Your Money Or Your Life Pdf
Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship With Money & Achieving Financial Independence Authors: Joe Dominguez & Vicki Robin with Monique Tilford Click Here to Get the PDF Summary of This Book & Many More “We shift from comparing ourselves to others to considering our real needs and desires.
Your money or your life.If someone thrust a gun in your ribs and said that sentence, what would you do? Most of us would turn over our wallets. The threat works because we value our lives more than we value money. Or do we?”Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin,Your Money or Your Life is one of those few books I read over and over because its ideas continue to challenge and inspire me. It’s a must-read for those interested in early retirement, financial independence, or improving their finances.The book is officially about money.
But in a deeper sense it’s about how to live your life. It’s about aligning your values and your daily decisions. It’s about swimming against the current of society in order to live a rich life on more than a just a material level.The core premise of the book is that we trade too much of our lives for money. Most of our time, our identity, and our self-worth revolve around money or the things we do for money, like our jobs. If these truly made us happy, maybe that would be a fair trade. But in reality many of us are either miserable or dissatisfied with our careers and our financial lives.So, if you feel like your existing patterns with money are not working, this book provides some interesting alternatives.In this review I’ve narrowed down my favorite big ideas from the book. These ideas are are both extremely practical and deeply philosophical.
If you really absorb and integrate them into your life, your relationship to money will change in a very positive way. And then when you’re asked whether you want your money or your life, you can happily answer “I want both!” Stuck Making a DyingHow many people have you seen who are more alive at the end of the work day than they were at the beginning?
Do we come home from our ‘making a living’ activity with more life? Where’s all the life we supposedly made at work? We are sacrificing our lives for money – but it’s happening so slowly that we barely notice.”Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin,Think of how much time most of us spend working. It’s not only the 40-60 hours per week while we’re officially on the clock. Work also includes the time commuting, getting ready each morning, decompressing each evening, attending post-work meetings, thinking about work at home, visiting the doctor for work or stress-related illnesses, and more.As a percentage of our lives, work dominates like no other activity.
If we’re lucky, we have work that challenges and rewards us in more ways than just a paycheck. But even then, work controls us instead of the other way around.We work to pay the bills. We work to feel good about ourselves. We work to maintain our self-image. We work because we don’t know what else we’d do with our time.There’s nothing wrong with work. It’s a noble pursuit. But are we really working to live?
Or are we kicking the can until later in life when the time is finally right to start living (or when it’s too late)? The authors shared a story from who a lady who asked:Is this all? Do I have to work and work and then retire – worn out – to be put out to pasture? Mahishasura mardini lyrics in english. To do nothing then but to try to spend money I saved up and to waste my time till my life is over?”The main message of this book is that you don’t have to stay trapped in a life pattern you don’t like.
Money is simultaneously the primary challenge and the primary solution. But, to solve this puzzle, you’ll have to undo some deeply ingrained habits and thought patterns.
The Myth of More is BetterIf you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better, ‘enough’ is like the horizon, always receding.
You lose the ability to identify that point of sufficiency at which you can choose to stop.”Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin,Do you know what financial myths you live by? A myth is not something untrue. It’s a story that you tell yourself below the surface of consciousness that affects your daily decisions.It’s easy for us to see the myths of other people in other eras.
For example, we study Greek myths in school. But our own myths? Those are much more difficult to identify. Yet, they determine most of our habits and our behaviors, for better or for worse.One of the dominant modern economic myths is that more is better. This is a story we’re told long before we have a chance to question its truth.If more is better, then the solution to most financial problems is to work more, to earn more money, to move up to a better job, to hire a better financial expert, and to get higher returns in the market. If we want to be happy, we should buy a nicer car, a bigger house, more food, more toys, and more expensive vacations.This is not to say that any of those things are bad. But the satisfaction they produce is short-lived.
It’s like a buzz from caffeine that wears off shortly after you drink a cup of coffee.Unfortunately, the briefly satisfying more-more-more binges come with heavy, long-lasting financial chains, like a mortgage, a car loan, and credit card debt.Psychologists call this phenomenon, which basically means you quickly revert back to your prior level of happiness after any life event – good or bad. Financially when you continually base decisions upon a more is better mindset, you get onto the hedonic treadmill, otherwise known as the rat race.So, a big part of changing your relationship with money is to simply recognize the motivation and patterns behind your financial decisions.
Plenty of outside forces are happy to make your decisions for you. Advertisers, for example, are happy to make you feel dissatisfied so that you’ll buy something new.But once you become aware of the larger games being played, you can learn to ignore the noise and listen to your own direction. You can decide to replace the dominant myths of society with stories of your own choosing that actually serve your life.This ode from poet Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road beautifully expresses the more unconventional path:From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,Listening to others, considering well what they say,Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,Gently, but with undeniable will divesting myself of the holds that would hold me. Enough and the Fulfillment CurvePart of the secret to life, it would seem, comes from identifying for yourself that point of maximum fulfillment.
There is a name for this peak of the Fulfillment Curve, and it provides the basis for transforming your relationship with money. It’s a word we use every day, yet we are practically incapable of recognizing it when it’s staring us in the face. The word is “enough”.Joe Dominguez and Vicky Robin,For me, this idea of “enough” was the gem of the book. It seems like common sense, but its application is anything but common.You can look at your money and level of fulfillment in life as a graph.
On the vertical axis is your level of fulfillment, and on the horizontal axis is the amount of money spent. From; Penguin Books, 2008In the beginning of the Fulfillment Curve, each dollar spent creates an enormous jump in fulfillment. For example, paying for heat during a cold winter, a full meal when you’re hungry, or a home in a safe neighborhood for your family all bring significant spikes in fulfillment.Eventually, as you spend more money, you reach the peak of the curve and that magical place called enough, which is very personal and unique for each person. But an interesting thing happens as you cross the peak of the curve and continue spending more. Your fulfillment flattens and then starts to drop.
You’ve now reached the zone of over-consumption.It’s as if the extra spending complicates and weighs down your happiness. A bigger house is nice, but it also requires a bigger mortgage payment, larger hazard insurance, nicer furnishings, more maintenance, a better security system, and a bigger job to pay for everything. The worry, stress, and pressure grow along with the amount of money spent.The authors of the book describe the down slope of the curve as clutter.Clutter is anything that is excess – for you. It’s whatever you have that doesn’t serve you, yet takes up space in your world. To let go of clutter, then, is not deprivation, it’s lightening up and opening up space for something new to happen.”Way back in the 1800s one of my favorite writers and philosophers, Henry David Thoreau, was already experimenting in the art of decluttering and finding his unique version of enough. I recommend books, tools, and other resources from time to time using links within my articles. In some cases these links are affiliate links.
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The 'the best book on money period' according to Grant of Millennial Money (as featured on CNBC Make It), who followed its advice and became a self-made millionaire entrepreneur in only five yearsIn an age of great economic uncertainty when everyone is concerned about money and how they spend what they have, this updated edition of the bestselling Your Money or Your Life is an essential read. Millennial Money s Grant explains: 'The premise of it is that you exchange your time for money.
And when you start thinking about how many hours of your life it took to save up the money to buy something, you really start thinking twice about your purchases.' In Your Money or Your Life, Vicki Robin shows readers how to gain control of their money and finally begin to make a life, rather than just make a living. With this book, you ll learn how to:.
Get out of debt and develop savings. Save money through mindfulness and good habits, not strict budgeting. Declutter your life and live well for less. Invest your savings and begin creating wealth. Save the planet while saving money. And much more!'
The seminal guide to the new morality of personal money management.' -Los Angeles Times.