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.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.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
Ven. Gen 17th, 2025
