When I talk with friends about money I distinguish between big-picture mentality and goals and day-to-day practice. I am totally on the same page as Dana about those big-picture goals of paying off all your debt, getting as rich as possible, etc. I’m particularly skeptical of FIRE - it reminds me of those sects of Christianity that preach abstinence before marriage and then also set the expectation that sex within marriage should be this enticing hedonistic wonderland. Like, no.
But. Budgeting as a day-to-day practice changed my life.
For years I told myself my problem was that I didn’t have enough money, and I’m sure there were times that was true. But then I got a contract where my income went up 40%. I was definitely making Enough Money and I still felt the same at the end of every month. So I started educating myself, tried a few budget apps, got a handle on what I was spending. And then when my contract ended and my income went down 20%? I‘d never felt so in control of my money. All my bills got paid, I could treat myself and have some fun, and I didn’t feel that desperation at the end of each month.
The founder of YNAB once compared a good budget to a good butler - sometimes the butler asks “are you quite certain?” and other times the butler says “very good madam, I’ll make it happen right away.” This sounds and feels right to me. For me, figuring out budgeting in my day-to-day has been like learning to be my own excellent butler.
Really appreciate everyone sharing their reactions to this one so thoughtfully. I'm glad it's worked well for you! And still think it's worth investigating the larger mentality and culture around budgeting (especially as it intersects with morality and religion, whew!). Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been sitting with a different question, too. Based on the comments I’m guessing most of your reader/listenership is lady-identifying, and money expertise can be SO gendered in our society. I wonder if a mostly dude-identifying group would respond along the lines of, “well I don’t know about this diet culture stuff but YES, money culture is SO EXHAUSTING”
I love the butler analogy! I think that can be a good way to describe conscious spending, as well — it's about being your own butler and checking in instead of letting a budget be the gatekeeper for your spending.
I'm very conflicted by this because while I can in general understand how fighting against mindsets of extreme restriction (and interrogating capitalist values) is a worthwhile goal, I'm a disabled person who receives government 'benefits" and find the perspective put forth in this interview to be very limited/privileged. I suppose it's easy to think about budgeting as too inherently restrictive if it's a matter of, say, paying down your mortgage aggressively versus taking a nice family vacation - but if the consequences are "I will not be able to afford medical care I need to function" or "I will not be able to afford food or a place to live" budgeting can very literally be a survival tool. That's not even counting the ways in which many disabled people are quite literally forced into performing "financial responsibility" in order to prove to others that they deserve the basic right to live independently with control over their own money at all.
I should take a moment here to point out that I am *incredibly* privileged as far as these things go with disabled people in America and I still wake up every day feeling this precarity and wondering if any little indulgence is going to mean that I might not be able to afford care I need, leading me with lasting irreparable physical damage (which has happened before.) And this is with things like a supportive working partner, a house, a car, etc! It's an odd balance to strike mentally between knowing that so much of the need for budgeting is caused by external systems that require changing (would feel a lot better buying some nice yarn once in a while if I knew we had universal healthcare) and also that at the end of the day it's a survival tool.
I'm looking forward to reading the comments as they come in, since this topic is very thought provoking and bound to bring up some good perspectives!
I so appreciate this - and I don’t think we articulated enough the privilege required to be able to say “I want to divest from this system.” You are right, it’s not an option for everyone.
I suppose the TLD;R is that I feel like any conversation about personal finance that doesn't emphasize the structural changes that people with the privilege to "divest" from budgeting need to be using said privilege to advocate for and fund is ultimately replicating the same Personal Responsibility rhetoric that's the whole problem with diet culture in the first place. 😅 Certainly we should - all of us - prioritize things like rest and care and decoupling from a restrictive mindset, but money can't quite be talked about in the same ways as dieting and to do so sort of muddies what's important to interrogate about both things (IMHO)
I agree with this. When we lived near the poverty line, I had to budget every cent because it was, if I buy these snacks I want, I'm not going to be able to pay the electric bill. There was no way I could just spend money - we spent enough time with an overdrafted account as it was. We were also unable to access credit or a mortgage to leverage that debt and free up cash for other uses. I don't know. I guess I just didn't relate to this episode. I can see the parallel but until we are ensuring that every one of us in our community has COMFORTABLE (not just bare minimum) access to food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare... I can't see how this could work for a large swath of the population. It's unfortunate that we live in a capitalist oligarchy where money is required to access even the most basic human needs. The poor are forced to think about every cent, generally, because if you don't you could easily end up without a place to live.
The more I think about "budgeting as diet culture" the less I think the two make sense in comparison, largely because of the reason you just articulated - even if dieting was a completely neutral activity existing in a vacuum, diets do not and will fundamentally never work. On the other hand, budgeting does verifiably work, in the sense of it being necessary labor poor and underprivileged people have to engage in because, like you said, they have to make choices like "food vs electric bill" every time they spend money.
Still, if we accept the framing, the interview's approach to budgeting almost makes me feel like it's the monetary version of "budgeting is a DIET but conscious spending is WELLNESS" if that makes any sense. It's been very heartening to see other comments that come from the perspective of budgeting as survival vs budgeting as being something that makes you rich or morally good and so on. Thinking about those in relation to the interview, I'm very much reminded of a new age store near my town that gets regularly mocked for selling 50 dollar crystal-embedded candles that you can light to help with "ritual work to destroy capitalism." Credit for being the right idea, but very much not the way to achieve that change.
This episode was good food-for-thought, and I appreciate the further conversation in the comments. I see the parallels/overlap between diet culture and budget culture, and I think it’s important to interrogate the narratives we are fed around finances and who they are coming from. When my husband and I got married, we decided that “wealth is not a value for this family” in an attempt to guide our financial approach. I think it can be freeing to reject the pressure to build net worth, “level up,” get the mansion, etc. that we often see reflected online. However, I think similar critiques can be made of “conscious spending” that can be made of intuitive eating. One being the amount of privilege involved in giving up budgeting. For example, I don’t grocery shop with a budget. We have no limits as a family on what we can spend on food. This is a result of not needing to worry if the bill is higher on a particular week. It also allows me to cultivate peace with food as we shop with a list and then allow a “shop with your heart” section where we pick up anything extra that is sounding good that week (a new item at TJ’s, a type of chip we’re craving, etc.). But I know that approaching grocery shopping this way is due to our financial privilege. When I had less money a few years ago, I handled shopping completely differently and I would not have been comfortable going without a budget when I didn’t have the flexibility to spend an extra $20 that week.
And with inflation, we have been looking at places we can scale back since our rent has increased, laundry fees have increased, food costs have gone up, etc. We’ve asked things like “do we need subscriptions to all these streaming services or can we cancel some? Do we need to eat out at this restaurant or can we find somewhere cheaper? Do I need this higher end shampoo or can I find an option at Kroger?” I want to acknowledge that none of these are very big sacrifices (we’re still eating out) but there is an element of restriction in limiting where we can eat, what shows/movies are available to us, etc. And I’m not sure that it’s totally a bad thing. It’s definitely a conversation around what our values and goals are and what is winning out at any particular moment. All this to say I think the parallel breaks down for me at a certain point.
But this isn’t my final opinion (I’m even nervous posting a response I’ve only started thinking about today), and I’ll definitely be reflecting further.
This is resonating quite a lot with me and I’m so glad you named the privilege involved in intuitive eating and conscious spending - that’s something I should have done better in this episode.
Thank you for this! And for bravely sharing a thought-in-progress :)
You're striking on a point that I need to examine more as I continue to have these conversations: Yes, there is a privilege in not needing to restrict your spending. And many people make ends meet by setting restrictions on how they use their limited resources. Breaking down budget culture starts with questioning why some people have to make those sacrifices while others don't, and making broader changes toward equity in food, housing, etc. so access to necessities isn't dependent on individual budgeting.
I need to take more care when talking about divesting from budget culture to articulate that that looks different for everyone. If you're a victim of the inequities baked into budget culture, divesting is about shedding the guilt and shame the culture places on you for how you use money, understanding you're not doing money wrong. If you benefit from those inequities, divesting is about (that, too, but also) shifting your perspective to question the broader implications of budget culture and be part of the fight against it. In either case, the act of budgeting is only the tip of the iceberg, the part we see; the cultural mindset behind it is the actual problem we need to tackle.
