YOU DON'T NEED A BUDGET

YOU DON'T NEED A BUDGET is a simple, no-stress guide to managing your money - free of the toxic messages and 'money shaming' baked into traditional personal finance advice.

Track every dollar you spend. Check your account balances once a week. Always pay off your credit card bill in full. Make a budgetand stick to it, no matter what. These are just a few of the edicts you'll find in virtually every personal finance book ever published. The problem is, this kind of rigid, one?size fits?all adviceusually written for and by wealthy white men (and a few women) with little perspective on the money struggles that ordinary people faceis unrealistic, and only creates more stress and shame. You Don't need a Budget is the financial guide for the rest of us. As a financial journalist and educator, Dana Miranda is on a mission to liberate readers from what she calls budget culture: the damaging set of beliefs around money that reward restriction and deprivationmuch like diet culture does for food and bodies. In this long?overdue alternative to traditional budgeting methods, Miranda offers a new approach that makes money easy for everyone, regardless of the numbers in their bank account. Full of counterintuitive advicelike how to use debt to support your life goals, how to save for retirement without a 401K, and how to take advantage of resources that exist to support those left behind by the forces of capitalismYou Don't Need a Budget will empower readers to get their money worries off their mind and afford the lives they want. Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance® (CEPF®) and a personal finance journalist who grew up in a working-class family in a small town in Wisconsin. When she joined the ranks of personal finance media in 2015, she found the niche led mostly by advice (and admonitions) from middle-class white men, ignoring the broad diversity of our relationships with work and money. After leaving a leadership position with a top financial media startup and spending two years as a freelance writer, she founded Healthy Rich, a platform for inclusive, budget-free financial education that's been featured in publications including GOBankingRates, Real Simple, and Forbes, where it was named a safe resource for LGBTQ+ financial education in 2022.