I'm Nicole Dieker Finley.

I’ve been a full-time freelancer since 2012, with a focus on personal finance and personal development. I’m also a classically trained musician and composer with an MFA in theater directing.

I currently write the “On the Money” advice column and the “Money Talks” interview series at Vox, and previously contributed to the “Money Matters” advice column at Morning Brew. I'm also the author of Frugal and the Beast, a short-and-sour series of financial fairy tales.

You can view more of my work at Newsweek, Bankrate, CreditCards.com, Dwell, Haven Life, Catapult, BoingBoing, Lifehacker, The Write Life, Longreads, NBC News, Popular Science, Make a Living Writing, and The Billfold.

In 2017, I published a two-volume novel called The Biographies of Ordinary People. BookLife wrote “Dieker writes with unrepentant honesty about the human condition,” which suggests that both the book and its author did what they intended to do. William Deresiewicz, in his book The Death of the Artist, called The Biographies of Ordinary People “a lovely, unpretentious story, suffused with feeling, that unfolds at the speed of life.” You can most easily read The Biographies of Ordinary People through Libby or Amazon, and I hope you do.

In 2022 and early 2023, I completed a four-volume inquiry into the process of understanding reality called WHAT IT IS and WHAT TO DO NEXT. This project was originally sold as a series of print zines designed by Alan Lastufka and published through Shortwave Publishing. The full text of the project (slightly revised from its print version) is now available to read for free online:

• Volume 1: Down the Rabbit-Hole
• Volume 2: Is It What It Is?
• Volume 3: D4, C4
• Volume 4: None of the Monitors Are Asleep

From 2022-2024, I wrote The Larkin Day Mysteries, a cozy-comedy-nerdy-mathy-theater-geeky mystery series that Kirkus called “engaging, sophisticated, and wide-ranging” and Publishers Weekly described as “breezy and full of surprises.” Get your copies at Amazon or buy directly from Shortwave Publishing.

My secular benediction “I Wish You Peace” has been a part of university choral repertoire since 2001.

After spending 20 years bouncing from one major city to another, I returned to the rural area where I grew up and married the great love of my life.

Email me at nicole@nicolediekerfinley.com.