In reality, most of us fall in a gray area of having some privilege and experiencing some oppression, so we each have to choose a unique path out of budget culture and form a personalized relationship with money, just as we're each doing with diet culture.
I found a lot of this conversation troubling and very bad advice. For one, the blithe universal assertion that "budgets don't work" with zero evidence beyond the personal and emotional. In fact, in the very next sentence, Dana mentions that there isn't much research into the efficacy of budgets. So where does this claim come from? What supports it, beyond her personal feelings that budgets are bad? There were a lot of personal experiences and reflections phrased as universals throughout the conversation: we feel this, we do that, we have this result (I find Anne Helen Peterson writes in a similar way). Who's the "we" in those statements? Where's the evidence to support that this is how--a majority of Americans? The bulk of Virginia's audience? "Ordinary" people? I'm not sure who "we" encompasses--think, feel, and behave? The dismissal of YNAB as x, y, z while admitting that she hasn't used it (and then mischaracterizing the way it works--you set your goals, categories, and amounts, you move money between categories as you see fit, expenses are tallied seamlessly and easily, and the tone is consistently non-judgmental and encouraging).
And then "conscious spending" advocated as the alternative...which is like a fuzzier, less accurate form of expense tracking.
The idea of dispensing with retirement planning is also deeply concerning advice.
People with perfectionist tendencies will find comfort and security in tracking and controlling aspects of their lives. This isn't inherently bad. And if you've got an anxiety disorder triggered by tracking your money, I suggest addressing this problem with a qualified therapist rather than deciding that its not worth keeping track of your money any more (speaking from experience here!) or planning for future unemployment or retirement (or your children's needs and educations).
Of course there's plenty of toxic bro posturing in the personal finance space. But there are also a lot of people who thoughtfully consider the same issues Dana argues are ignored--what it means to be "rich," how to set and achieve short- and long-term goals, how to determine when the challenges with achieving those goals is the goal, is your spending, or is your income, and how to plan solutions to those problems.
This conversation left me really concerned and unsettled and disappointed that Virginia didn't interrogate more of these claims with the same clear-eyed objectivity she has when she approaches aspects of medical reporting.
I second this comment, I really enjoy/learn a LOT from burnt toast but this interview felt really off base. I definitely agree that it's a conversation worth having, and so much of our financial debt system is set up to fail (medical debt, student debt, cost of housing vs wages), but just not saving for retirement was really off mark for me, especially in the system we live in where social security is not enough (and it's extremely doubtful social security will exist for retired millennials). I also looked at her website and her article on student debt/not paying loan and it not make a lot of sense to me, it took a lot of scrolling for the blog post to mention that they might (and very could!) garnish wages if you don't pay, that the interest will keep accruing (and how that adds up over time). Yes I'm fully here for student loan forgiveness/lower cost of university/etc, but not warning at the beginning that hey, if you decide not to pay, you could still end up paying through wage garnishing with a much higher debt due to interest felt very dismissive of very real consequences that could hurt people. Virginia, I love your work, but this work felt like you just sat back and listened without doing any real analysis/fact checking.
I'd like to add my agreement to this, too. And these posts have articulated what I've been feeling all day since I read the interview. I mostly feel like Dana didn't represent her work well in your interview; if you visit her website it is pretty run of the mill personal finance advice, much of which owes a lot to Ramit Sethi who's been doing great shame-free work in this space for over a decade.
Hi! I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I don't expect every conversation to land with everyone. I also don't intend this conversation to be the final word on any of this (that's why I said right in the intro that I want to hear people's thoughts and see where else we can take this discussion). Nor was anything Dana or I said intended as financial advice; we were sharing our experiences and ideas. Which is a bit different from what I do with my reporting. I agree we could have been clearer about who we meant by "we" and what the evidence does and does not tell us. But I do think interrogating a lot of the messaging and perfectionism of personal finance is work worth doing.
This was a really interesting convo (as always!) but I am left with some conflicting feelings around it. Compared to dieting, where I have increasingly seen SO many people have the exact same experience, the opposite is true with money and finance. One thing that immediately struck me was this idea that budgeting is all about "being rich", which is something I have never associated with budgeting or necessarily felt like I have been sold as a part of it. It almost feels to me like the idea of casting off the restriction of "budgeting" is a privileged idea in itself? I grew up in what I guess was the lower working class. We never had food insecurity and had clothes and shelter, but never had anything extra and my parents were always in debt and fighting about money. So for me, taking back some control and understanding of money now that I'm in a very different income bracket has felt really empowering. It has taught me that it is important to see where your money is going, and it gives me the choice of how I spend it now that I finally have that extra that I never had. I was never given any information about money or tools for understanding how to manage it. In dieting, women have been pushed towards focusing on something that we now realize is trivial. Finance to me has always been seen as something left to the (white) men with women actively excluded in the past, despite it being far more vital to our lives. I am really having trouble with the idea that women and other marginalized groups should disengage with budget culture the same way we have with diet culture. The language of restriction and the false marketing around budgeting is a totally fair thing to reject, but it feels like we could be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Changing the way we talk about money, more open discussion, re-framing ideas around debt and spending, these are all great things. Maybe the way budgeting has been sold to a certain group/class specifically needs to be changed, but I don't think it is accurate or fair to compare it to dieting. Women especially have been steeped in diet culture for at least the last hundred years — talking about money and budgets has been a closed door for many women until very recently. Even if, like dieting, there are some pretty frustrating aspects of how we talk about budgeting, it feels like a more convenient comparison than it is a totally true one. Food for thought I guess. Thank you so much for doing this work!
You raise some excellent points. I agree (and I think Dana would agree) that the goal here isn't for women or POC to disengage from money -- it's the rejecting of the toxic messaging that we're interested in. And maybe it's worth considering whether budgeting is the best tool for engaging folks -- especially when it doesn't work for so many of us. But there's a lot here!
Yeah I definitely agree that there are toxic ideas being marketed to us around financial responsibility (and of course the very toxic American idea of "bootstraps" so that we can blame poor people for being poor). I think the difference that is important to note here if we are making a comparison between diets and budgets is that we know for sure diets do not work and have the evidence to back that up. As Dana mentioned herself, there isn't great research on the effectiveness of budgets and it does seem like there is a lot of value in using certain budgeting tools for some folks -- especially if/when they are flexible enough to be used in a way that works for a wide range of people.
Yes, I agree with what Virginia said, that our focus is on rejecting the toxic messaging around money.
A major parallel I see between diet culture and budget culture is the way we determine whether a diet or budget "works." Restrictive (a.k.a. all) diets do, in fact, often lead to weight loss, which a diet culture mindset considers a success. In the same way, budgeting can help some people eliminate debt or stretch dollars from income that's too low, and a budget culture mindset considers them "good with money." In both cases, the goal is the problem. Diets wouldn't happen if we didn't have a cultural ideal of thinness (which we mask with the language of "health"). And budgets wouldn't happen if we didn't have a cultural ideal of richness (which we mask with the language of "self-sufficiency" or "security").
I completely agree. My husband left a job where he was making more money because he hated the work to a job that he enjoys but pays a bit less, and so for now we have to be pretty strict in our spending. It’s not about getting rich, it’s about making sure we can pay our bills.
I do think the point made about understanding the larger financial and economic systems, and how our individual finances our impacted by those systems, is an important conversations to have:
Thank you Dana for this thoughtful conversation! I completely agree with so many of your ideas. I struggled mightily for most of my life as the person in all the families I was in who earned the money kept track of money did the taxes blah blah blah. It was hell and exactly like an eating disorder.
Then I got ill and became disabled.
The money thing became truly terrifying, and I found YNAB. In our more broke and lower income status making us more “regular” YNAB has set me free. It keeps track. I don’t worry. As time has gone by… It’s been six years… I freely move money from any category to cover the haircolor I needed for morale without a second thought. We recently just dumped every single penny we had in savings to pay off our mortgage, and are struggling to have any savings at all, and it’s totally OK.
But maybe it’s like financial Al-Anon for people with money issues and if that’s the case. I’m really thankful for it. Now my husband can see the finances and my kids can see them and I get to share the load.
