Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
Break free from the paycheck-to-paycheck cycle and reclaim your most precious resource: your time. This is the book that launched the FIRE movement, with more than a million copies sold worldwide.
Co-author Joe Dominguez was a Wall Street financial analyst who retired at age 31 and never worked for money again. He and Vicki Robin developed a proven nine-step program that has helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their relationship with money and achieve true financial freedom.
This fully revised 2018 edition, featuring a foreword by Mr. Money Mustache, updates the classic for modern life. It covers today's financial landscape, including index fund investing, side hustles, freelancing, and online money tracking.
Whether you're drowning in debt or dreaming of early retirement, this book will teach you to:
• Get out of debt and build savings
• Save money through mindfulness rather than strict budgeting
• Declutter your life and live well for less
• Invest wisely and build lasting wealth
Oprah called it "a wonderful book" that "can really change your life." The Los Angeles Times named it "the seminal guide to the new morality of personal money management." Stop trading your life energy for a paycheck. Start building the life you actually want to live.
Interesting Facts
Inspired the FIRE Movement: The 1992 book is widely credited as the original inspiration for the Financial Independence, Retire Early movement. FIRE bloggers and podcasters consistently cite it as the foundational text that started it all.
Mr. Money Mustache Foreword: The 2018 edition features a foreword by Peter Adeney, the influential blogger known as Mr. Money Mustache, who retired at 30.
Started as Cassette Tapes: Before the 1992 book existed, Joe Dominguez recorded his nine-step program on cassette tapes in 1986. He and Vicki Robin ran workshops in church basements and motel meeting rooms for years before publishers came calling.
Oprah's Stamp of Approval: The book became a bestseller after Vicki Robin appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah said it would "change your life," and sales skyrocketed past 600,000 copies following that appearance.
Over a Million Copies Sold: The book has been revised four times (1998, 2008, 2018) and translated into multiple languages. Combined editions have sold well over a million copies worldwide.
Money Equals Life Energy: The book introduced the powerful concept that money equals "life energy" traded for work. Every purchase can be measured in hours of your life spent earning, which transforms how you think about spending.
Wall Street Dropout at 31: Co-author Joe Dominguez was a successful Wall Street financial analyst who retired at age 31 by following the nine-step program he created.
Soap Opera Beginnings: Before co-writing a personal finance classic, Vicki Robin worked as an extra on soap operas like Love of Life and The Secret Storm. She left acting after becoming disillusioned with the industry.
The Crossover Point: The authors coined this term for the moment when investment income exceeds monthly expenses. It remains one of the clearest definitions of financial independence ever written.
A Middle School Dream: When a teacher asked young Joe what he wanted to be at 30, he wrote "financially independent." He achieved exactly that goal, one year late at age 31.
Quotes
"If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough." - Vicki Robin
"Do we come home from our “making a living” activity with more life? Do we bound through the door, refreshed and energized, ready for a great evening with family and friends? Where’s all the life we supposedly made at work?" - Vicki Robin
"The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life." - Vicki Robin
"No matter how much you have, that voice of “more would be better” drives you to make acquisition the name of your game." - Vicki Robin
"Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life." - Vicki Robin
"We no longer live life. We consume it." - Vicki Robin
"How you spend your money is how you vote on what exists in the world." - Vicki Robin
"We shift from comparing ourselves to others to considering our real needs and desires. We shift from “more” to “enough” and ultimately get more of what money can’t buy. Priceless." - Vicki Robin
"Americans used to be 'citizens.' Now we are 'consumers.'" - Vicki Robin
"We Aren’t Making a Living, We’re Making a Dying." - Vicki Robin
"Once we’re above the survival level, the difference between prosperity and poverty lies simply in our degree of gratitude." - Vicki Robin
"Consumption seems to be our favorite high, our nationally sanctioned addiction, the all-American form of substance abuse." - Vicki Robin
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