Money works best when it supports the life you want to live.

 

Dana Miranda, author, content creator, and money writer joined me on Get Ready Before Life Happens to talk  about what it means to build a healthier, more empowering relationship with money.

 

We explored why traditional money advice often misses the lived experiences of women, people of color, and LGBTQ communities, and how understanding financial tools can replace fear with confidence and choice.

 

Key Takeaways

 

🔹 Financial products are tools, not goals.

🔹 Understanding how money works helps reduce fear and uncertainty.

🔹 Traditional advice often reflects an idealized life that many people do not live.

🔹 Your identity and lived experience shape your relationship with money.

🔹 Good money management does not have to mean restriction.

🔹 “Enough” is personal and can change over time.

🔹 Money should support your life, not become your boss.

 

Tony’s Take: Healthy wealth begins with self-trust. Financial readiness is not about following someone else’s rules. It is about understanding the tools available to you and using money to support the life you want to build.

 

 🎥 Watch this episode below: 

 

🎧 Listen to the podcast below or on your favorite podcast app. 

 

Connect with Dana Miranda: 

 

• Website and newsletter: https://www.healthyrich.co
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justdanamiranda/overlay/contact-info/
• Forbes Advisor Columnist: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/author/dmiranda/

 

Books: 

 

• You Don't Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Amazon) 

 

Bio: 

 

Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She’s been writing about personal finance as a staffer, freelancer, author, and creator since 2015, sharing her innovative budget-free approach, which recognizes the ways financial education fails to meet the needs of marginalized folks and shifts the conversation toward a better relationship with money for everyone.

 

👉 Start Your Financial Readiness Plan: A free, practical plan that helps you create your in-case-of-emergency Financial First Aid Kit, organize what matters, and prepare before life happens. Start Your Free Financial Readiness Plan  https://www.tonysteuer.com

 

👉 Support Get Ready. Become a Get Ready Insider and help keep the Financial Readiness Plan free, support the podcast, trusted resources, and consumer-first financial education. You’ll receive access to the Get Ready Library. Support Get Ready here. www.tonysteuer.com/support

Transcript 

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Tony: What if the real problem with money advice is the assumption that there’s only one right way to do things?

Welcome to Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Today, I’m joined by Dana Miranda.

Dana, welcome to the podcast.

Dana: Thanks so much for having me, Tony.

Tony: I’m excited to have you on.

I’ve been following your Substack for a while and really enjoy your writing and what you’re exploring.

To start, what is your origin story, and how did it lead you to launching Healthy Rich and writing You Don’t Need a Budget?

Dana: My origin story in personal finance starts out sounding a lot like other people’s.

I was in my 20s.

I knew nothing about money.

I had debt.

I was getting by making money as a freelancer.

Where my story is a little different is that I didn’t discover personal finance because I was trying to take on some huge financial challenge.

I found personal finance as a writer because I got a job writing for a personal finance site.

At first I thought, “This is probably going to be pretty boring, but it’s a writing job. I’ll stick with it for a year, and maybe it’ll get my foot in the door.”

But I ended up loving writing about personal finance because it allowed me to dig into a subject that had never really been presented as being for me or for people like me.

I grew up in Wisconsin in a working-class family.

Nobody really talked with me about growing money, finding success in life, or finding joy in a career.

The financial lessons I got were basically:

Work hard.

Avoid debt.

That was about the extent of it.

I loved learning how loans worked.

How mortgages worked.

How credit cards worked.

How credit scores worked.

That knowledge empowered me to understand my own situation.

I started to understand how I could improve my credit score after years of being in debt and not really knowing what to do.

I learned how I could deal with student loans without burying my head in the sand or letting them become this enormous burden.

Money didn’t have to be about getting rich as quickly as possible.

It didn’t have to be about getting out of debt as fast as possible.

It didn’t have to be about becoming more disciplined.

As I learned more, I realized I could understand money as a tool.

Financial products were tools too.