That said, I recognize everyone doesn’t need AA, and therefore everyone doesn’t need YNAB. But some do and it’s good to have support.
Oh I love the potential of a budgeting app to share the financial mental load -- you are completely right that is so much to carry and manage all on your own.
I love that you've found a way to lessen the mental load! I'm completely in favor of turning over the burden to money management apps and automating and sharing as much of the work as you can. That sounds like a great relief 💖
I thought I was the only one who had huge issues with this interview and I’m relieved to not be alone. I just kept thinking “money is fluid *if you have access to non-predatory credit.* You can practice “conscious spending” if you have enough cash on hand OR access to non-predatory credit! (Also, I don’t understand how being mindful of how much money I have on hand and how much is coming in/going out to other things this month isn’t “conscious spending” - and I call that “budgeting.”)
Rich people carry tons of debt because they have collateral that allows them to access huge amounts of credit with favorable terms and low interest rates. The rest of us may not have access even to things like mortgages and student loans (if we’re not students). “Bad debt” isn’t bad because the person who holds it made a bad choice, it’s bad because it hurts them and is emblematic of a system where some people can treat money like it’s fluid and others have to count every penny. This is a terrible system! But hand-waving it away as “budget culture” doesn’t change the system.
When I was in my 20s, I earned a low salary (nonprofits!) in an expensive city and had almost no access to credit (no history, so my first credit card had a $700 limit). In the wake of the financial crisis, banks had gotten skittish about lending to people like me. My then-gf also earned a low salary and had no credit history. We budgeted in a spreadsheet every month and yes, it felt like restriction but also, we liked being housed and having food to eat? And it empowered us to say to friends “hey, we can’t do dinner and drinks this weekend but we’d love to do something cheaper or free” - and we lived in a city full of awesome cheap/free things to do with friends, so it wasn’t really a hardship; just a fact of life at the time. I’m so glad we had a budget that allowed us to enjoy our 20s without getting evicted or stressing out about money all the time.
Now that we have more money coming in, we don’t budget as tightly. Does it feel good? Yep! Is it entirely a byproduct of financial privilege? You bet. It’s not “conscious spending” - it’s “having a safety cushion and higher incomes and access to low-interest borrowing when we need it.” It’s the system working for us. It’s privilege. We didn’t need to “ditch budget culture”… we just needed more money and better credit scores.
I agree with this a lot, and i felt like this interview really failed to also look at the privilege it takes to just, not budget. I also felt like as a conversation it overlooked some very real impacts inflation is having on money and spending for nearly everyone. Until general income and annual raises match *or exceed* the rate of inflation, I cannot ignore the fact that our grocery costs have nearly doubled even when we are buying the same amount and varieties of food. Or that my cat litter and food have gone up 145% over the past 6 months. It’s easy to not budget but it is hard not to *plan.*
The goal for many isn’t, in my anecdotal experience, to become rich but to be fiscally solvent in a way that allows a person to be flexible in what or how they spend without worrying that this will impact their ability to buy groceries, or visit urgent care, or any necessity. I find it baffling that so many in our society seem to believe that not all of our people deserve the means to live comfortably without constant fear of that single issue that would lead them to financial ruin.
I agree - I think all people should have their basic human rights in place without always just waiting for that other shoe to drop.
I was thinking about this episode as I budgeted out money in YNAB. We don't quite make ends meet so it's always me trying to take from one place to pay a different place that's more important. If I didn't have any kind of system, we would pretty quickly end up with overdrafts or unpaid bills. There really isn't much discretionary income left to "not budget". Well, really, there's none, because we already incur debt just to pay certain necessary healthcare expenses not covered by insurance, but that's another whole topic!
I previously worked in “financial literacy” and have now come to understand that you can give someone all the tools in the world but if they don’t have the income to cover basic needs then that’s the issue. I appreciate that this point was made but I wish the conversation had dug deeper on those inequities. I also think that instead of “good” vs “bad” debt, you could think of it as “predatory” vs “asset building”. So many people are only given access to predatory types of lending that are designed to keep them in a constant loop of debt just to cover basic costs. While people with money can access lending to purchase assets like a home or education that will provide for a more stable future. And finally, taking away pensions to put the onus on individuals to save for retirement via 401ks was just incredibly unethical. It’s an absolute crapshoot to plan for retirement this way. All in all, I think we all could have a healthier relationship with money but the more important issue is to create systemic changes in our country to actually help everyone get a living wage and have access to better lending and retirement planning.
Yes to all of this! Thank you for sharing. I love reframing debt as "predatory" vs. "asset building." That's a wonderful way to shift the responsibility to the lender instead of the borrower. The frame of "good" vs. "bad" debt is an unfair way to put blame on the borrower for the consequences of predatory lending.
Lol, I'm another YNAB devotee signing in to express some differing opinions from Dana. I also have spent the last 15+ years writing frequently about personal finance and investing - some journalism, but largely on behalf of the giant financial services companies that underpin the American (and global) economy. So, a whole continent of salt there. I find what Dana said about retirement to be terrifying -- the idea of waiting until retirement age to see how it all works out is not how I want to spend the last part of my life! I might feel differently if we had a functioning social safety net. But in its absence, I need to make sure I take care of myself, especially since I have the means to do so. (Lots of privilege here, too, obviously.)
Given the particulars of my life experience - raising a teen in ED recovery and writing a lot for financial services companies - the comparison of diet culture to budgeting feels a lot like apples and oranges to me. But I really appreciate this interview for pushing on some long-held assumptions, whether I ultimately agree with them or not.
This is a bit of an aside, but I turned 50 last month and am *really* struggling of late to figure out where I can fight the system(s), and where I need to just preserve my energy and understand that one person's actions aren't going to have much practical impact (no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc). I'm doing a ton of grappling w/ the insidiousness of capitalism and hustle culture... and also I have to pay my mortgage and send my kid to college in two years. Sometimes it all really just makes my head hurt.
I actually really like this discussion and don't entirely disagree with the points articulated! Especially the identification of a "universally assumed goal" (to be thin; to be rich) and consideration of it for either adopting or rejecting.
I spent most of my life living well within my means and, with the "thin-budget" privilege that came with being a single person with steady employment and a healthy side-hustle, assumed that meant I was good at budgeting. My wants were fairly simple and easily satisfied by my earnings, with plenty leftover to save. Once I had my kids, upsized my living situation, took various maternity leaves for them (as a freelancer, no less), couldn't just throw all my waking hours at the wall and extract all the money possible from the market (ie had to be the primary parent to my kids and fit my work into a set period of hours), I realized that the situation before had not really been that I was just so good at managing money - it was that my wants cost less than my income, so I never had to confront the hard choices. Now, my wants feel infinite - I want my kids to take gymnastics! I want them to have snow gear. I want them to have a mom who is home for weekly movie nights! etc - and my income feels far more constrained. I have to really weigh priorities and resources (time, financial) and decide things like: what is the goal of this? does this decision serve that goal or not? etc.
For me, that all DOES mirror my relationship to my body. Just like I don't believe body positivity is just saying, "physical health doesn't exist!!" I don't believe that considering my financial goals and choices is just about throwing caution to the wind and buying everything I want. Mostly, it's about considering my (family's) mental and emotional health as well as our financial health, and critically examining what that blend of priorities triangulates for us. For me it's far more about an emotional state of compassion and understanding of my own human self, than about any concrete set of actions or choices.
I think that one of the best things my parents taught me about money was that it isn’t ever about “deserving.” My mom always kind of firmly maintained that, like, we didn’t get a bookstore treat because we “deserved” it for getting good grades, or X reason; we got one because such a treat was possible for us in that moment, and it was how we wanted to spend that money. People will often kind of view these things as, like, I “deserve” a treat or “I work so hard I deserve to have a better house” etc; or the flip side – “I know I don’t deserve it, but I want it anyway,” and I feel like that is very similar to how we view food – this simultaneous obsession with deserving a treat, and depriving yourself of one because you don’t deserve it, etc.
