Your Money or Your Life

By Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
This is a great book for anybody who handles money. It covers how we look at money, how we deal with it, and how to replace our bad habits with good ones. The program itself is hard and I’m not sure I could handle doing it – it involves several steps, including taking a complete inventory of everything you have and figuring out how much it’s worth, calculating how much money you’ve made in your lifetime, and tracking every single bit of money that goes into or out of your life. I would love to sit down with the authors (I believe Dominguez is deceased, but Robin is still around) and see what their thoughts are about folks like Antwon and I, who handle improbably large sums of money on a regular basis and deal with stock and whatnot. When I was in college, this program would have been a cinch. But now, when I literally handle thousands of dollars on a monthly basis, it seems very daunting.
That aside, I loved the rest of the book. It gave me a lot to think about, particularly the idea of enough. How much money is enough for me to live on? Once you’ve figured that out, you can start working toward financial independence — having enough investments that one can live off the interest.
Book 22 in 2007.