Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018

There are two parts to this step: A. Find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime—the sum total of your gross income, from the first penny you ever earned to your most recent paycheck. B. Find out your net worth by creating a personal balance sheet of assets and liabilities.

Clutter is anything that is excess—for you. It’s whatever you have that doesn’t serve you, yet takes up space in your world. To let go of clutter, then, is not dearth (lack); it’s lightening up and opening up space for something new to happen. As self-evident as these ideas may be, many people experience a subtle (or not so subtle) resistance to le

Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt, in Work Without End, illuminates the doctrine of “full employment”: Since the Depression, few Americans have thought of work reduction as a natural, continuous, and positive result of economic growth and increased productivity. Instead, additional leisure has been seen as a drain on the economy, a liability on wages, and t

SUMMARY OF STEP 4 1. Of each spending subcategory in your Monthly Tabulation ask question 1: “Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction, and value in proportion to life energy spent?” Mark your answer with a + (or an up arrow), a – (or a down arrow), or a 0. 2. Of each spending subcategory in your Monthly Tabulation ask question 2: “Is this expenditu

Reaching your Crossover Point is a mighty accomplishment. You haven’t been turned out to pasture by someone else. You’ve restructured your life around what is most fulfilling and valuable to you. You have dedicated yourself to replacing financial fiction with financial facts, challenging many old beliefs about yourself, your money, and your life. Y

Enough is a fearless place. A trusting place. An honest and self-observant place. It’s appreciating and fully enjoying what money brings into your life and yet never purchasing anything that isn’t needed and wanted. Once you have discovered what is enough for you, your fulfillment curve can reverse direction and head straight up.

To live within your means is to buy only what you can prudently afford, to avoid debt unless you have an assurance that you will be able to pay it promptly, and to always have something put away for a rainy day.

As Annie Leonard vividly shows in her short film The Story of Stuff, our appetite for things drives a one-way trip for resources from the earth to factory to store to our house to the dump.

SUMMARY OF STEP 2 1. Establish (accurately and honestly) how much money you are trading your life energy for, and discover your real hourly wage. 2. Learn about your money behavior by keeping track of every cent that comes into and goes out of your life.