relationship with money

The broader problem with budget culture is its emphasis on individual responsibility and insistence on ignoring the varying levels of access and privilege in our world. It vilifies and oppresses anyone who doesn’t live up to the ideal, regardless of their circumstances. And that ideal is, unsurprisingly, rooted in maleness and whiteness in the way... See more

My journey with relating to money & the book that changed my life for @threadapalooza 👇

Once again, I am coming back to the mutual relationship between words and thought. In order to create the possibility of relationships and systems based on human needs, a consciousness shift may be absolutely necessary, and changing our language may just be the path, even if I don’t quite yet see exactly how it could go there. As we learn to speak... See more

Budget culture is the damaging set of beliefs around money that rewards restriction and deprivation — much like diet culture does for food and bodies — and promotes an unhealthy and fantastical ideal of financial success.

The simplest problem with this approach is that budgeting, like dieting, doesn’t work. Restriction and deprivation are unsustainable; accurately tracking spending is hard; income fluctuates, and costs don’t operate on a perfect monthly reset. Budgets don’t account for the way lives work, so they’re hard to keep in our lives consistently.

In the same way diet culture is quick to blame health conditions on a person’s weight, or prescribe food restriction as treatment toward the goal of being thin, budget culture sees measures like credit scores and debt as signifiers of financial health, and prescribes spending restrictions as the first step toward wellness — defined, at its core, as... See more