Author Images

Dana+brick+wall.jpg
dana+headshot.jpg
Dana+headshot2.jpeg
dana+senator.jpg
dana+working.jpg
Dana+writer.jpg

Author Bio

  • Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance®, creator of the Healthy Rich newsletter and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She writes about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.

  • Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance®, creator of the Healthy Rich newsletter and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She writes about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.

    Dana is the expert behind the nationally syndicated “Dear Penny” financial advice column, a regular contributor to Business Insider, Fortune, CNET Money and Salon, and a founding member of the Kiplinger Advisor Collective.

  • Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance®, creator of the Healthy Rich newsletter and author of You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024). She writes about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.

    Dana is the expert behind the nationally syndicated “Dear Penny” financial advice column, a regular contributor to Business Insider, Fortune, CNET Money and Salon, and a founding member of the Kiplinger Advisor Collective.

    Dana 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 popular financial media startup and spending two years as a freelance writer, she created Healthy Rich to change the way we talk about money.

Promotional Assets

High-res cover image

  • Free yourself from the tyranny of toxic budget culture, and build an ethical, stress-free financial life.

    Track every dollar you spend. Check your account balances once a week. Always pay off your credit card bill in full. Make a budget—and stick to it. These are just a few of the edicts you'll find in virtually every personal finance book. But this kind of rigid, one‑size-fits‑all advice—usually written for and by wealthy white men (and a few women) with little perspective on the money struggles that many people face—is unrealistic, and only creates stress and shame.

    As a financial journalist and educator, Dana Miranda is on a mission to liberate readers from budget culture: the damaging set of beliefs around money that rely on restriction, shame, and greed—much like diet culture does for food and bodies. In this long‑overdue alternative to traditional budgeting advice, Miranda offers a new approach that makes money easy for everyone, regardless of the numbers in their bank account.

    Full of counterintuitive advice—like how to use debt to support your life goals, how to plan for retirement without a 401K, and how to take advantage of resources that exist to support those left behind by the forces of capitalism—You Don’t Need a Budget will empower readers to get money off their mind and live the lives they want.

  • Category: Business/Finance

    Publication date: Dec. 24, 2024

    ISBN: 978-0-316-56893-7

    Retail price: $28.00 US / $38.00 CAN

    Trim size: 5-1/2 x 8-1/4 in.

    Page count: 336

    Logline: Free yourself from the tyranny of toxic budget culture, and build an ethical, stress-free financial life.

  • Little, Brown Spark

    Bookshop

    Amazon

    Goodreads

    Books-A-Million

    Barnes & Noble

    Target

    Walmart

    Signed copies

Discussion Topics

  • Dana Miranda is a Certified Educator in Personal Finance (CEPF) and a personal finance journalist and author. She's the expert behind the money advice column Dear Penny, and she's a contributor to Business Insider, Fortune, CNET and Salon.

    Dana has shared her expertise as a guest on Queer Money, Burnt Toast, Wisconsin Public Radio, Connecticut Public Radio and more.

    With nearly a decade of experience, Dana can speak to both the practices and the culture of money, in particular:

    • Budgeting

    • Debt management

    • Joyful spending

  • About money management

    1. What is the biggest misconception about budgeting?

    2. What do we know about how budgeting impacts our financial situation?

    3. What is budget culture, and how does it impact our relationship with money?

    4. How can we approach debt management if paying off debt isn't necessarily a priority?

    5. How can we approach spending if we don't use a budget?

    6. What is one step people can take right now to improve their relationship with money?

    7. What's your best tip for money management?

    About the book

    1. What is this book about, and who is it for?

    2. Why did you write this book?

    3. What’s the one thing you want people to take away from this book?

    4. How did you come up with the title?

    5. What was the hardest part for you to write?

  • When Dana is a guest on your podcast, she's always happy to share links and clips through the Healthy Rich newsletter, Notes, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok.