hi! i’m dana

I’m a writer who likes to talk about money in a lot of places:

• My newsletter, Healthy Rich.

• My book, You Don’t Need a Budget: Stop Worrying about Debt, Spend without Shame, and Manage Money with Ease (Little, Brown Spark 2024).

• The nationally syndicated advice column “Dear Penny.”

• Articles at Business Insider, Forbes and Kiplinger.

I write about how capitalism impacts the ways we think, teach and talk about money.

I grew up in a working-class family in a small town in Wisconsin. When I joined the ranks of personal finance media in 2015, I 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, I created Healthy Rich to change the way we talk about money.