What if a budget isn't the answer?

Vox

17-02-2025

For many, budgeting has never felt like more of a challenge, which might explain why it seems to be trendier than ever — with all the fads and judgment that attention implies. TikTok influencers offer financial trendbait like 'loud budgeting' and the '100 envelope challenge,' which suggest that people can solve their financial problems by following strict rules that can be summed up in a single viral hashtag.
Dana Miranda is a personal finance journalist and educator based in central Wisconsin who runs the Healthy Rich newsletter and is the author of You Don't Need a Budget. Jen Smith and Jill Sirianni are based in St. Petersburg, Florida, where they co-host the Frugal Friends Podcast and co-authored Buy What You Love Without Going Broke . These three financial educators believe that budgeting culture has gone to the kinds of extremes that make it difficult to think holistically about financial values — and that the best way to manage money might involve letting go of some of the so-called rules.
The following conversation has been lightly condensed and edited.
Jen Smith: I think that we've learned a lot of our budgeting, and our financial habits and consumption, from the way we consume food. We've taken something we're already familiar with, extreme diets, and transitioned it to money. For women, it's been this constant source of shame and struggle — and so we really want to get away from the language that causes this shame and struggle and create a new way to think about financial concepts that are a little more freeing and empowering.
Dana Miranda: I specifically thought it was important to name budget culture and to show the direct parallel to diet culture. The ways we talk about money are focused on that same restrictive mindset. It's also a very individualistic mindset, when both our approach to food and our approach to money have so many systemic causes and implications that we often don't talk about when we're giving financial advice.
Once we understand the ways we teach and talk about money in our culture, we can understand that even if we're not specifically engaging in restrictive budgeting, that kind of culture underlies all of the ways we think about money.
Jill Sirianni: I think a lot of us are not taught how to manage our resources well. We're not taught how to spend, we're not taught how to save, much less how to invest. It's not usually overtly taught by our parents or caregivers, and it's not taught in school — so we graduate and take on student loan debt, not really understanding what that means for us in the long term.
We also learn that spending is a personality trait. You're either a spender or a saver. We should be learning that we all spend, and we all should be saving, and there shouldn't be this guilt or shame attached to any of it. We can align our spending with the things that actually matter; our values, the things that are important and life-giving to us. This gives us a sense of confidence and freedom about the ways we spend our money — or ways we don't spend our money, if we choose to consume less.
Jen: Spending was a hobby when I was growing up. It's what we did on the weekend! We went to the mall. We went to Walmart. That was how I learned what to do with money. I didn't learn how to spend it on investments. I didn't learn how to spend it on vacations after saving up for them. I wasn't taught any of that.
Now shopping isn't just a hobby. It's what you do when you're stressed! It's what you do when you're bored! It's the go-to thing to do with any free given second of time.
Dana: That's interesting, because I was raised just the opposite. I grew up in a culture that was anti-debt, anti-spending, pro-saving. Hold on to money as much as you can and work hard to earn it. That's what I see in people as adults, too — sometimes they're afraid to spend money, because they've been told their whole life that spending money leads to chaos.
We're never taught to question what's going on outside of us, and we're never taught to look inside of ourselves and ask ourselves what we want to do with our money.
Jill: For our book, we really wanted to teach the skill of spending. It's not a personality trait, it's not a moral failing or a moral superiority, it's a skill. That means it's something you can learn and something you can get better at doing.
Stopping all spending and doing something like a no-buy year, we don't think that's the answer. A short no-spend challenge can show us something about our spending habits and speed up the timeline of learning — but if you want to learn how to function in the world that we live in, you're going to spend money. Let's hone that skill and do it well!
Dana: Your book is such a complement to mine that I'm starting to recommend them together. My book focuses on the cultural relationship with money and the personal relationship with money. What I really want people to take away from my book is to start to question the traditional advice that they're hearing, because I think that's the big skill we're not learning. We're looking for a specific set of rules or a specific method, and we end up bouncing from method to method to try to find the right one instead of asking questions about why this person is describing this particular method. Why is this person giving this particular advice? What about their life made that method work for them, and how might that be different from what's in my life — or how might it be the same? That's how people can start piecing together something that works for them, and how they can start questioning what's around them instead of asking someone else to tell them what to do next.
I use my book to shift people into that mindset, but I like to recommend your book because it gives people the practical tips that can help them take the next steps.
Jill: Our approach is similar to Dana's approach: understanding ourselves first. We need to understand some of the reasoning behind what we're doing so that we can have self-understanding, and a lot of that involves giving people tools that they can take with them throughout any season of life.
When that happens, when we understand what our current spending habits are and learn the ways in which we want to shift them, how we can get more of what really matters, our values, our higher needs; then we can identify what we want to do with our resources. That's all of our resources: our time, our physical space, our relationships, our mental and emotional energies, as well as our money.
So with something like investing — and of course that's a whole large topic, there are plenty of books just on that topic — we believe that it requires these first steps in order to build a really solid foundation so that people can determine what the best investment strategy might be for them going forward.
