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

Your Money or Your Life has been an empowering and transformative read. The nine steps outlined in this book have helped me reframe how I view and manage money. This book’s practical advice has been invaluable in simplifying and prioritizing my expenses. The insights are clear and relatable, and quite easy to apply to everyday life. I have assembled quite a library on achieving greater financial literacy that I am passing on to my children and grandchildren. Highly recommend for anyone seeking financial clarity and freedom!

I recently asked ChatGPT about the best books to become wealthy, and Your Money or Your Life was suggested. I went to check it out and then realized that I already had it on my Kindle, having bought it years ago. I had read most of the book but not all, and I hadn't used the tools suggested. Looking back now, it feels crazy that I had the simple solution for my financial chaos right in front of me - but instead, I was busy chasing quick fixes in other places ("success" retreats, woo-woo books, therapy, you name it).I have now finally finished Your Money or Your Life and had a huge aha-moment that this is the approach I want and need for sound money management moving forward. I know that the book's method works because although I haven't used all of its steps, I've been tracking my income and expenses every day for eight months (using a Japanese money journal, a "Kakeibo"). After having struggled with money my whole adult life, I'm now FINALLY living within my means and I'm set up to start creating wealth. It would never have happened without getting conscious about my actions with money through tracking how I use it.I think I probably dismissed Your Money or Your Life when I first bought it years ago because I wanted a shortcut to abundance, so those were the "solutions" I bought into. The problem is that none of the other methods really worked. Your Money or Your Life may not come in a sexy package, but it WORKS. The tools are simple too, and anyone can use them. If you're tired of financial chaos and feeling like you never have enough, read this book and USE THE TOOLS! Although a very practical and no-nonsense book, I think its results in one's life can still be magical.

I started liking this book when I read the sentence "What kind of society turns its young people into a profit center for the debt industry?" It got better from there and I'm really glad I bought and read it. There were several issues I wish it addressed in more depth. The first was the importance of earning quarterly Social Security benefits 4 times a year for 35 years as a way to reinforce financial freedom. The second was to always be employed, even at minimum wage, to earn those benefits. The third was to show average and median family net worth holdings by decades to give a sense of how net worths increase over time to contribute first to financial security, and second to reach family financial independence. I also would have liked to see some in depth discussion about college debt, how much was reasonable, and relative earnings values of various degrees, and how to pay them off in 10 years.We all come from different circumstances of poverty or wealth, social capital, and human capital. Our task is to recognize our circumstances, advantages and disadvantages, and use the insights of this book to help us to the results that dignify and suit us

Just finished this book. Have already recommended it to three or four friends. I don’t frequently tell my wife she needs to read something, but this book has so many thought-provoking ideas and questions, and such potential to shape our future financial life that I felt it was was critical reading.I recommend reading through quickly, then deciding how much detail to go into on some of the “assignments.” If you want the short short version, see the appendix, but i gained a lot through the extended, deliberate dive into each topic, the illustrations of real world people, and the time spent with my mind wandering and weaving Vicki’s recommendations into my own mental schema.Some of it is a bit overboard in my opinion—I personally see little value in tracking down old W2’s, for instance. But I did find spending 30 minutes or so estimating what I made each year of my life revealing in multiple ways.The process of methodically accounting for all you income and expenses can require a level of fastidiousness that I don’t have. Fortunately in this tech age online tools can help. I use Mint and love it. I began using Mint about a year ago, so some of the categorization tasks were already done for me. It has its quirks, but if you work past them it is a powerful, free budget analysis tool that pairs nicely with this book.The book left me invigorated, and inspired to live more simply so that I can spend more of my life “ working for a living instead of working for a dying,” financially independent, and content with “enough.”