YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence
by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
Publisher: Penguin Books
ISBN: 0140167153
Do you spend more money than you earn? Would you like to change jobs but can't afford to? Are arguments about money affecting your marriage or other relationships? If you answer yes to any of these questions, you may find the answers you need in YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence, if you're willing to work for them.
The authors, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, both gave up successful careers in order to live less stressfully and more meaningfully. In YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE , they take you through their nine step program to transform your relationship with money and put you on the road to financial freedom.
This is not your average financial book. It will not teach you how to calculate a stock's price earning ratio or how to balance your checkbook. What it WILL do, if you do the work, is help you distinguish between your needs and your wants, show you how to spend time on the things that are most important to you and empower you to take control of your money and your life.
One of the most revealing exercises in the book translates the dollars you earn at work into hours of your life, so you can see the real trade-offs you make in your style of living. The concept that "money is something we choose to trade our life energy for" is a powerful one when you begin to apply it to your daily life. Our life energy is the finite amount of time we have allotted to us in this life. When we go to our jobs we are trading our life energy for money. We "pay" for money with our time.
To help you evaluate your spending, this book shows you how to calculate the actual hourly rate that you earn at your job, after deducting all the expenses associated with working (clothes, car, gas, lunches at work, dry cleaning, etc.). Then you keep track of your expenses and review each one at the end of the month to see how many hours of life energy it took and whether it was worth it in the sense that it was fulfilling or in accordance with your life purpose. This step is not about budgeting. It's about spending your money more consciously and getting full value for selling the most precious commodity, your life.
Whether you are deeply in debt, comfortably situated financially, or already wealthy, YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE can transform your relationship with money and may transform your life.
Deborah Fowles, your Guide for Financial Planning
