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

Independence cuts through the Gordian knot of not knowing what rich is. Financial Independence has nothing to do with rich. It is the experience of having enough—and then some. Enough, you will remember, is found at the peak of the fulfillment curve. It is quantifiable, and you will define it for yourself as you work with the steps of this program.

If you see your life as bigger than your job and can conceive of having to work for money for only a finite and foreseeable period of time, then you are likely to be an even more highly motivated, high-integrity worker. The qualities of self-assurance, high motivation, dedication, integrity, joyful pride of workmanship, and responsibility that you

In a book called Diets Don’t Work! Bob Schwartz offers four rules for getting off the diet-go-round: Eat when you’re hungry. Eat exactly what your body wants. Eat each bite consciously. Stop when your body has had enough.

Step 1: Making Peace with the Past

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.

Retiring your debt returns to you the freedom to choose. Whatever the economic climate, being able to say “I don’t owe anything to anyone” is a statement of sanity, dignity, and freedom.

The people I found had already incorporated the broken promise of the old American Dream into their lives and were designing their lives not around a ladder of success but around meaning, creativity, flexibility, and a sort of rapid prototyping not just of jobs but of entire careers.

SUMMARY OF STEP 1 A. Find out how much money you have earned in your lifetime. B. Create a balance sheet of your assets and liabilities. What do you have to show for the money you’ve earned?

Legendary investor Warren Buffett said, “A low-cost fund is the most sensible equity investment for the great majority of investors.” He explains, “By periodically investing in an index fund, for example, the know-nothing investor can actually outperform most investment professionals.”