I could use them to support the life I actually wanted.

Having that understanding allowed me to incorporate money into my life in a way that worked for me, without so much fear.

A lot of financial advice is very fear-based.

I stayed at that job for about four years.

Then I spent another four or five years freelancing in the personal finance space.

And I kept noticing that everybody was sharing a lot of the same advice.

Personal finance often comes down to:

Make as much money as possible.

Hold onto as much of it as possible.

Pay down debt as fast as possible.

There’s this prescribed set of goals defining what it means to be “good with money” and what you’re supposed to want.

A lot of those goals didn’t appeal to me or to many people I knew.

And I realized that much of the advice was coming from people whose backgrounds weren’t like mine.

At the time, personal finance was largely being led by middle-class men.

We weren’t hearing enough from women, people of color, people from working-class backgrounds, people living in rural areas, LGBTQ people, or people with disabilities.

So I started Healthy Rich to create a space for conversations with those people.

How does your identity intersect with your relationship with money?

How does it affect your relationship with work and money?

I started having really interesting conversations and learning from what we were publishing at Healthy Rich.

I could take everything I had learned in traditional personal finance and then start to question it.

How can we break some of these rules?

How can we make them work for us?

Because the message I kept hearing was:

“These rules aren’t working for me.”

“They don’t account for the fact that I’m being discriminated against at work.”

“They don’t account for the fact that I came from a low-income family.”

“I’m dealing with generational poverty.”

“Half of my income goes toward helping family members who are dealing with debt or poverty.”

There’s so much that gets left out when we pretend there is one set of financial rules.

That’s how I came to Healthy Rich and eventually wrote You Don’t Need a Budget, which really condenses what I had learned from those conversations.

Tony: You said so much there that we could probably just wrap up the episode.

Dana: That’s the book in a nutshell.

Tony: Exactly.

There are so many directions we could go.

But one thing I want to emphasize is that traditional financial advice has often said:

“Here’s the set of rules. They apply to everyone.”

Instead of asking:

“What works for this individual?”

And something else you said is really important:

The more you know, the more empowered you become.

Are you finding that knowledge really is power for people whose financial lives don’t fit that traditional model?

Dana: Absolutely.

That was my experience, and it’s what I see in conversations with other people too.

There’s that classic idea that you have to know the rules before you can break the rules.

We accept that in a lot of areas of life.

But there’s something about our cultural relationship with money that makes us believe there is one set of rules for everyone.

Either we can follow them, or we can’t.

Or we choose not to.

And if we don’t follow that specific set of rules or work toward that specific set of goals, then we’re bad with money.

We’re failures with money.

That becomes an identity people adopt.

But once you start looking at those rules, it becomes clear that they were created by certain people for certain people.

If the rest of us want to use money as a tool to live the lives we want, we have to understand how to maneuver within those rules.

We need to know when to question them.

When to break them.

When to use products differently.

And understanding how things work can really remove fear.

Take a bank account.

Understand how interest works.

Take credit cards.

Understand how using them affects your credit score, how payments affect interest, and what they really cost you.

Take student loans or other debt products.

Understand your repayment options and how they can align with your actual resources.

Once you know that, you don’t have to be so afraid when a bill arrives.

Or when a debt collector calls.

You don’t have to think:

“I’m going to jail if I don’t pay this.”

There are so many fears that make people feel like their whole life is going to collapse if they don’t do money exactly one way.

Once you understand how money and financial products actually work, you can let go of some of that fear.

You realize it isn’t always as rigid as it appears.

Money is much more fluid than people tend to believe.

Tony: I think taking the fear out of money is really important.

And what you’re describing gets back to the idea that the traditional set of rules was designed for a particular subset of the population.

That can make a lot of people think:

“Money isn’t for me.”

That turns people off.

For me, curiosity is a huge part of this.

We have to empower people to ask questions.

But financial services often shuts questions down with:

“That’s just the way it is.”

