Your Money or Your Life - Book Review

For sure I am not the first person to try to obtain financial independence (hope I'm not the last either).  I think that that award can go to a Mr. Joe Dominguez who created a nine step program to basically "get your shit in order."  That program was brought into book form by Vicki Robin and Mr Dominguez called "Your Money or Your Life." 

I'm not sure if I even need to go on as this book has already been approved by so many people seeking FI that I'm not sure I'll add anything new to the discussion or praise.  But I'll try...

I checked my local library and they didn't have this book so I went online and ordered the Kindle version through Amazon.  If I remember right I paid about USD13.00, or about JYP1050.


The heart of the book is about your life and your relationship with money.  We all have a predetermined amount of life energy (meaning our time on this Earth), as the authors put it, that we exchange via a job for a paycheck (money).  Without a plan this is called "making a dieing."  The nine steps are about organizing your financial life, discovering and refining your values to bring your financial life and your real life (your hopes and dreams) into focus, creating a stash of capital, and finally investing that capital safely to allow yourself the freedom to spend your life energy as you see fit.

Being a big fan of Mr. Money Mustache I drew many similarities between what he writes about and the principals expressed in this book.  I'm sure MMM read this book (or perhaps visited one of Mr. Dominguez's seminars) and it helped him on the road to to FI.

One of the most interesting parts of the book for me was step 5, "Making Life Energy Visible." Step 5 has you graph your income versus your expenses and post them somewhere visible to remind you of your goal. I have been tracking my spending down to the penny regularly for the last 5 years, give or take, but I had never thought of turning it into a graph to see where I was going.    I like this idea a lot!  It gets even better around Step 7 where you start to graph investment income.  Once you reach the crossover point where investment income meets expenses you are FI.  It makes it seem so easy!

This is a step I am very excited to start.  Once I have my first full month of YMOYL style tracking done I will be sticking a graph up on my wall.

Some of the other steps I am not so crazy about.  After you break down your spending you ask yourself three questions about each category of spending and decide if it was worth the life energy required for that activity.  So if you see going to the club and drinking will cost you 10 hours of life energy is that worth it to you?  It was hard for me to decide why I felt this step wasn't necessary for me.  I guess I normally just do the things I want to do anyway so at the end of the month it seems like I would say "Of course I wanted to do that!  That's why I did it."  I won't skip this step when the time comes to do it, and maybe that will show me the purpose of it.

All in all this book is considered the bible of FI.  If you haven't heard of it well now you have no excuses.  A great required read for anybody looking to learn how to become FI from start to finish.