Your Money or Your Life

Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
By Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, Penguin (Non-Classics) (September 1, 1999), 400 Pages
Reviewed by Roberta and Terry Heinlein, Better Marriages Board of Directors

Have you ever struggled with a traditional budget, tried unsuccessfully to spend less, or felt the fear of not having enough money for your needs? This book faces these financial concerns with a unique and thought provoking 9-step program that is based on consciousness, fulfillment and choice, not on budgeting or deprivation.

Your Money or Your Life is about achieving financial independence, not through traditional budgeting and investing strategies, but rather through changing your relationship with money. Financial Independence is having an income sufficient for your basic needs and comforts from a source other than paid employment. Your Money or Your Life examines those basic assumptions you have unconsciously adopted about money – such ideas as “more is better” even when more doesn’t bring fulfillment or that

Your Money or Your Life examines those basic assumptions you have unconsciously adopted about money – such ideas as “more is better” even when more doesn’t bring fulfillment or that
spending rather than saving is good for the economy. The book will challenge your definition of work, your priorities between work and leisure, and the difference between work and paid employment.

The 9-step program includes activities you may have never done before. In one step, you will calculate the actual cost to you in time and money to maintain your job including commuting cost and time, housekeepers and handymen, and vacations to decompress. In another step, you establish spending categories that reflect the uniqueness of your life rather than traditional categories that may not work for you. You apply critical questions to your spending to determine if you received fulfillment, satisfaction, and value for your money and if spending is in alignment with your values and life purpose. Your Money or Your Life presents unique perspectives on many topics. Could we have a socially acceptable addiction to money – reaching for it even when it isn’t bringing fulfillment and feeling it is essential to our sense of wholeness?

Working through the 9-steps is designed to be a guilt-and shame-free way to become conscious about our own relationship with money While the book is not written specifically for couples, couples who work through the steps together will find new understanding about money in their couple relationship as they change their own relationship with money.