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

Step 1: Making Peace with the Past

Donna preferred prevention, yet the economics of medicine kept pulling her back into the old way of working. “Either I have to do medicine differently or not do it at all.”

The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff—that sends us back to work again!

And here is where this program is different from the tens or hundreds of other recipes for fiscal health. It is based on consciousness, fulfillment, and choice, not on budgeting or deprivation.

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.

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

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a hidden hierarchy based on what you do for money. That’s called jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings, and even at home.

Winning isn’t having the most toys. It’s having precisely what you need and nothing in excess and being able to stop playing the game at will. Knowing money is life energy allows you to maximize and optimize your most precious resource: your time; your life.