To that end I kind of view a lot of financial decisions as being like…having an allergy, or intolerance. Or maybe being pregnant and unable to eat certain foods, however temporarily (I flagrantly disobeyed most cultural recommendations about what not to eat in pregnancy, but tomatoes – I craved them nonstop, and oh the heartburn, it killed me; and so it’s kind of the closest thing I’m thinking of, here. The desire to eat the tomatoes, combined with the knowledge that it would be a prolonged period of discomfort if I ate them – not a moral failing, though, never that kind of feeling. That weighing of the now and later, the physical and emotional and all different kinds of heath, as equal and neutral parts – that’s what I’m aiming for as a metaphor). If you have an allergy to, say, chocolate, it isn’t like “I want a brownie but I don’t deserve one,” it’s just, “Man, I want a brownie but I can’t have one,” and it’s a bummer, and then the immediate thing to do next is to look for substitutions for that thing you want but can’t have. I kind of take a similar view to financial stuff. There are things I want – badly!! – that I can’t have (right now, at least). It isn’t because I have failed in some moral or personality-related way; the fact that I do not have enough money to buy X is not because I was “over indulgent” on some previous day or year – I made those choices and they brought good things into my life in their own way. It just is a thing I cannot have right now for neutral reasons, and that can feel frustrating and bad sometimes, and it’s okay to feel those things – but also, with “deserve” out of the equation, I can pivot more easily to alternate solutions or at least try to shift focus, instead of wallowing in this weird place of self-flagellation and -loathing, where I deserve the misery I’m feeling.
It is all really complex to try to parse out, the emotional parts from the objective parts etc.
I use YNAB and have for years. I find it helpful because I can easily see what we’re spending on things, move money as needed WITHOUT guilt, and purposefully add money to buckets when I am seeing that we’re not being realistic. For me, who has a history of traumatic money experiences, seeing the tracking is helpful. This doesn’t feel like restriction to me because I use it in a way that works for our family and ignore all of their suggestions and emails to do it differently or in a certain way. I do feel like all budgeting advice online does feel like a diet though.
I know it's been such a powerful tool for you (and for others on this thread). I am noticing how much folks keep saying they just ignore their emails and marketing though -- and feeling frustrated that you can't just use the tool without having to consciously shut your eyes to the parts that might inspire guilt or stress. It's like why can't we have treadmills and exercise bikes that don't post calorie counts. The tools themselves are fine, but so much of the larger culture needs to change!
Fair! I worry because people are so vulnerable around money and trained to look for experts - so the marketing emails can seem louder. (Much like with diet stuff!)
Though I do feel like she sort of missed part of the deal with YNAB, which is that they want you to use it however works for you. You can customize the whole thing. They encourage people to use their money for what they want. It’s really not prescriptive, despite their name. I kind of wish there was another voice in this conversation, someone who could give this other side or budgeting, because it sort of seemed like you two agreed and didn’t really question each other? I know of plenty of diety money experts, but that wasn’t really the angle here. You can tell I keep thinking about it.
The thing is, the amazing people at YNAB do not inspire guilt and stress. They present a structure that might help people, educate on how to use it and then let folks get on with it in a way that suits them the best.
I've read every comment so far and want to start by saying I love how thoughtful everyone's responses are here.
For me, having ADHD and being self-employed has made using YNAB one of the smartest financial decisions I've ever made. Being able to save enough each month for regular but less frequent expenses (car insurance, annual subscription renewals, etc.) has been so helpful to me and my particular brain. I never feel deprived because that's not what this system is about; it's about being aware and making conscious choices about where to put your money. As for the cult following thing, sometimes things are popular because they're good and they bring about life-changing positive results.
I agree with others who said that the diet/budget comparison didn't feel accurate, especially given our lack of a social safety net, the cost of elder care, the very real risk of outliving our retirement savings, and people who don't have the privilege to spend "consciously" without some sort of structure that helps them not only stay organized, but literally solvent and able to remain housed and have food.
I think this episode was a great starting point into analyzing the Venn diagram between diet culture and wealth/prosperity gospel culture--but maybe not budgeting culture, per se. Unpacking ideas about the dearth of research into whether budgeting works and how to come up with financial systems that serve everyone, not just the culturally and financially privileged, are fascinating and bear further exploration.
I found this so thought-provoking - thanks for hosting, Virginia, and I hope this discussion continues with more analysis and perspectives (including perhaps Dana's again!).
I wanted to share a couple of my own experiences. The big thing going on in my life right now is that my father-in-law passed away very unexpectedly earlier this summer. He retired only a year ago and was loving being retired. And he worked really hard for his savings - he was a mechanic. I already "knew" this but it really drives home the point that retirement isn't guaranteed. I certainly wish my husband and I had prioritized doing something fun with them every year (we live multiple flights away from them). I wish we had sprung for a real vacation with them every year now instead of paying off student loans, saving for a house. It *is* a privilege to be deciding among those choices, yes. But also yeah I wish we had been less focused on our budget and how much we "should" spend on travel each year. (Not needing sympathy - my father-in-law definitely knew we loved him and we made it out for important occasions - just reflecting on how not just actual finances but also maybe budget culture, which I hadn't really thought about as a thing I guess, had real effects you know?)
Another element I would like to read more about and am thinking about from my own experience is "who has to budget and to what degree" being a little like "who has to [try to] diet and to what degree" based on biology and social structures? Like if you have "enough" money, you don't really have to budget right?
Anyway, thanks again for the thought-provoking reading, Virginia, Dana, and other commenters! And Virginia, hope you have a great vacation!
I did a rotation at a long-term care facility this summer and my preceptor talked about how working there changed her views on retirement. There were several residents who were very early into retirement when they had an accident or unexpected medical condition and were now needing higher levels of medical care for the rest of their life. She said it made her realize she didn’t need to wait for retirement to start creating her dream life because retirement isn’t guaranteed. I think it’s a good principle—take that trip, cultivate that hobby, read that book! Maybe we could all do better at spending a little more upfront to enjoy our present day life. However, I still think it’s wise to plan for your elder years if able. Just like we don’t know if we will get a retirement, we don’t know if we’ll need to support ourselves for 40 more years after retirement! And if health problems come up, there’s definitely no universal healthcare to pay for it either, sadly.
I loved this episode! I think diet culture and budget culture are great comparisons, and it really rung true for me because my mother is a huge Dave Ramsey fan and also very influenced by diet culture. She's always tried to get me to follow Dave Ramsey and I never have. I 100% agree that most white male financial "gurus" are selling nonsense that doesn't make sense for most people. I happily take on debt for a mortgage and cars - the idea that we need to pay cash for those things or pay them off ASAP is just so limiting and unecessary. And I agree that the idea of bad/good budgeting and restriction is worth discussing. It's never made sense to me that anyone who is living in poverty or in a lower income bracket can simply budget their way into having more money. Instead, we need to help them access resources and jobs that will provide a living wage. I do pause at saying budget trackers are like calorie or weight trackers. I personally use YNAB. I don't really pay attention to the advice it gives or try to follow certain rules, but having a general sense of where of my money is going, remembering to pay my bills on time, and making thoughtful decisions to move money to different places based on my goals has been helpful (although I definitely have lots of privilege as someone who makes six figures). I'm really interested in hearing more about this topic.
I found this to be a really fascinating conversation, and I also appreciate how it has continued here. I started tracking all of my spending on an excel spreadsheet when I graduated college. Which has now been eight years goodness. This episode definitely has me questioning the utility of that, and I was also really drawn to the idea of mindful journaling about the money one has spent.
I do think reevaluating the restriction mindset around money feels really powerful, but I also feel so much precarity around money (and this is as a postdoc who has a full time salary and health insurance). Which definitely always cuts into any enjoyment that spending money does bring. (Specifically, the need to be prepared in the case of a medical emergency).
This completely blew my mind!!! Everything Dana said made perfect sense, yet was so opposite of how I was brought up and preached to my entire life! I am always grateful for Burnt Toast--you really get some outstanding people to interview, Virginia!
Oh, man, I feel so conflicted about this one.
When I talk with friends about money I distinguish between big-picture mentality and goals and day-to-day practice. I am totally on the same page as Dana about those big-picture goals of paying off all your debt, getting as rich as possible, etc. I’m particularly skeptical of FIRE - it reminds me of those sects of Christianity that preach abstinence before marriage and then also set the expectation that sex within marriage should be this enticing hedonistic wonderland. Like, no.
