The Enduring Myths of Budget Culture
Culture Study Podcast
Anne Helen Petersen
4.6 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 26 February 2025
⏱️ 60 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last month, I published an interview in the newsletter with Dana Miranda about “budget culture” — and it became one of the most popular (and discussed) interviews I’ve done since I first launched the newsletter. At the time, I asked for questions for Dana about specific myths of budget culture for us to unpack. We got dozens of those — plus a bunch of compelling follow-up questions, like “what’s the difference between knowing how much money goes in and out of your account and ‘budget culture’” and “is YNAB budget culture?”
We tackle all of that and much, much more, with a bonus prolonged guest appearance from Melody about her experience with Dave Ramsey (which included cutting up her credit card in front of her class and sparked the worst fight of her marriage). I loved this conversation and have been thinking about it for weeks; I think you will too.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | That's definitely the attitude that I grew up with in a working class community was this idea that using debt is irresponsible. |
| 0:09.3 | And I think it's tied to that, never wanting to be taken advantage of. |
| 0:13.8 | And I imagine it's because we spend our whole lives, largely as Americans, but I think in particular in working class communities that |
| 0:22.3 | we spend our whole lives with the culture just taking advantage of us constantly making |
| 0:27.2 | us pawns and suckers and things. And so we're always looking for ways to avoid that |
| 0:32.5 | humiliation a little bit. |
| 0:39.6 | This is the Culture Study podcast, and I'm Anne Helen Peterson. |
| 0:43.6 | And I'm Dana Miranda, the author of You Don't Need a Budget and creator of the Healthy, |
| 0:49.1 | rich substack. |
| 0:50.2 | So this episode is basically a follow-up on an interview I did with you in the newsletter, and |
| 0:55.2 | that interview spawned more than 300 comments. A lot of them really wrestled with concepts |
| 1:00.4 | that we talked about in the newsletter. But I want to start from scratch here, because not |
| 1:04.7 | everyone who listens to the podcast is a newsletter reader. What is your framework for thinking |
| 1:09.5 | about money and personal finances, just generally? |
| 1:12.8 | So I try to question a lot of what we see in traditional personal finance media and |
| 1:20.5 | education. And what I see as sort of the conventional approach is something I call budget culture, which is kind of the money |
| 1:30.3 | parallel to diet culture, where we sort of default to individual responsibility, restriction, |
| 1:40.5 | and feel a lot of shame for when our financial circumstances are not what we'd like them to be. |
| 1:46.5 | And so the work that I do is to try to name that and show that to people |
| 1:50.9 | and also to question the kind of advice that's coming through budget culture |
| 1:55.6 | and question a lot of the assumptions that are being made. |
| 1:58.3 | I think that sometimes people mistake anyone talking about money and money |
... |
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