Book Review: Your Money or Your Life
- Is it still up-to-date?
- Save yourself to freedom
- Proof is in the pudding. Or is it?
- Would I recommend this book?
- Is this book a keeper?
| Title: | Your Money or Your Life |
|---|---|
| Author: | Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin |
| Published: | 2018 |
| My rating: |   |
Your Money or Your Life, by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, is often titled one of the most influential books about money and personal finance; a book about life that will change your life, but personally, I think this book is a mess.
I think the point of this book was to somehow wake you up from the traditional work to retirement life. To show you an alternative to working 9-5 through your life until you retire and will live from your government pension.
To introduce you to the concept of FIRE, “Financial Independence, Retire Early”, and as they say, to “free your mind from consumerism thinking” and introduce the “process of liberation that will free your mind from thinking that more is always better”.
Just that sounds very religious. And it is. Most of this book is wasted on ranting over consumerism and buying things, over clutter, credit cards, over working 9-5. It feels like their idea of life is to live in some deep forest without using money and having things.
It explains the very basic concept of retiring early - reducing your expenses, living frugally, saving up and building an investment portfolio, but gives you only basic info about everything, the same info you can get from a Wikipedia page or high-school level economy textbook.
As somebody who is familiar with the FIRE movement and working on his personal financial freedom, I see that the general ideas are there, but they are in fact very general. And you will get lost in all the talk around it.
This book lost me. I have tried to go through it three times, but I had a hard time finishing it. I was constantly falling asleep as it was all over the place, ranting and talking around the point but not about the point. I had to distract myself to get through every chapter.
Is it still up-to-date?
This book, originally published in 1992 (with latest update in 2018), is based on an audio course released in 1984, which was based on seminars the author did in the 70s, based on steps he took on his own path to financial independence.
It is a lot of “based on”, and it is important to realise the views in the book were aimed at the 9-5 working class, in their 20s-30s, living in the 70s in America. Are current generations thinking like Boomers and Gen Xers did?
I know that in 2023 plenty of people still don’t have decent financial literacy, are working from month to month without any retirement plans, or believe in safety of 9-5 and retirement pension, but we don’t need to hear that buying things is bad.
You can see the outdated (or limited) thinking when they try to present some “great” examples and it completely misses the mark. Like calling selling your excess things a “creative” solution.
There were several updates to this book since its release in 1992 (in 1998, 2008 and 2018), but they just added some comments on modern technology like smartphones, social media, or financial crises, not updated approach or advice relevant to the times.
Save yourself to freedom
That’s it. That’s the whole book.
It basically tells you to spend less and invest more. Be frugal, save money and build an investment portfolio that will feed you for the rest of your life.
Easier said than done, because they don’t give you any specific advice on how to build your retirement wealth or to maintain it (considering they have about 50 years of experience to share).
They just tell you to calculate how much you need and to get it. And they expect you to somehow figure it out on your own.
Proof is in the pudding. Or is it?
There is no single specific proof or example of what authors did in their personal life to achieve financial freedom. They never talk about how they used these steps in their own life or what challenges they faced.
Or any information in the updated versions how they managed to go through the financial crisis of 2000 and 2008. How it affected them, their retirement plans and their portfolios. How they keep it relevant.
Throughout the whole book you will never hear how the authors achieved their financial independence or what they had to change or give up in their life, or what they did in their life once they got their freedom and what they did with the extra time.
Not even examples of how their readers and listeners used all those steps to achieve their financial freedom. They only give some generic examples which have no meaning, like “XY sold their house and now lives in a smaller house”.
They keep referencing “9 step method”, but even after going through the book three times I could not tell you what those steps actually are. I just got lost in all the ranting and all the jumping all over the place.
They claim these “9 steps”, these “tools” will get you the house you want, raise, extra income, and even liberate you from working for money entirely, but then they tell you you need to give up those things like the house and live more frugally.
Would I recommend this book?
No. If you are not on my blog for the first time and you have already read some of my posts (for example the one about the FIRE movement), you probably know more about personal finances than this book can ever give you.
Or go read some other blogs about personal finance and life design. Or go to FIRE sub-Reddit.
Is this book a keeper?
No. Get some current information instead.
Did you find this post helpful?
Share it with a friend.
You can also support me
and buy me a coffee. Thank you.
You may also like this post:
Book Review: Do the Work