But. Budgeting as a day-to-day practice changed my life.
For years I told myself my problem was that I didn’t have enough money, and I’m sure there were times that was true. But then I got a contract where my income went up 40%. I was definitely making Enough Money and I still felt the same at the end of every month. So I started educating myself, tried a few budget apps, got a handle on what I was spending. And then when my contract ended and my income went down 20%? I‘d never felt so in control of my money. All my bills got paid, I could treat myself and have some fun, and I didn’t feel that desperation at the end of each month.
The founder of YNAB once compared a good budget to a good butler - sometimes the butler asks “are you quite certain?” and other times the butler says “very good madam, I’ll make it happen right away.” This sounds and feels right to me. For me, figuring out budgeting in my day-to-day has been like learning to be my own excellent butler.
Really appreciate everyone sharing their reactions to this one so thoughtfully. I'm glad it's worked well for you! And still think it's worth investigating the larger mentality and culture around budgeting (especially as it intersects with morality and religion, whew!). Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been sitting with a different question, too. Based on the comments I’m guessing most of your reader/listenership is lady-identifying, and money expertise can be SO gendered in our society. I wonder if a mostly dude-identifying group would respond along the lines of, “well I don’t know about this diet culture stuff but YES, money culture is SO EXHAUSTING”
Ha, yes, I am SURE that’s true.
I love the butler analogy! I think that can be a good way to describe conscious spending, as well — it's about being your own butler and checking in instead of letting a budget be the gatekeeper for your spending.
I'm very conflicted by this because while I can in general understand how fighting against mindsets of extreme restriction (and interrogating capitalist values) is a worthwhile goal, I'm a disabled person who receives government 'benefits" and find the perspective put forth in this interview to be very limited/privileged. I suppose it's easy to think about budgeting as too inherently restrictive if it's a matter of, say, paying down your mortgage aggressively versus taking a nice family vacation - but if the consequences are "I will not be able to afford medical care I need to function" or "I will not be able to afford food or a place to live" budgeting can very literally be a survival tool. That's not even counting the ways in which many disabled people are quite literally forced into performing "financial responsibility" in order to prove to others that they deserve the basic right to live independently with control over their own money at all.
I should take a moment here to point out that I am *incredibly* privileged as far as these things go with disabled people in America and I still wake up every day feeling this precarity and wondering if any little indulgence is going to mean that I might not be able to afford care I need, leading me with lasting irreparable physical damage (which has happened before.) And this is with things like a supportive working partner, a house, a car, etc! It's an odd balance to strike mentally between knowing that so much of the need for budgeting is caused by external systems that require changing (would feel a lot better buying some nice yarn once in a while if I knew we had universal healthcare) and also that at the end of the day it's a survival tool.
I'm looking forward to reading the comments as they come in, since this topic is very thought provoking and bound to bring up some good perspectives!
I so appreciate this - and I don’t think we articulated enough the privilege required to be able to say “I want to divest from this system.” You are right, it’s not an option for everyone.
I suppose the TLD;R is that I feel like any conversation about personal finance that doesn't emphasize the structural changes that people with the privilege to "divest" from budgeting need to be using said privilege to advocate for and fund is ultimately replicating the same Personal Responsibility rhetoric that's the whole problem with diet culture in the first place. 😅 Certainly we should - all of us - prioritize things like rest and care and decoupling from a restrictive mindset, but money can't quite be talked about in the same ways as dieting and to do so sort of muddies what's important to interrogate about both things (IMHO)
I agree with this. When we lived near the poverty line, I had to budget every cent because it was, if I buy these snacks I want, I'm not going to be able to pay the electric bill. There was no way I could just spend money - we spent enough time with an overdrafted account as it was. We were also unable to access credit or a mortgage to leverage that debt and free up cash for other uses. I don't know. I guess I just didn't relate to this episode. I can see the parallel but until we are ensuring that every one of us in our community has COMFORTABLE (not just bare minimum) access to food, shelter, clothing, and healthcare... I can't see how this could work for a large swath of the population. It's unfortunate that we live in a capitalist oligarchy where money is required to access even the most basic human needs. The poor are forced to think about every cent, generally, because if you don't you could easily end up without a place to live.
The more I think about "budgeting as diet culture" the less I think the two make sense in comparison, largely because of the reason you just articulated - even if dieting was a completely neutral activity existing in a vacuum, diets do not and will fundamentally never work. On the other hand, budgeting does verifiably work, in the sense of it being necessary labor poor and underprivileged people have to engage in because, like you said, they have to make choices like "food vs electric bill" every time they spend money.
Still, if we accept the framing, the interview's approach to budgeting almost makes me feel like it's the monetary version of "budgeting is a DIET but conscious spending is WELLNESS" if that makes any sense. It's been very heartening to see other comments that come from the perspective of budgeting as survival vs budgeting as being something that makes you rich or morally good and so on. Thinking about those in relation to the interview, I'm very much reminded of a new age store near my town that gets regularly mocked for selling 50 dollar crystal-embedded candles that you can light to help with "ritual work to destroy capitalism." Credit for being the right idea, but very much not the way to achieve that change.
This episode was good food-for-thought, and I appreciate the further conversation in the comments. I see the parallels/overlap between diet culture and budget culture, and I think it’s important to interrogate the narratives we are fed around finances and who they are coming from. When my husband and I got married, we decided that “wealth is not a value for this family” in an attempt to guide our financial approach. I think it can be freeing to reject the pressure to build net worth, “level up,” get the mansion, etc. that we often see reflected online. However, I think similar critiques can be made of “conscious spending” that can be made of intuitive eating. One being the amount of privilege involved in giving up budgeting. For example, I don’t grocery shop with a budget. We have no limits as a family on what we can spend on food. This is a result of not needing to worry if the bill is higher on a particular week. It also allows me to cultivate peace with food as we shop with a list and then allow a “shop with your heart” section where we pick up anything extra that is sounding good that week (a new item at TJ’s, a type of chip we’re craving, etc.). But I know that approaching grocery shopping this way is due to our financial privilege. When I had less money a few years ago, I handled shopping completely differently and I would not have been comfortable going without a budget when I didn’t have the flexibility to spend an extra $20 that week.
And with inflation, we have been looking at places we can scale back since our rent has increased, laundry fees have increased, food costs have gone up, etc. We’ve asked things like “do we need subscriptions to all these streaming services or can we cancel some? Do we need to eat out at this restaurant or can we find somewhere cheaper? Do I need this higher end shampoo or can I find an option at Kroger?” I want to acknowledge that none of these are very big sacrifices (we’re still eating out) but there is an element of restriction in limiting where we can eat, what shows/movies are available to us, etc. And I’m not sure that it’s totally a bad thing. It’s definitely a conversation around what our values and goals are and what is winning out at any particular moment. All this to say I think the parallel breaks down for me at a certain point.
But this isn’t my final opinion (I’m even nervous posting a response I’ve only started thinking about today), and I’ll definitely be reflecting further.
This is resonating quite a lot with me and I’m so glad you named the privilege involved in intuitive eating and conscious spending - that’s something I should have done better in this episode.
Thank you for this! And for bravely sharing a thought-in-progress :)
You're striking on a point that I need to examine more as I continue to have these conversations: Yes, there is a privilege in not needing to restrict your spending. And many people make ends meet by setting restrictions on how they use their limited resources. Breaking down budget culture starts with questioning why some people have to make those sacrifices while others don't, and making broader changes toward equity in food, housing, etc. so access to necessities isn't dependent on individual budgeting.
I need to take more care when talking about divesting from budget culture to articulate that that looks different for everyone. If you're a victim of the inequities baked into budget culture, divesting is about shedding the guilt and shame the culture places on you for how you use money, understanding you're not doing money wrong. If you benefit from those inequities, divesting is about (that, too, but also) shifting your perspective to question the broader implications of budget culture and be part of the fight against it. In either case, the act of budgeting is only the tip of the iceberg, the part we see; the cultural mindset behind it is the actual problem we need to tackle.
In reality, most of us fall in a gray area of having some privilege and experiencing some oppression, so we each have to choose a unique path out of budget culture and form a personalized relationship with money, just as we're each doing with diet culture.
