“Trust yourself.”
Following up with Dana Miranda
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I first interviewed Dana Miranda a couple of years ago. She blew my mind back then, she’s blown it since with her brilliant book, You Don’t Need A Budget, and her Substack continues to inspire me. Check out this post:
And read my previous interviews with Dana here:
and here:
Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance®, creator of the Healthy Rich newsletter and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She's been writing about making and managing money as a staffer, freelancer, author and creator since 2015.
Dana has become a go-to source on all things money because of her innovative budget-free approach, which recognizes the ways financial education fails to meet the needs of marginalized folks and shifts the conversation away from individual responsibility and onto systemic change.
Are there any money habits you’ve let go of since the first interview? If yes, what and why?
I’ve adjusted my spending quite a bit over the past two years. At first, I was spending less so I could earn less and focus on writing my book. But now that I’m back to full-time work, I’ve stuck with lower spending as a form of voluntary simplicity in response to the capitalist politics threatening fascism in the United States this year.
I was already fairly minimalist, but the uncertainty in our country under this new regime (and, more broadly, since the pandemic) has really exposed the lies budget culture tells us about working hard and managing money with discipline. Consuming less means participating less in this damaging economy, so it’s taken on a new importance for me.
