I checked out Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin) from the library a while back and decided it\'s one I\'d like to own.  Along the same line of thinking, I also bought a copy of Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Life that is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich (Duane Elgin).  Got both of them used.  :laugh:

Post edited by: Jen, at: 2006/04/13 14:19

After I read Your Money or Your Life, I was inspired to create a spreadsheet with a graph that charts our savings balances on the first of each month, the idea being, of course, that I would see upward movement on the graph from month to month.  To get to financial freedom/independence, you would chart both your expenses and your income from savings, and when the two intersect you\'ve achieved independence.

Their focus isn\'t on making as much money as possible but on figuring out what you truly need to be happy and then earning appropriately.  If I recall correctly, this book also has you figure out how much you realyl earn per hour from your job after you factor in all the associated costs of working - communting costs, wardrobe, dining out, dues, etc.  You calculate your true hourly wage and ten use that to weight purchases in the future against the \'life energy\' you\'d have to expend in order to make the purchase.  It\'s an interesting approach to valuing one\'s money and the time and energy it takes to earn it.

The voluntary simplicity book was much more philosophical and not necessarily a how-to, but it was a thought-provoking read in terms of choosing to live more simply.  One idea brought up in the book  was the notion that people can only live a voluntarily simple lifestyle and feel satisfied with it if it truly is a choice.  Two people might bike to work; the person who has to out of necessity is far less likely to feel a satisfaction from it than the person who could get to work in other ways but is choosing to bike.