I found a lot of this conversation troubling and very bad advice. For one, the blithe universal assertion that "budgets don't work" with zero evidence beyond the personal and emotional. In fact, in the very next sentence, Dana mentions that there isn't much research into the efficacy of budgets. So where does this claim come from? What supports it, beyond her personal feelings that budgets are bad? There were a lot of personal experiences and reflections phrased as universals throughout the conversation: we feel this, we do that, we have this result (I find Anne Helen Peterson writes in a similar way). Who's the "we" in those statements? Where's the evidence to support that this is how--a majority of Americans? The bulk of Virginia's audience? "Ordinary" people? I'm not sure who "we" encompasses--think, feel, and behave? The dismissal of YNAB as x, y, z while admitting that she hasn't used it (and then mischaracterizing the way it works--you set your goals, categories, and amounts, you move money between categories as you see fit, expenses are tallied seamlessly and easily, and the tone is consistently non-judgmental and encouraging).
And then "conscious spending" advocated as the alternative...which is like a fuzzier, less accurate form of expense tracking.
The idea of dispensing with retirement planning is also deeply concerning advice.
People with perfectionist tendencies will find comfort and security in tracking and controlling aspects of their lives. This isn't inherently bad. And if you've got an anxiety disorder triggered by tracking your money, I suggest addressing this problem with a qualified therapist rather than deciding that its not worth keeping track of your money any more (speaking from experience here!) or planning for future unemployment or retirement (or your children's needs and educations).
Of course there's plenty of toxic bro posturing in the personal finance space. But there are also a lot of people who thoughtfully consider the same issues Dana argues are ignored--what it means to be "rich," how to set and achieve short- and long-term goals, how to determine when the challenges with achieving those goals is the goal, is your spending, or is your income, and how to plan solutions to those problems.
This conversation left me really concerned and unsettled and disappointed that Virginia didn't interrogate more of these claims with the same clear-eyed objectivity she has when she approaches aspects of medical reporting.
I second this comment, I really enjoy/learn a LOT from burnt toast but this interview felt really off base. I definitely agree that it's a conversation worth having, and so much of our financial debt system is set up to fail (medical debt, student debt, cost of housing vs wages), but just not saving for retirement was really off mark for me, especially in the system we live in where social security is not enough (and it's extremely doubtful social security will exist for retired millennials). I also looked at her website and her article on student debt/not paying loan and it not make a lot of sense to me, it took a lot of scrolling for the blog post to mention that they might (and very could!) garnish wages if you don't pay, that the interest will keep accruing (and how that adds up over time). Yes I'm fully here for student loan forgiveness/lower cost of university/etc, but not warning at the beginning that hey, if you decide not to pay, you could still end up paying through wage garnishing with a much higher debt due to interest felt very dismissive of very real consequences that could hurt people. Virginia, I love your work, but this work felt like you just sat back and listened without doing any real analysis/fact checking.
Appreciate this - and I hear you.
I'd like to add my agreement to this, too. And these posts have articulated what I've been feeling all day since I read the interview. I mostly feel like Dana didn't represent her work well in your interview; if you visit her website it is pretty run of the mill personal finance advice, much of which owes a lot to Ramit Sethi who's been doing great shame-free work in this space for over a decade.
I heard an interview with Ramit a few months ago and have been meaning to look up his work - thanks for the reminder!
Hi! I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I don't expect every conversation to land with everyone. I also don't intend this conversation to be the final word on any of this (that's why I said right in the intro that I want to hear people's thoughts and see where else we can take this discussion). Nor was anything Dana or I said intended as financial advice; we were sharing our experiences and ideas. Which is a bit different from what I do with my reporting. I agree we could have been clearer about who we meant by "we" and what the evidence does and does not tell us. But I do think interrogating a lot of the messaging and perfectionism of personal finance is work worth doing.
This was a really interesting convo (as always!) but I am left with some conflicting feelings around it. Compared to dieting, where I have increasingly seen SO many people have the exact same experience, the opposite is true with money and finance. One thing that immediately struck me was this idea that budgeting is all about "being rich", which is something I have never associated with budgeting or necessarily felt like I have been sold as a part of it. It almost feels to me like the idea of casting off the restriction of "budgeting" is a privileged idea in itself? I grew up in what I guess was the lower working class. We never had food insecurity and had clothes and shelter, but never had anything extra and my parents were always in debt and fighting about money. So for me, taking back some control and understanding of money now that I'm in a very different income bracket has felt really empowering. It has taught me that it is important to see where your money is going, and it gives me the choice of how I spend it now that I finally have that extra that I never had. I was never given any information about money or tools for understanding how to manage it. In dieting, women have been pushed towards focusing on something that we now realize is trivial. Finance to me has always been seen as something left to the (white) men with women actively excluded in the past, despite it being far more vital to our lives. I am really having trouble with the idea that women and other marginalized groups should disengage with budget culture the same way we have with diet culture. The language of restriction and the false marketing around budgeting is a totally fair thing to reject, but it feels like we could be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Changing the way we talk about money, more open discussion, re-framing ideas around debt and spending, these are all great things. Maybe the way budgeting has been sold to a certain group/class specifically needs to be changed, but I don't think it is accurate or fair to compare it to dieting. Women especially have been steeped in diet culture for at least the last hundred years — talking about money and budgets has been a closed door for many women until very recently. Even if, like dieting, there are some pretty frustrating aspects of how we talk about budgeting, it feels like a more convenient comparison than it is a totally true one. Food for thought I guess. Thank you so much for doing this work!
You raise some excellent points. I agree (and I think Dana would agree) that the goal here isn't for women or POC to disengage from money -- it's the rejecting of the toxic messaging that we're interested in. And maybe it's worth considering whether budgeting is the best tool for engaging folks -- especially when it doesn't work for so many of us. But there's a lot here!
Yeah I definitely agree that there are toxic ideas being marketed to us around financial responsibility (and of course the very toxic American idea of "bootstraps" so that we can blame poor people for being poor). I think the difference that is important to note here if we are making a comparison between diets and budgets is that we know for sure diets do not work and have the evidence to back that up. As Dana mentioned herself, there isn't great research on the effectiveness of budgets and it does seem like there is a lot of value in using certain budgeting tools for some folks -- especially if/when they are flexible enough to be used in a way that works for a wide range of people.
Yes, I agree with what Virginia said, that our focus is on rejecting the toxic messaging around money.
A major parallel I see between diet culture and budget culture is the way we determine whether a diet or budget "works." Restrictive (a.k.a. all) diets do, in fact, often lead to weight loss, which a diet culture mindset considers a success. In the same way, budgeting can help some people eliminate debt or stretch dollars from income that's too low, and a budget culture mindset considers them "good with money." In both cases, the goal is the problem. Diets wouldn't happen if we didn't have a cultural ideal of thinness (which we mask with the language of "health"). And budgets wouldn't happen if we didn't have a cultural ideal of richness (which we mask with the language of "self-sufficiency" or "security").
I completely agree. My husband left a job where he was making more money because he hated the work to a job that he enjoys but pays a bit less, and so for now we have to be pretty strict in our spending. It’s not about getting rich, it’s about making sure we can pay our bills.
I do think the point made about understanding the larger financial and economic systems, and how our individual finances our impacted by those systems, is an important conversations to have:
I am with you, Justine.
Thank you Dana for this thoughtful conversation! I completely agree with so many of your ideas. I struggled mightily for most of my life as the person in all the families I was in who earned the money kept track of money did the taxes blah blah blah. It was hell and exactly like an eating disorder.
Then I got ill and became disabled.
The money thing became truly terrifying, and I found YNAB. In our more broke and lower income status making us more “regular” YNAB has set me free. It keeps track. I don’t worry. As time has gone by… It’s been six years… I freely move money from any category to cover the haircolor I needed for morale without a second thought. We recently just dumped every single penny we had in savings to pay off our mortgage, and are struggling to have any savings at all, and it’s totally OK.
But maybe it’s like financial Al-Anon for people with money issues and if that’s the case. I’m really thankful for it. Now my husband can see the finances and my kids can see them and I get to share the load.
That said, I recognize everyone doesn’t need AA, and therefore everyone doesn’t need YNAB. But some do and it’s good to have support.