For many people who are middle or average earners, the best strategy is probably going to be some kind of automation utilizing your Roth IRA and your 401(k), but a lot of times people in this space are still looking at debt payoff and fully funding an emergency fund. These are the types of things they can set on autopilot so they can begin saving for retirement, but first we need to understand the skill of spending. What do I even value? How can I get more of what I want without throwing money at my problems?
Jen: There are already plenty of great investment books out there. Rich AF by Vivian Tu, Grow Your Money by Bola Sokunbi, but it is very hard to take action on them if you are spending every dollar you make. The lowest barrier to entry to get started with investing is to spend less. Our book can help people increase their margin so they can start investing faster. They don't have to wait to earn more.
Dana: In You Don't Need a Budget , I try to speak to people who might be experiencing financial insecurity or some instability, but the issue with that is that most of the time if someone is experiencing something like food insecurity, it is usually the result of a systemic cultural problem and not something that we can offer personal advice to help them change. It's something that needs to be addressed at a systemic level.
What I try to do for readers in that situation is to reiterate that message over and over, because often in the personal finance space they're getting messages written for people who are middle or average income. They're getting tweaks on how to spend their money, which is just not enough — so the message I want to send is that this information is not for you . People are not speaking to your situation, and you should not feel ashamed of the things that you have to do to survive in this system that is not allowing you that kind of security.
It's hard as a financial educator and personal finance writer to speak to that situation, because there's no answer for it. It's a systemic thing and a political thing, and it's important to say that.
Jen: We also believe that debt is neutral. Some people consider a mortgage 'good debt,' and for other people their mortgage can be 50 percent of their income — which doesn't make mortgages bad, but in this case it might not be the best decision for you.
Credit card debt and high interest debt can be a bad decision, but not always. Sometimes you need those tools to keep you afloat. I often like to say that there's a difference between being hungry and not knowing where your next meal is coming from. A person who is using credit cards to deal with food insecurity is different from a person who is maximizing every line of credit available to them and not dealing with their long-term financial goals.
That said, if you are in credit card debt, get rid of that debt first. That's something I'm willing to take a stand on. For everything else, you have to honor your season and your capacity for what you can do financially.
Dana: I really think that's the approach we need to take to debt. It's about your season. I take a radical approach in terms of allowing the use of debt, but I also want people to understand how debt products work.
I don't think that anybody has a moral obligation to pay off debt as quickly as possible, the way that it is sometimes represented. I think that debt products are a resource to help you live a life that's comfortable and have the experiences that you want and deserve. As long as you understand how debt works and how to deal with any debt you accrue, you can go ahead and use debt products in your life.
It's important to avoid actions such as maxing out your credit card or damaging your credit score — the kind of things that might reduce your access to debt as a resource — but you should also avoid thinking of debt in terms of rules, such as 'it's a rule that we should avoid debt' or 'it's a rule that we should pay off debt as quickly as possible.'
Jill: One of the reframes we've used on debt is the idea of 'beneficial' versus 'not beneficial.' Rather than talking about moral and immoral or good and bad, try to individualize these decisions. Is this good for me and my family, or is this not beneficial for me and my family? That's going to look different from person to person.
Dana: When I say that you don't need a budget, the most important thing I'm looking at is eliminating that reliance on restriction and the kinds of boundaries that require you to live a smaller life. You need to be aware of what's happening with your money, but it's not just an awareness of where your money's going because that kind of exercise can lead to self-judgment. You should also be aware of what money is coming in and what resources you have access to. What goals are you trying to achieve, and how can you use money as a part of all of that?
This doesn't mean making a spending plan, and it doesn't mean restricting your spending according to someone else's rules — but it does mean being aware of money because it's one of the things you're dealing with in life. It's one piece of your life that you're being mindful about, the same way that you are about anything else.
Jill: It's like asking whether you can have beneficial relationships and interactions in the future without looking at what your past relationships and interactions have been. You just can't. That's not to say that we're going to look back with shame, but we won't be able to make money decisions and choices if we don't know what we've already been doing with our money.
Jen: The anticipation of finding that out is typically a lot more overwhelming than what you actually find out. It's also a good idea to reframe some of the negative feelings that might come up. Instead of feeling guilty, for example, you can acknowledge that you regret some of your past decisions. That's healthy. Regret helps you understand that you can change, and it helps you decide what to do next.
Jill: Writing this book has helped me manage some of my own financial regrets and reframe them as learning opportunities.
Jen: For me, writing the book has given me accountability to practice what I preach. When I spend, it's on something that I truly value — and if it's to meet a need, I want to make sure what I buy is meeting that need 100 percent , instead of trying to put money towards something that money can't buy.
Dana: What I've learned from writing about personal finance is this empowerment of understanding how things work. How our financial systems work and how they interact with our culture and our political systems.
So much of financial education is about telling people the right and wrong things to do, and that isn't accurate for everyone. Once you understand how things work, you can find out what's actually right for you — and you can understand why certain things don't work for some people. Then you can take what works for you and do what's going to work best in your life, instead of doing whatever someone else told you is the right thing.