“You can’t question it.”

Then we get stuck in the same pattern.

Dana: It scares people to question the system too.

My book is called You Don’t Need a Budget.

That concept alone freaks some people out.

That can be enough for somebody to walk away and decide they’re not ready to question it.

You mentioned mindset, and I agree with that.

But it isn’t just about financial literacy.

We’ve seen more financial education rolling out in schools across the U.S.

And when we look at whether access to financial education leads to better outcomes later, sometimes we see improvement.

But we don’t see this simple, consistent correlation.

There are still so many other factors affecting what kind of debt someone has, what kind of income they earn, or what kind of savings they have 10 years after high school.

Financial education alone doesn’t solve everything.

People want to believe it does because learning the rules feels like it should put you in control.

But that’s not always the case.

And when we talk about mindset, I also want to make clear that this isn’t:

“You just have to believe you can do it.”

That isn’t true either.

There are still systems that may be working against you.

Mindset also includes trust.

History.

Your relationship with money.

Your relationship with financial systems.

How have those systems treated you?

How have they treated your family or people like you historically?

How do you respond to them because of that?

That all matters.

Tony: You hit on something important there.

The example I know best is women and money.

There’s the gender pay gap.

There can be career gaps when women take time away to raise children or care for parents.

And women often live longer.

So someone can earn less over a career and then need that money to last longer.

That’s a very different planning situation than simply saying:

“You should save more.”

That doesn’t solve it.

Dana: Exactly.

Another example is immigrant families who may have reasons to distrust institutions.

Maybe they aren’t comfortable with their bank.

Maybe the bank doesn’t communicate well in the language they’re most comfortable using.

And do you really want to deal with money in a language you aren’t comfortable with?

Money is already difficult enough.

So how are these systems treating you?

Are they welcoming you?

Are they not welcoming you?

That affects your relationship with money too.

Tony: That’s so important.

I’ve had first-generation financial coaches on the show, and cultural adjustment comes up a lot.

Things may work differently in the country someone came from.

Trust is also a huge issue.

Financial institutions have not always done a great job maintaining trust.

And then they wonder why people don’t trust them.

Dana: If you follow financial news, it can be difficult to trust the broader system too.

Who’s making decisions about interest rates?

What’s moving the stock market?

Why are your savings going up and down?

All of that can make people want to bury their heads in the sand.

Or it can make people want to opt out of traditional systems.

That can be a reasonable response if you don’t trust a system or feel it isn’t treating you well.

But if that’s what you decide to do, knowledge is still incredibly useful.

Maybe you don’t want to work with a traditional bank.

Maybe you don’t want to use traditional lenders or credit cards.

Okay.

But understand what impact that has on your credit score or your ability to access other products.

Then you can make that decision intentionally.

Knowledge lets you decide rather than feeling like your only options are:

“Do it one way.”

Or:

“Fail with money.”

Tony: Exactly.

Even if you don’t like the rules of the traditional money world, it helps to understand how they work.

Credit scores may have flaws, but they aren’t disappearing tomorrow.

You need to understand how the system works today so you can decide how much you want to participate in it and how you might want to change it.

If we don’t even understand the game, it’s hard to decide whether we want to play.

Dana: Right.

And that’s where so many people are, especially when they’re first becoming adults.

You’re handed a set of rules.

That’s often what formal financial education is too:

A set of rules about what you’re supposed to do.

If those rules don’t align with what’s possible in your life, which is true for a lot of people, then you start thinking:

“Being good with money just isn’t accessible to me.”

Maybe you took out student loans to get through school.

Maybe you needed to use debt to pay rent.

Then you start burying your head in the sand.

You ignore the phone calls.

You ignore the mail.

You hope it disappears.

Because it feels like your choices are:

“I have to pay this $600 bill every month.”

Or:

“I can’t pay it, so I’ll just ignore it.”

But there are often other options.

Different payment plans.

Consolidation.