Oh I love the potential of a budgeting app to share the financial mental load -- you are completely right that is so much to carry and manage all on your own.
I love that you've found a way to lessen the mental load! I'm completely in favor of turning over the burden to money management apps and automating and sharing as much of the work as you can. That sounds like a great relief 💖
I thought I was the only one who had huge issues with this interview and I’m relieved to not be alone. I just kept thinking “money is fluid *if you have access to non-predatory credit.* You can practice “conscious spending” if you have enough cash on hand OR access to non-predatory credit! (Also, I don’t understand how being mindful of how much money I have on hand and how much is coming in/going out to other things this month isn’t “conscious spending” - and I call that “budgeting.”)
Rich people carry tons of debt because they have collateral that allows them to access huge amounts of credit with favorable terms and low interest rates. The rest of us may not have access even to things like mortgages and student loans (if we’re not students). “Bad debt” isn’t bad because the person who holds it made a bad choice, it’s bad because it hurts them and is emblematic of a system where some people can treat money like it’s fluid and others have to count every penny. This is a terrible system! But hand-waving it away as “budget culture” doesn’t change the system.
When I was in my 20s, I earned a low salary (nonprofits!) in an expensive city and had almost no access to credit (no history, so my first credit card had a $700 limit). In the wake of the financial crisis, banks had gotten skittish about lending to people like me. My then-gf also earned a low salary and had no credit history. We budgeted in a spreadsheet every month and yes, it felt like restriction but also, we liked being housed and having food to eat? And it empowered us to say to friends “hey, we can’t do dinner and drinks this weekend but we’d love to do something cheaper or free” - and we lived in a city full of awesome cheap/free things to do with friends, so it wasn’t really a hardship; just a fact of life at the time. I’m so glad we had a budget that allowed us to enjoy our 20s without getting evicted or stressing out about money all the time.
Now that we have more money coming in, we don’t budget as tightly. Does it feel good? Yep! Is it entirely a byproduct of financial privilege? You bet. It’s not “conscious spending” - it’s “having a safety cushion and higher incomes and access to low-interest borrowing when we need it.” It’s the system working for us. It’s privilege. We didn’t need to “ditch budget culture”… we just needed more money and better credit scores.
This is spot on. You really do have to have access to money to not have to worry about money.
I agree with this a lot, and i felt like this interview really failed to also look at the privilege it takes to just, not budget. I also felt like as a conversation it overlooked some very real impacts inflation is having on money and spending for nearly everyone. Until general income and annual raises match *or exceed* the rate of inflation, I cannot ignore the fact that our grocery costs have nearly doubled even when we are buying the same amount and varieties of food. Or that my cat litter and food have gone up 145% over the past 6 months. It’s easy to not budget but it is hard not to *plan.*
The goal for many isn’t, in my anecdotal experience, to become rich but to be fiscally solvent in a way that allows a person to be flexible in what or how they spend without worrying that this will impact their ability to buy groceries, or visit urgent care, or any necessity. I find it baffling that so many in our society seem to believe that not all of our people deserve the means to live comfortably without constant fear of that single issue that would lead them to financial ruin.
Sorry this turned into a soap box
I agree - I think all people should have their basic human rights in place without always just waiting for that other shoe to drop.
I was thinking about this episode as I budgeted out money in YNAB. We don't quite make ends meet so it's always me trying to take from one place to pay a different place that's more important. If I didn't have any kind of system, we would pretty quickly end up with overdrafts or unpaid bills. There really isn't much discretionary income left to "not budget". Well, really, there's none, because we already incur debt just to pay certain necessary healthcare expenses not covered by insurance, but that's another whole topic!
I previously worked in “financial literacy” and have now come to understand that you can give someone all the tools in the world but if they don’t have the income to cover basic needs then that’s the issue. I appreciate that this point was made but I wish the conversation had dug deeper on those inequities. I also think that instead of “good” vs “bad” debt, you could think of it as “predatory” vs “asset building”. So many people are only given access to predatory types of lending that are designed to keep them in a constant loop of debt just to cover basic costs. While people with money can access lending to purchase assets like a home or education that will provide for a more stable future. And finally, taking away pensions to put the onus on individuals to save for retirement via 401ks was just incredibly unethical. It’s an absolute crapshoot to plan for retirement this way. All in all, I think we all could have a healthier relationship with money but the more important issue is to create systemic changes in our country to actually help everyone get a living wage and have access to better lending and retirement planning.
Excellent points. Thank you!
Yes to all of this! Thank you for sharing. I love reframing debt as "predatory" vs. "asset building." That's a wonderful way to shift the responsibility to the lender instead of the borrower. The frame of "good" vs. "bad" debt is an unfair way to put blame on the borrower for the consequences of predatory lending.
Yes to all of this.
Lol, I'm another YNAB devotee signing in to express some differing opinions from Dana. I also have spent the last 15+ years writing frequently about personal finance and investing - some journalism, but largely on behalf of the giant financial services companies that underpin the American (and global) economy. So, a whole continent of salt there. I find what Dana said about retirement to be terrifying -- the idea of waiting until retirement age to see how it all works out is not how I want to spend the last part of my life! I might feel differently if we had a functioning social safety net. But in its absence, I need to make sure I take care of myself, especially since I have the means to do so. (Lots of privilege here, too, obviously.)
Given the particulars of my life experience - raising a teen in ED recovery and writing a lot for financial services companies - the comparison of diet culture to budgeting feels a lot like apples and oranges to me. But I really appreciate this interview for pushing on some long-held assumptions, whether I ultimately agree with them or not.
This is a bit of an aside, but I turned 50 last month and am *really* struggling of late to figure out where I can fight the system(s), and where I need to just preserve my energy and understand that one person's actions aren't going to have much practical impact (no ethical consumption under capitalism etc etc). I'm doing a ton of grappling w/ the insidiousness of capitalism and hustle culture... and also I have to pay my mortgage and send my kid to college in two years. Sometimes it all really just makes my head hurt.
Really appreciate this perspective. And I agree about it making my head hurt!
I actually really like this discussion and don't entirely disagree with the points articulated! Especially the identification of a "universally assumed goal" (to be thin; to be rich) and consideration of it for either adopting or rejecting.
I spent most of my life living well within my means and, with the "thin-budget" privilege that came with being a single person with steady employment and a healthy side-hustle, assumed that meant I was good at budgeting. My wants were fairly simple and easily satisfied by my earnings, with plenty leftover to save. Once I had my kids, upsized my living situation, took various maternity leaves for them (as a freelancer, no less), couldn't just throw all my waking hours at the wall and extract all the money possible from the market (ie had to be the primary parent to my kids and fit my work into a set period of hours), I realized that the situation before had not really been that I was just so good at managing money - it was that my wants cost less than my income, so I never had to confront the hard choices. Now, my wants feel infinite - I want my kids to take gymnastics! I want them to have snow gear. I want them to have a mom who is home for weekly movie nights! etc - and my income feels far more constrained. I have to really weigh priorities and resources (time, financial) and decide things like: what is the goal of this? does this decision serve that goal or not? etc.
For me, that all DOES mirror my relationship to my body. Just like I don't believe body positivity is just saying, "physical health doesn't exist!!" I don't believe that considering my financial goals and choices is just about throwing caution to the wind and buying everything I want. Mostly, it's about considering my (family's) mental and emotional health as well as our financial health, and critically examining what that blend of priorities triangulates for us. For me it's far more about an emotional state of compassion and understanding of my own human self, than about any concrete set of actions or choices.
This is so well put -- and I think a really good example of what Dana was articulating with the "conscious spending" concept. Thank you for sharing!
I think that one of the best things my parents taught me about money was that it isn’t ever about “deserving.” My mom always kind of firmly maintained that, like, we didn’t get a bookstore treat because we “deserved” it for getting good grades, or X reason; we got one because such a treat was possible for us in that moment, and it was how we wanted to spend that money. People will often kind of view these things as, like, I “deserve” a treat or “I work so hard I deserve to have a better house” etc; or the flip side – “I know I don’t deserve it, but I want it anyway,” and I feel like that is very similar to how we view food – this simultaneous obsession with deserving a treat, and depriving yourself of one because you don’t deserve it, etc.
