A couple of years ago, when I offered my first meditation class, I called it “free.”
Afterward, my mentor corrected me.
She explained that calling the class free missed something important. It missed an opportunity for the people receiving the teaching to practice generosity. It also ignored the reality that teachers invest time, energy, training, and care in making teachings available. She introduced me more deeply to the Buddhist practice of Dana.
I wrote about that experience at the time, and I said something else in that original piece: perhaps, someday, more of Mindful Money’s digital educational courses would be offered on a Dana basis.
Someday has arrived.
Over the coming months, we are going to transition Mindful Money’s digital financial education resources toward a Dana model. This will include the modules in our Lifestage Courses, the Mindful Money 360 Course, the DIY Financial Plan Course, and ultimately much of the financial education we have spent years developing.
There will no longer be a required price standing between you and this education.
But I don’t want to call it free.
That distinction matters.
Dana is a Pāli and Sanskrit word usually translated as “giving” or “generosity.” It is one of the oldest practices in the Buddhist tradition and, traditionally, one of the first practices taught.
Generosity comes first for a reason.
Before meditation gets deep, before wisdom becomes sophisticated, before we begin talking about enlightenment or liberation, we can practice loosening our grip. We can notice the instinct to protect what is ours and deliberately practice opening our hands.
Dana is the practice of giving something freely.
Spirit Rock describes generosity as turning our orientation away from what we can “get and keep” and toward what we can offer. Giving becomes the action through which that generous intention takes form.
I love this idea, especially when we bring it into the world of money.
We live in a culture that has monetized almost everything. Information has a price. Advice has a price. Attention has a price. Access has a price. Expertise has a price. Increasingly, even our relationships with one another are mediated through transactions.
I have spent almost 30 years in financial services, so I am certainly not opposed to people being paid for valuable work. Financial planners should be paid. Teachers need to eat. Businesses need revenue. People who spend decades developing expertise deserve compensation for sharing that expertise.
Dana isn’t an argument against commerce.
It creates a different kind of exchange alongside commerce.
Instead of saying, “This information costs $499, and if you cannot afford $499 you cannot have it,” Dana says, “Here is something I believe can help you. Use it. Learn from it. Improve your life with it. If you are able and inspired to support the work that made it possible, you are invited to do so.”
Those are very different relationships.
And I think the second relationship is especially appropriate for basic financial education.
One of the great frustrations of my career has been that the people who most need good financial guidance are often the least economically attractive people for the financial services industry to serve.
If you have millions of dollars, there are thousands of financial advisors competing for your attention.
If you are 27 years old, have $8,000 in a 401(k), $14,000 of student loans, are trying to build an emergency fund, and don’t know whether you should pay down debt or increase your retirement contribution, the economics are very different.
Yet those early decisions may be among the most consequential financial decisions you ever make.
This has been part of the reason for building Mindful Money’s educational platform in the first place. Financial planning does not have to begin with a giant comprehensive financial plan. It can begin with understanding where you are, understanding where you want to go, learning the basic sequence of good financial decisions, and making the next right decision. That is the philosophy behind our modular financial planning work.
Know what is worth seeking. Develop a vision for the life you want. Build a savings habit. Create an emergency fund. Eliminate high interest debt. Save and invest for retirement. Build taxable savings. Protect yourself appropriately. Invest simply and intelligently.
None of this needs to be mysterious.
And none of it should require you to be wealthy before you can learn it.
That is where Dana comes in.
Under this model, if you need the education and cannot afford to contribute anything, take the course.
Seriously.
Take it.
Do the exercises. Build the emergency fund. Pay down the credit card. Increase your 401(k) contribution. Write your financial plan. Stop reacting to financial headlines. Build the boring diversified portfolio. Talk to your spouse about money. Make the next right decision.
Your sincere use of the material matters more to me than your payment for it.
There is a wonderful story Thanissaro Bhikkhu tells about his teacher, Ajaan Fuang.
Students would sometimes ask how they could repay him for his teaching. His answer was simple: practice.
That gets very close to what I want this to mean at Mindful Money.
The best way you can repay financial education is to use it.
If something you learn here helps you stop carrying a credit card balance, start saving automatically, avoid a terrible investment decision, have an important conversation with your partner, stop panicking about markets, or build a financial life around what matters to you, then the teaching worked.
That is the point.
But Dana doesn’t end there.
