Your Money or Your Life

Review

This book is not just about personal finance – it's also about reshaping your perspective on your life, your work, and the meaning you attach to money and possessions. Parts of the book I liked the most:

• The definition of money as 'something we choose to trade our life energy for'
• The chapter on fulfillment, and thinking through how my expenses are aligned to my purpose and values
• The section on frugality
• The exercise of calculating exactly how much you make per hour and the practice of using that to assess expenses

   

I'm still pondering parts of the book's philosophy; potentially more thoughts to come on that. In the meantime, please enjoy the following callout:

For the sake of order and convenience, we've sorted our lives into boxes. There's our work life, our home life, our community life, our inner life and our secret life. Such 'systems management' allows us to track and balance our many responsibilities. But our prioritized To Do lists are not our lives. In theory they are there to assist us in navigating life—but more often they run us. Rather than perceiving life as a continuing flow of experience in the present moment, we become convinced that we have life captured in a three-ring binder with colored dividers. If we just follow the signs and connect the dots the picture of a perfect life will pop out at us.