Tanja Hester is the author of Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change and Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way. After spending most of her career as a consultant to Democratic politics and progressive issue campaigns, and before that as a public radio journalist, Tanja retired early at the age of thirty-eight. She documented the process on her award-winning financial independence/retire early (FIRE) blog, Our Next Life. She’s been an outspoken voice in the personal finance media community to consider systemic barriers and opportunity gaps, rather than simply pushing people with lots of advantages already to accumulate more wealth, part of why the New York Times called her “the matriarch of the women’s FIRE movement.” 

She hosts a podcast also called Wallet Activism, writes an occasional opinion column for MarketWatch, and lives in a burgeoning permaculture food forest she’s growing in North Lake Tahoe, California, with her husband, Mark Bunge, and a flock of tiny rescue dogs.