies for his teachers. So we're going to do that at, and then coming up next week, just like the transition to summer, it's a big transition for Henry. It's a big transition for me. So just sort of navigating that and thinking about what I want the summer to look like is what I'm going to be thinking about for next week
Elise (50:41):
Because we are transitioning to summer. My kids have their last day. I guess just it would be tomorrow since this is coming out on Monday. And because we are transitioning, I really need to get a bunch of stuff out of my house. I have so much random, I have a lot of old toys and things that need to probably go. I'm not going to have any more babies and knock on wood. And so I would like to set as my intention, just like declutter. I kind of need a Marie Kondo it, so I'm going to declutter. I'm going to put decluttering as my, I'll feel better too going into the summer, just having a little bit more closet space and just
(51:30):
Fewer
(51:31):
Random items in bins. So I have these big bins with handles on each side that anytime I don't really want to put something away in a precise spot, I just throw it in a bin. So now I just have a bunch of stuff in bins, but I need to offer up lots of squish meows and stuffed animals for adoption. Just lots of things that probably need to, lots of Lego sets. We have so many Lego sets, endless Lego sets. I'm like, the kids haven't played with Legos in years. So anyway, that's going to be my intention. Oh yeah. And then last week my intention ended up going great. It was hosting Doree's friends, meeting Doree's friends, and then her friends have become friends. So that was a success.
Doree (52:15):
Yeah, one of your friends was on your team with some of my friends, and I feel like they all bonded.
Elise (52:22):
Yeah. Yeah.
Doree (52:23):
Alright, well thanks everyone for listening. Forever 35 is hosted and produced by me, Doree Shafrir and Elise Hu, and produced and edited by Sam Junio. Sami Reed is our project manager and our network partner is Acast. We'll talk to you soon.
Elise (52:38):
Talk to.