Negotiation.

Ways to make debt easier to manage.

Yet formal financial education often doesn’t teach those things because it assumes you’re going to be in an ideal financial situation.

Nobody says:

“If you can’t pay your bills, here are your options.”

“If you can’t pay your debt on time, here’s what you can do.”

Things like negotiating debt, filing for bankruptcy, moving bills around, and financial triage tend to get ignored.

Those are often the skills people really need.

Meanwhile, we’re still teaching things like how to properly write a check.

Tony: That’s funny because checks really aren’t much of a thing anymore.

Dana: Exactly.

And if you need to know how to fill one out, that’s very Google-able information.

Take that class time and teach somebody how to make a decision when rent is due and the credit card payment is also due.

That’s probably a much more useful skill.

Tony: I completely agree.

Financial education often misses the real questions people are facing.

That reminds me of my work as an insurance consultant.

People would come in and ask:

“Is this insurance policy any good?”

They weren’t asking me to explain how it compared technically with five different insurance designs.

They wanted to know:

“If I buy this policy, is it going to take care of what I need it to take care of?”

People are trying to solve problems.

Financial services is often very good at lecturing people and talking at them rather than listening and creating products or advice that help them get where they’re trying to go.

Dana: That’s a really great point.

And that’s a big part of the motivation behind my book.

When I see people trying to manage money, trying to choose the perfect budget or some magic-bullet money-management method, it usually comes down to a much simpler question:

“Can I afford this?”

Can I afford to go out to eat with friends tonight?

Can I afford this vacation?

Can I afford this thing I want?

That’s what people are trying to answer with a detailed budget.

And often the budget doesn’t actually answer the question.

It just adds shame, stress, and another chore.

I encourage people to think about money differently.

Sometimes it is as specific as:

“Can I afford this purchase?”

But more broadly:

“What do I want my life to look like?”

Then:

“How can money support that?”

That’s much more useful than starting with:

“You need this budget.”

“You need to save 10%.”

“You should have this much in retirement savings by this age.”

Those rules don’t necessarily get to the real question:

“Is this going to give me the life, security, and comfort I want?”

Tony: I think you say that really well.

It comes back to goals and what life looks like for each of us.

We’re often given rules like:

“You need X amount at retirement.”

Maybe.

Maybe not.

It depends on what you want retirement to look like.

Different people have very different definitions of enough.

Dana: Absolutely.

And I think it’s probably true for everyone that no amount of money, by itself, is going to bring happiness.

One of the most insidious messages in our culture is that there is always something more you’re missing.

If you’re a very high achiever and you accumulate enormous wealth, there’s still a message saying:

“You could do more.”

If you don’t start with much, there’s another message:

“If you just worked harder, saved more, or spent less, you could finally be happier.”

That message is everywhere.

Accumulate more.

Spend less.

That’s the underlying cultural relationship with money.

It isn’t only about greed.

It’s just the set of values we’ve been handed.

Tony: And for a lot of people, a better question may be:

“What is enough?”

That’s different for each of us.

Sometimes we discover we already have enough.

I talk a lot about financial independence rather than simply retirement.

What makes you feel comfortable?

What gives you enough freedom?

Dana: And enough can change too.

It’s different for every person, but it can also be different for the same person at different points in life.

It’s hard to pick one number and say:

“That’s enough.”

I don’t talk much about specific money numbers because I don’t always think they’re that useful as educational tools.

Something like:

“Save 10% of your income.”

Or:

“Pick your enough number.”

Can still be difficult because you don’t know what you’ll want a month from now, five years from now, or 50 years from now.

I prefer:

“What kind of life do I want to live?”

“What do I want to do?”

Then enough can adjust around that.

There have been times in my life when it made sense to hustle and earn more money because there were things I wanted to accomplish.

Then there were times when enough was much less because I was taking a year off to write a book.

Different priorities.

Different amount of money required.

