Tanja Hester

Tanja Hester is the author of Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change (BenBella Books, 16 November 2021) and Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way (Hachette Books, 2019). After spending most of her career as a consultant to Democratic politics and progressive social change 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 to accumulate more wealth, part of why she's been called her “the matriarch of the women’s FIRE movement” by the New York Times and a “female financial influencer you should be following” by U.S. News and World Report. She also hosts the podcast 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. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and originally hails from Green Bay, Wisconsin. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @our_nextlife and visit her blog at OurNextLife.com.