To that end I kind of view a lot of financial decisions as being like…having an allergy, or intolerance. Or maybe being pregnant and unable to eat certain foods, however temporarily (I flagrantly disobeyed most cultural recommendations about what not to eat in pregnancy, but tomatoes – I craved them nonstop, and oh the heartburn, it killed me; and so it’s kind of the closest thing I’m thinking of, here. The desire to eat the tomatoes, combined with the knowledge that it would be a prolonged period of discomfort if I ate them – not a moral failing, though, never that kind of feeling. That weighing of the now and later, the physical and emotional and all different kinds of heath, as equal and neutral parts – that’s what I’m aiming for as a metaphor). If you have an allergy to, say, chocolate, it isn’t like “I want a brownie but I don’t deserve one,” it’s just, “Man, I want a brownie but I can’t have one,” and it’s a bummer, and then the immediate thing to do next is to look for substitutions for that thing you want but can’t have. I kind of take a similar view to financial stuff. There are things I want – badly!! – that I can’t have (right now, at least). It isn’t because I have failed in some moral or personality-related way; the fact that I do not have enough money to buy X is not because I was “over indulgent” on some previous day or year – I made those choices and they brought good things into my life in their own way. It just is a thing I cannot have right now for neutral reasons, and that can feel frustrating and bad sometimes, and it’s okay to feel those things – but also, with “deserve” out of the equation, I can pivot more easily to alternate solutions or at least try to shift focus, instead of wallowing in this weird place of self-flagellation and -loathing, where I deserve the misery I’m feeling.
It is all really complex to try to parse out, the emotional parts from the objective parts etc.
I use YNAB and have for years. I find it helpful because I can easily see what we’re spending on things, move money as needed WITHOUT guilt, and purposefully add money to buckets when I am seeing that we’re not being realistic. For me, who has a history of traumatic money experiences, seeing the tracking is helpful. This doesn’t feel like restriction to me because I use it in a way that works for our family and ignore all of their suggestions and emails to do it differently or in a certain way. I do feel like all budgeting advice online does feel like a diet though.
I know it's been such a powerful tool for you (and for others on this thread). I am noticing how much folks keep saying they just ignore their emails and marketing though -- and feeling frustrated that you can't just use the tool without having to consciously shut your eyes to the parts that might inspire guilt or stress. It's like why can't we have treadmills and exercise bikes that don't post calorie counts. The tools themselves are fine, but so much of the larger culture needs to change!
I mean I ignore everyone’s sales and marketing emails? This feels no different to me🤣.
Fair! I worry because people are so vulnerable around money and trained to look for experts - so the marketing emails can seem louder. (Much like with diet stuff!)
Though I do feel like she sort of missed part of the deal with YNAB, which is that they want you to use it however works for you. You can customize the whole thing. They encourage people to use their money for what they want. It’s really not prescriptive, despite their name. I kind of wish there was another voice in this conversation, someone who could give this other side or budgeting, because it sort of seemed like you two agreed and didn’t really question each other? I know of plenty of diety money experts, but that wasn’t really the angle here. You can tell I keep thinking about it.
The thing is, the amazing people at YNAB do not inspire guilt and stress. They present a structure that might help people, educate on how to use it and then let folks get on with it in a way that suits them the best.
I've read every comment so far and want to start by saying I love how thoughtful everyone's responses are here.
For me, having ADHD and being self-employed has made using YNAB one of the smartest financial decisions I've ever made. Being able to save enough each month for regular but less frequent expenses (car insurance, annual subscription renewals, etc.) has been so helpful to me and my particular brain. I never feel deprived because that's not what this system is about; it's about being aware and making conscious choices about where to put your money. As for the cult following thing, sometimes things are popular because they're good and they bring about life-changing positive results.
I agree with others who said that the diet/budget comparison didn't feel accurate, especially given our lack of a social safety net, the cost of elder care, the very real risk of outliving our retirement savings, and people who don't have the privilege to spend "consciously" without some sort of structure that helps them not only stay organized, but literally solvent and able to remain housed and have food.
I think this episode was a great starting point into analyzing the Venn diagram between diet culture and wealth/prosperity gospel culture--but maybe not budgeting culture, per se. Unpacking ideas about the dearth of research into whether budgeting works and how to come up with financial systems that serve everyone, not just the culturally and financially privileged, are fascinating and bear further exploration.
I found this so thought-provoking - thanks for hosting, Virginia, and I hope this discussion continues with more analysis and perspectives (including perhaps Dana's again!).
I wanted to share a couple of my own experiences. The big thing going on in my life right now is that my father-in-law passed away very unexpectedly earlier this summer. He retired only a year ago and was loving being retired. And he worked really hard for his savings - he was a mechanic. I already "knew" this but it really drives home the point that retirement isn't guaranteed. I certainly wish my husband and I had prioritized doing something fun with them every year (we live multiple flights away from them). I wish we had sprung for a real vacation with them every year now instead of paying off student loans, saving for a house. It *is* a privilege to be deciding among those choices, yes. But also yeah I wish we had been less focused on our budget and how much we "should" spend on travel each year. (Not needing sympathy - my father-in-law definitely knew we loved him and we made it out for important occasions - just reflecting on how not just actual finances but also maybe budget culture, which I hadn't really thought about as a thing I guess, had real effects you know?)
Another element I would like to read more about and am thinking about from my own experience is "who has to budget and to what degree" being a little like "who has to [try to] diet and to what degree" based on biology and social structures? Like if you have "enough" money, you don't really have to budget right?
Anyway, thanks again for the thought-provoking reading, Virginia, Dana, and other commenters! And Virginia, hope you have a great vacation!
I did a rotation at a long-term care facility this summer and my preceptor talked about how working there changed her views on retirement. There were several residents who were very early into retirement when they had an accident or unexpected medical condition and were now needing higher levels of medical care for the rest of their life. She said it made her realize she didn’t need to wait for retirement to start creating her dream life because retirement isn’t guaranteed. I think it’s a good principle—take that trip, cultivate that hobby, read that book! Maybe we could all do better at spending a little more upfront to enjoy our present day life. However, I still think it’s wise to plan for your elder years if able. Just like we don’t know if we will get a retirement, we don’t know if we’ll need to support ourselves for 40 more years after retirement! And if health problems come up, there’s definitely no universal healthcare to pay for it either, sadly.
I loved this episode! I think diet culture and budget culture are great comparisons, and it really rung true for me because my mother is a huge Dave Ramsey fan and also very influenced by diet culture. She's always tried to get me to follow Dave Ramsey and I never have. I 100% agree that most white male financial "gurus" are selling nonsense that doesn't make sense for most people. I happily take on debt for a mortgage and cars - the idea that we need to pay cash for those things or pay them off ASAP is just so limiting and unecessary. And I agree that the idea of bad/good budgeting and restriction is worth discussing. It's never made sense to me that anyone who is living in poverty or in a lower income bracket can simply budget their way into having more money. Instead, we need to help them access resources and jobs that will provide a living wage. I do pause at saying budget trackers are like calorie or weight trackers. I personally use YNAB. I don't really pay attention to the advice it gives or try to follow certain rules, but having a general sense of where of my money is going, remembering to pay my bills on time, and making thoughtful decisions to move money to different places based on my goals has been helpful (although I definitely have lots of privilege as someone who makes six figures). I'm really interested in hearing more about this topic.
I'd love to do more on this. It's so interesting to see which pieces resonate and which pieces bring up questions.
I found this to be a really fascinating conversation, and I also appreciate how it has continued here. I started tracking all of my spending on an excel spreadsheet when I graduated college. Which has now been eight years goodness. This episode definitely has me questioning the utility of that, and I was also really drawn to the idea of mindful journaling about the money one has spent.
I do think reevaluating the restriction mindset around money feels really powerful, but I also feel so much precarity around money (and this is as a postdoc who has a full time salary and health insurance). Which definitely always cuts into any enjoyment that spending money does bring. (Specifically, the need to be prepared in the case of a medical emergency).
This completely blew my mind!!! Everything Dana said made perfect sense, yet was so opposite of how I was brought up and preached to my entire life! I am always grateful for Burnt Toast--you really get some outstanding people to interview, Virginia!
So glad it resonated!
Thank you so much 💗