Your Money or Your Life
Your Money or Your Life is the foundational early-FIRE-movement book by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, first published in 1992 and substantially updated by Robin in 2008 and again in 2018. The book lays out a nine-step program for radically reorganizing the relationship between work, money, and time. Step one is to come to terms with the actual amount of money one has earned in a lifetime and the actual net worth one has to show for it. Subsequent steps include calculating one's true hourly wage after subtracting all costs incurred in earning it, asking of every expense whether it provided fulfillment in proportion to the hours of life energy traded for it, and tracking income, expenses, and a single chart of investment income versus expenses until the lines cross at what the authors call financial independence. Dominguez, who himself reached that point at thirty-one and lived on roughly seven thousand dollars a year for the rest of his life, taught the seminars on which the book is based.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Your Money or Your Life
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez lay out a nine-step program for getting out of debt, tracking every dollar of spending, and crossing the line into financial independence.
Yes. The 2018 revised edition by Vicki Robin updates the original Joe Dominguez framework for index funds and the modern FIRE movement, which credits the book as foundational.
It draws on values-based philosophy and has spiritual overtones, but it is not denominational. It is widely used in secular financial counseling.
Your Money or Your Life was written by Vicki Robin, published in 1992 by Viking.
Your Money or Your Life is 376 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Your Money or Your Life takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Your Money or Your Life is a standalone novel by Vicki Robin, not part of a series.
Your Money or Your Life is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.