About

Hi there, 

I’m Diana Crabtree Green, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) with more than twenty years of experience in personal finance and tax.

Clients come to me with many of the same concerns: they don’t know where their money goes every month. Budgeting feels restrictive and complicated. They feel overwhelmed and want help getting ahead. 

Sound familiar?

Just like dieting, budgeting doesn’t work yet we keep banging away at it anyway. If that old myth isn’t the answer, what should we do instead?

Here is what I’ve learned along the way while managing many sets of finances in addition to my own:

• Managing money can be easy.
• It helps to have a plan, but you don’t need a financial planner.
• We don’t need budgets and tracking; there is a better way.

With this in mind, I created Buck the Budget^TM and have shared it with friends and clients.

My story

Why should you apply the strategies I share in detail with Buck the Budget?

I am just anyone…everyone. I am not a trust funder, a lucky investor, or a magician. I am a college graduate who left school more than twenty years ago with debt.

Now I am 45 and don’t need to work much anymore. I’m not retired, but I could be. I am financially free which is to say that my net worth exceeds 25 times my annual costs. I don’t need to work to pay my bills—my investments would do it for me if I let them. But I don’t. I continue to work because I have a passion to help people like you and me to achieve financial freedom and to get ahead. 

How did this normal Norma come out on top so fast?

My secret sauce has been my 401(k). Once working, I dipped my toe into my company’s retirement plan. I didn’t begin maxing it out until my student loans were paid off – a mistake that I estimate is worth about $200,000 today (ouch). Nonetheless, I began maxing it out later in my 20’s and continued to as long as I had one available to me. I also contributed to Roth IRAs and made HSA contributions. I found each and every tax-advantaged saving opportunity available to me and I did it.

Then I lived on what was left.
This is all I did.

I suppose I should claim I was fixated on building wealth and retiring early but it’s not true. I simply started early on and put away as much as I could. Then I went on to comfortably live my life. When I popped my head up to survey the landscape, I had accumulated more than I really needed to. 

If this normal Norma can achieve financial freedom, anyone…everyone can, even if you haven’t started yet. We all know that the earlier you start, the better, yet my strategies work at every life stage.