Budget Culture and the Dave Ramseyfication of Money

...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.

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 being (on the way to becoming) rich.

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. But even when people do use them, budgeting doesn’t necessarily fulfill its promises: A 2021 survey by The Penny Hoarder, for example, found that budgeters are just about as likely as non-budgeters to have any amount of debt.

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 many of our cultural ideals are. Budget culture idealizes and advises for a definition of richness that relies on things like power at work, freedom from domestic labor, well-rounded education, debt elimination, homeownership, credit, and other things moneyed, straight white men tend to have access to more readily than anyone else. We equate these things with being good with money because we exist in a system designed — by people with money trying to keep it — to favor them, not because they’re inherent signs of more or less responsible stewardship of money....

I know the real reason my finances are “healthier” now: I have more money. I took a job with a salary that quadrupled my income, and voila — I became a lot more “responsible” with money...