Your Money or Your Life Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

Your life is being wasted chasing money and trying to have more.

You are probably living a life of excess, with more expenses than you need. If you take stock of what you’re spending and think about what you need, you can transform your life. Your time is your life energy and you should get the greatest value possible. Pursue a frugal lifestyle with the goal of financial independence to allow yourself to choose your life instead of a focus on your money.

About the Author

Joe Dominguez was a key part of the Voluntary Simplicity movement. He championed the idea of curbing unnecessary consumption and encouraged a return to save your money. Dominguez grew up poor, but he became a financially successful Wall Street Analyst. He retired at the age of 31 and no longer worked for money from 1969 until his death in 1997.

Vicki Robin is an author and speaker who focuses on financial independence and reducing your environmental footprint. In addition to her work with Dominguez, Robin has worked on a model for how to reduce your reliance on food that isn’t local. Her second book after Your Money or Your Life chronicles her own experiences trying to only eat food that came from within 10 miles of her home on Whidbey Island.

Topics

Money & Investments

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Key Insights

You are exchanging your life for money. When you take a job that offers you the highest salary or when you work to support a lavish lifestyle, this takes more time away from doing what matters to you. Your Money or Your Life asks you to rethink your relationship with money and consider how your financial life fits into your whole life.

Pursuing financial independence and focusing on a lifestyle driven by your values will allow you to maximize the time you have. This book is about reprioritizing your life and moving away from consumerism. You have to be methodical and diligent about setting up your financial independence so your life isn’t spent making money you don’t need.

What you’ll learn:

How to cut back on your expenses
The downsides of consumerism
Why frugality gives you more time and helps you live a better life
How your perception of money drives the quality of your life
What it takes to achieve financial independence

Who this is for:

Anyone looking to achieve financial independence
Anyone who spends too much time earning a salary
Anyone who feels like they want to downsize their lifestyle
Anyone trying to focus their life on something other than money
Anyone who wants to decrease their impact on the planet

Money traps people in lifestyles they don’t need and shouldn’t pursue.

It used to be that you could get a job with a good company, work 40 hours a week for 30-40 years, and retire with a healthy pension. The salary you received at that company would generally support the average family, allowing you to own a home, buy a car, and take the occasional vacation. You didn’t even have to have two incomes to support that stable lifestyle.

This is no longer the reality for most Americans. Now, most people are working for more than 40 hours every week. That time doesn’t even include everything else that usually goes into having a job, like the time you spend getting ready and commuting. On top of that, households usually require two incomes to cover all of their expenses. So, this traditional lifestyle comes at a cost.

But you can’t just quit. You become accustomed to having a certain lifestyle. The long hours are just the price you pay to have a bigger house with a pool, a nicer car, or fancy handbags. This makes you feel unable to contemplate a life where you don’t focus on making money.

In this way, money is a trap. You work to afford a lifestyle. While each person may be working to sustain a different level of personal luxury, the message is the same. You are working for things you don’t need and giving up your time so you can’t enjoy the life you have.

Society pushes consumerism, which reinforces the trap and is bad for the planet.

There is a belief that you have a fundamental right to buy what you want. While there is certainly free will to do so, this messaging is less about your rights and more about consumerism.

Society reinforces a message that it is good...