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Tiffany Aliche was 30, the Great Recession was eating her job, her credit cards were maxed, and her condo was sliding toward foreclosure. She finally called her best friend Linda and told her everything. Linda laughed and said, “girl, I’m calling you from my mother’s couch.” That sentence broke the spell.
Aliche, who built The Budgetnista into a personal finance brand, told Paula Pant on the Afford Anything podcast: “Shame shields solutions. So I couldn’t see those solutions with the shame, but giving voice to shame helps to relieve you of that shame.”
The stakes are concrete. Pant framed today’s economy as a moment when “on paper, things look good” yet “a lot of…