Your Money or Your Life
By: Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin
Far from being just another book about personal finance, this book takes a deeper look at the role money plays in your life and provides a road map for how to improve a situation that (for most of us anyway) could probably stand a little improvement. First published more than 20 years ago, Your Money or Your Life has since become something of a classic. Unlike many personal finance books, it does not advocate living by a budget, since budgets, like diets, rarely work due to their failure to address the root of the problem. Instead, it provides readers with an opportunity to reflect on the ebb and flow of money in their lives and to evaluate what they spend and why they spend the way they do.
One of the most useful tools that this book offers is its encouragement to keep track of every single cent that you spend so that you have an accurate picture of where your money actually goes. And you are to do this with “no shame, no blame.” The point is not to judge yourself, but to give yourself information about habits that may be obscure to you, shrouded as they tend to be in guilt and denial. This book seeks to free you from all of that; one of the questions readers are to ask themselves is: Are you at peace with money? It is a telling question, and this is a thought-provoking book.
This book challenges the assumption that “more is better” in our lives. (One of the most interesting graphs is one that show that people who make more money are actually slightly less satisfied with life in general than those who make less.) It challenges you to find and explore the concept of “enough” in your life and to define what that is. What happens when you pass the enough mark? Clutter. Stuff or activities that take up space and must be maintained but that really bring you no real joy or fulfillment.
If you are looking for a way to transcend the rat race and develop a better relationship with the role that money plays in your life – both in how it comes to you and what you have to do to get it and how you spend it – then this is definitely a book you will want to read and take to heart.
Your Money or Your Life
By: Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
Pages: 364
Published: 1992 by Penguin Books
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