Home > Media > Books > Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin - Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin - Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence
Pros: A life-changing philosophy and plan for financial freedom.
Cons: The steps are time-consuming, but necessary.
The Bottom Line: Creates an awareness of how you are spending your money and your Life Energy, and this awareness will transform your dealings with money.
thessa's Full Review: Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin - Your Money or Your...
If you are an avid book reader, during your lifetime you’ll encounter a few books that will literally change your life. Your Money or Your Life is one that has done so for me.
The late Joe Dominguez, who co-authored this book with Vicki Robin, had an interesting life story. Like most Americans he was in debt in his mid-20s. He then went through a bit of a self transformation in his philosophy about money. He took a job on Wall Street making a modest income, put a plan to work (some or all of that plan is detailed in this book), and became financially independent and retired at the age of 30. For the rest of his life, he lived modestly but well on just $7000 a year and donated the rest of his income to various charities. The proceeds from his seminars and book went to the charities. He died at age 50 after having lived a life that truly reflected a knowledge of what is really important.
Vicki Robin continues in the philosophy expounded on in the book Your Money or Your Life. She is also financially independent and heads up the organization The New Roadmap Foundation (http://www.newroadmap.org) which espouses the principles of voluntary simplicity detailed in her book. Her foundation gives to various needy charities.
You really have to be ready to read this book for it to make a difference in your life. If you are frustrated with debt, notice you buy things to elevate your mood, realize you have too much “stuff”, feel burned out working on the treadmill for other people, or wish you could really make your time in this life count for perhaps a bigger cause, you may just be ready for this book.
Your Money for Your Life starts off by talking about philosophy of money, yet it manages never to be dry or boring. It asks the question, “Are you making a living, or are you making a dying?” The authors help you realize that what you spend your money on is equivalent to an expenditure of Life Energy. In other words, the money that you spend had to be earned. Earning takes time and effort, and these are the things that life is made of. Therefore, your money going out actually equals your life energy being dispersed.
The book details nine steps that must be followed if you wish to achieve financial independence and financial freedom. The authors caution that each and every step must be followed or the program will not work. The steps admittedly require a good deal of effort and time. If you are not serious about changing your life and your relation to money, you may have difficulty following through. You have to be at a point that you are ready to make a commitment without cutting corners. If you do the homework, however, you will be left with valuable information that will open your eyes to your spending habits, both now and in the past. This knowledge itself will create a consciousness about how money leaves your hands.
In the first two of the nine steps, you will find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime as well as figure what your true hourly wage is. Once you know your true hourly wage is, say, $8/hour, you will then know that an hour of your time is worth $8 of Life Energy. A $4 lunch at a fast food restaurant every day of your work week then equates to 2-1/2 hours of life energy spent.
One of the nice things about this book is that it doesn’t give you rules about how much you are allowed to spend or tell you exactly what you should or should not spend your money on. It mostly works by making you aware of this precious commodity of Life Energy that you may be spending foolishly. As you consistently work through the steps in the book, it will soon bother you to know that 2-1/2 hours of your life was spent this week for burgers and fries. There is no guilt, just simply awareness, and that awareness coupled with the knowledge that you get from this book is likely to forever change how you relate to money.
One of the biggest criticisms this book receives is that the authors advise investing your money in savings bonds. Most people know that you will typically get a higher rate of return and more aggressive investment vehicles such as mutual funds. What you have to realize is that these authors are talking about investing your money in a form that will give you a consistent and stable monthly income that you can live off of. With this as the goal, their advice makes sense. This is one of the reasons why the authors say each and every step MUST be followed to the letter.
I have had this book for a good while. After buying it, I skimmed it, thought it was somewhat interesting, but put it back on the shelf and focused on other things. After some time passed and I started to become bothered by consumerism, including my own, as well as the feeling I am on a bit of a treadmill, working just to make money yet not feeling like I am making a difference or making the world a better place, I pulled this book out and actually read through it. I am on step 3 of 9, and I can already say that it has permanently changed my philosophy about money.
I highly recommend Your Money or Your Life for anyone else who is starting to feel that there must be more life has to offer than the routine of 9-5 for a corporation in order to buy a bunch of things that never seem to make you as happy as you had hoped.
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