Veronica Duke knew what it was like to grow up in poverty, and she wanted to create a better life for her children. She became a single mom the summer after graduating high school in 1983 after her baby’s father suffered a traumatic brain injury.
“Between the time [my daughter] was one and about six, I was in school. I decided that would be the best way to try to make things better for both of us and get out of poverty,” Duke told me in an interview for my book, "You Don’t Need a Budget."
Duke chose to work part-time while going to school and supplement her income with government welfare programs rather than look for a part-time job she knew would keep her just eking by for the rest of her life. The assistance she received was vital to her family, but it required careful monitoring to maintain eligibility. Social workers were supposed to help her navigate these systems, but she said they “would give me a pamphlet and tell me how to grow a garden, how to budget my money better. Not very practical.”
“And then when I went to the food pantry…again, I would have to go through that shame and being lectured about not budgeting my money,” she added.
This practice hasn’t changed since Duke’s days as a young mother. One former case manager wrote for Healthy Rich in 2022 about the standard practice in a shelter program of making families create a budget and check in on it weekly.
“I was sharing the knowledge from training and the wealth gurus of my time, and I didn't know the emotions and insecurities I was helping to grow,” she wrote.
“So many of the individuals that I work with have been directly harmed by normative financial advice that makes them feel bad for not adhering to some unexamined ideal,” said Sloane Ortel, chief investment officer at Ethical Capital.
What this common advice ignores is that people experiencing financial hardship are, in fact, “budgeting” their money. When you’re choosing between paying rent, having a car and feeding your children, there’s just not room to be a frivolous spender.
“Often the problem is just that there's not enough money coming in,” said Ortel. “And that can be for all sorts of reasons like disability, illness, caring for a family member or just plain bad luck. So it can kind of fall flat when someone recommends doing a bunch of spreadsheet work in order to solve a problem [that actually lies] with the income side of the household's financial equation.”
Duke shared that she cut costs any way she could when her daughter was young. “I did everything I could to save. I breast fed and used cloth diapers and made her baby clothes. I remember taking a calculator with me to the store because every penny counted. You could never buy anything that wasn’t a necessity.”