If you have the financial capacity and the desire to give, you can support the work. You can contribute what feels appropriate to you. Your contribution helps us maintain the resources, improve them, create new ones, and make them available to the next person regardless of that person’s ability to pay.
In that sense, your Dana isn’t simply paying for the course.
You are helping make the next person’s education possible.
Someone with significant financial resources might give substantially more than the old course price. Someone else might give $50. Someone might give $10. Someone might give nothing today and return years from now when their circumstances have changed.
There is no test.
There is no judgment.
And, importantly, there should be no guilt.
That last point is important because Dana stops being Dana when generosity becomes coercion.
Thanissaro Bhikkhu has written forcefully about this distinction. Giving has meaning precisely because it is voluntary. The recipient has responsibilities too. Teachers should not manipulate gratitude, hint at what they expect, or turn generosity into a cleverly disguised fee. The relationship depends on mutual trust.
So I don’t want to replace a $499 course with a button that says, “Suggested Dana: $499.”
That would just be pricing with Buddhist vocabulary.
I want to try something different.
I want us to trust you.
If these resources aren’t useful to you, don’t support them.
If you’re struggling financially, use them without paying and let them help you get stronger.
If they help you and you have the capacity to contribute, give something that feels appropriate.
If they dramatically change your financial life and someday you find yourself in a position to help make the same education available to thousands of other people, perhaps you will choose to do that.
The amount is less important than the intention.
There is another side of this practice that I find particularly interesting for Mindful Money. Dana asks the giver to pay attention to what happens internally around money.
What do you feel when you’re invited to give without being told how much?
Do you immediately wonder what everyone else is giving?
Do you worry about giving too little?
Do you feel pressure to demonstrate that you’re generous?
Do you immediately look for the minimum?
Do you feel scarcity even when you objectively have plenty?
Do you feel embarrassed receiving something without paying for it?
Do you distrust an offering precisely because it doesn’t have a price?
That is fascinating territory for anyone trying to develop a healthier relationship with money.
Spirit Rock describes Dana as a mindfulness practice partly for this reason. Giving can reveal generosity and stinginess, anxiety and equanimity, along with the stories we carry about money and resources.
Those stories are exactly what Mindful Money has always been interested in.
Because financial well-being isn’t simply about knowing what an IRA is.
It is about understanding enough about money that money can stop dominating your life.
It is about learning what enough means.
It is about separating your financial decisions from fear, comparison, advertising, prediction, status, envy, and the endless cultural demand for more.
It is about putting money back where it belongs: in service of a life well lived.
Generosity has always been part of that philosophy. In our modular planning work, I describe generosity as one of the pillars of happiness and argue that generosity should be an integral part of both our lives and our financial plans.
Dana lets us practice that idea together.
Mindful Money gives first.
We give you the education, the tools, the worksheets, the frameworks, and the accumulated lessons of decades spent helping people make better financial decisions.
You receive them without a required financial obligation.
Then you decide what happens next.
Maybe your Dana is financial.
Maybe, for now, your Dana is doing the work.
Maybe it is sharing a course with someone who needs it.
Maybe it is telling us what worked and what didn’t so we can make the material better.
Maybe it is taking something you learn here and teaching it to your children.
Maybe it is becoming financially secure enough that ten years from now you can be extraordinarily generous somewhere else.
The gift doesn’t have to come back to the giver.
That’s part of the beauty of it.
Over time, I hope this creates something larger than a different pricing model for online courses. I hope it creates a small ecosystem of financial generosity.
People who have knowledge share it.
People who need knowledge receive it.
People who have resources help make that knowledge available.
People who don’t have resources aren’t excluded.
And people who benefit become more capable of helping others.
The giver benefits. The receiver benefits. And, if we do this well enough and long enough, people neither of us will ever meet benefit too.
That is the accumulated return on generosity.
It is also a pretty good description of the financial world I have always wanted Mindful Money to help create.
So, over the coming months, when you begin seeing the Lifestage Courses, Mindful Money 360, the DIY Financial Plan Course, and other digital educational resources offered on a Dana basis, I hope you’ll understand what we’re trying to do.
We aren’t making the education worthless by removing its price.
We are separating its value from its price.
Learn what you need.
Use what helps.
Give if you are inspired and able.
Pass something useful along.
And let’s see what happens when financial education begins with generosity.
Take a look: https://mindful.money/financial-education/
