Tanja Hester is the author of Wallet Activism: How to Use Every Dollar You Spend, Earn, and Save as a Force for Change (coming in November) and Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way. After spending the bulk 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 New York Times called her “the matriarch of the women’s FIRE movement.” She hosts a podcast launching this summer 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. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @our_nextlife, and visit her blog at ournextlife.com.