Enough isn’t necessarily some retirement target you hit once and you’re done.

I’ve heard stories from people in the financial independence and retire early movement who set these huge goals.

Then, after saving for 10 years, they realize:

“I’m comfortable now.”

Maybe they’re only at 25% of the goal they originally set.

But they look at their life and think:

“I could leave my job.”

“I could live on this.”

That can be enough.

It doesn’t always have to be a fixed number.

It’s:

“Where am I?”

“What makes me comfortable?”

“Am I ready?”

“Does this give me enough cushion to live the life I want?”

Tony: And I’ve talked with people in the FIRE movement who have regretted parts of it too.

They may feel they gave up too much of the present in order to reach early retirement.

That’s another trade-off.

You took a year to write a book instead of saying:

“I’m going to work for 10 more years and then someday write it.”

Money enabled you to do something you wanted to do on the journey.

Before we wrap up, your newsletter is called Healthy Rich.

What does healthy mean to you in the context of money?

Dana: It started as something that just came to me, kind of a shower thought.

Healthy Rich was the opposite of “filthy rich.”

Personal finance so often celebrates becoming filthy rich.

And I thought:

“Can’t we just feel good about being rich? Why does it have to be dirty?”

And by rich, I don’t necessarily mean having a huge number in a bank account.

Rich can mean a lot of things.

Healthy Rich is about having a healthier relationship with money.

A more joyful relationship.

A more fluid relationship.

A more nuanced relationship.

That’s very different from focusing only on accumulating the most possible and parting with the least possible.

That’s what “filthy rich” kind of means to me.

Tony: I like that.

A lot of our financial habits are unhealthy because we pick them up simply because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do.

Social media probably makes that worse.

We see someone else’s vacation.

Someone else’s new car.

Someone else’s best financial day.

Then we start comparing ourselves.

Dana: Definitely.

Step away from the comparison game.

Your financial journey isn’t somebody else’s financial journey.

And you have no idea what’s behind the story they’re presenting.

Maybe there is a mountain of wealth and joy behind it.

Maybe there’s a mountain of debt and stress.

You don’t know.

And it doesn’t really matter.

Everybody gets to use money in the way they want.

That includes you.

Your struggles are your struggles.

Your successes are your successes.

Stepping away from the comparison game is a big step toward a healthier relationship with money.

Tony: I love that.

Everyone can use money in their own way.

We have agency over our money.

That really gets back to your whole message:

Our money should work for us.

My enough doesn’t have to look like your enough.

Dana: Exactly.

Money should work for us.

Don’t work for your money.

Don’t let money be your boss and dictate what’s possible in your life.

Don’t let it dictate what your days look like.

There’s this idea that once you make a financial commitment, you’re stuck with it.

You have a mortgage, so now you have to work this job and earn this amount forever.

You’re miserable, but you can’t take vacations or make art or do something else you wanted because the mortgage dictates your life.

That isn’t necessarily true.

You can sell your house.

You can make changes.

Every decision comes with consequences, of course.

People will say:

“I can’t just sell my house. My family lives there.”

Sure.

But it’s an example because housing is such a huge financial commitment and can really anchor someone to a particular life.

I tell a story in the book about a couple who ended an expensive lease in downtown Los Angeles.

That housing cost was keeping them in work they didn’t want to be doing and restricting other goals.

They moved into an Airstream RV.

At first it was a very small one.

Then they realized they loved the lifestyle and bought a larger one.

They drastically changed their financial life in order to do work they actually wanted to do.

Your choices don’t have to be that extreme.

But I like it as an example because it shows the degree of control you may have over your life that you don’t realize.

Financial commitments don’t always have to be anchors.

You can restructure debt.

Sell assets.

Use money from different places.

There are ways to use money as a tool in your life instead of letting financial choices you made in the past dictate everything you can do in the future.

Tony: I love that.

It’s about trade-offs.

Somebody may be earning a high income but be miserable in the job.

