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........

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