Part of why some jobs pay so much may be because they aren’t especially enjoyable.

You only have one life.

You have to decide what matters most to you.

Dana, to wrap up, I have what’s called the Get Ready Hot Take Trio.

These are three quick questions I ask all my guests.

First:

What’s one money myth you’re trying to break?

Dana: That you need a budget.

My book lays out several tenets of what I call budget culture that I want to counter.

But the simplest myth is:

You need a budget.

That good money management equals restriction and discipline.

I don’t agree with that.

Tony: I love that.

There has been a lot of popular advice over the years like:

“Give up your daily coffee.”

But what if you really enjoy your daily coffee?

Maybe there’s a bigger financial decision somewhere else that matters more.

Dana: Exactly.

Maybe it’s changing your housing situation.

Maybe it’s applying for assistance.

Maybe it’s finding ways to change the big things so you can enjoy the small things.

Those small pleasures often aren’t what’s making or breaking your financial life.

Tony: Exactly.

So don’t give up your coffee if you enjoy it.

Let’s get out the time machine.

If you could go back knowing what you know now about money, what advice would you give your younger self?

Dana: I would try to download all the financial knowledge I’ve gained.

Understanding how debt products work in particular would have removed so much fear.

I don’t have huge regrets.

I didn’t accumulate an enormous amount of debt or completely wreck my finances in my 20s.

But I did have a lot of avoidance and fear.

I adopted this identity that I was bad with money.

I didn’t need to do that.

I was doing pretty normal things with money and debt for somebody in their 20s.

If I had understood how my student loans worked or how credit cards worked, I could have addressed those things even while I was broke.

I could have avoided some of the credit-score damage I later had to rebuild.

More importantly, I could have avoided some of the shame.

I wouldn’t have had to adopt an identity of being “bad with money.”

That wasn’t fair to myself.

Tony: I think that identity is a huge topic.

We let those labels rule us.

But as we’ve talked about, knowledge creates agency.

You can learn.

You can ask questions.

You can understand how the system works.

And that gives you more choices.

Last question:

What’s your number one tip to change the way we think about money?

Dana: Trust yourself.

I think that’s a really important place to start in your relationship with money.

Trust yourself to know what you need from money.

Don’t constantly look for some third-party set of rules that was probably created for somebody else’s life.

In the book, I talk about listening to your gut or tapping into your inner voice.

Whatever language works for you.

I like “listen to your gut.”

Start by understanding what you really want.

Once you know that, most people actually have a pretty intuitive understanding of how money can help them get there.

Then learning the ins and outs of financial products and systems becomes a much smaller step.

Those are details.

Trust yourself to use money in the way that’s right for you, even if it doesn’t look like what people on social media say you should be doing or what your friends claim they’re doing.

Do what’s right for you.

Tony: That reminds me of something basketball coaches used to tell me:

“Play your own game.”

Don’t worry about what everybody else is doing.

Know the rules.

Then play your game.

I think that applies pretty well to money too.

Dana: I love that framing.

Tony: Dana, where can people learn more about you, subscribe to Healthy Rich, and pick up a copy of You Don’t Need a Budget?

Dana: You can find Healthy Rich at HealthyRich.co.

If you’re on Substack, you can also search for Healthy Rich there.

You can find the book at YouDontNeedABudget.com or anywhere you buy books.

And ask for it at your local library or independent bookstore.

I’d love to get it into more people’s hands that way.

Tony: Fantastic.

For everyone watching and listening, there will be links in the show notes.

Dana, thanks for joining us on Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

Dana: Thanks so much for having me, Tony. This was great.

Tony: I loved it.

And thank you, everyone, as always, for tuning in to this episode of Get Ready: Before Life Happens.

If you learned something today that changed the way you think about money, please subscribe and share this episode with a friend.

You can also go to TonySteuer.com to join the Get Ready Movement and get access to my newsletter and resources.

Because when life happens, the way you think about money matters.