Review 11: Your Money or Your Life
24/07/07 22:12 Filed in: Books
The book attacks the concept of money from both the philosophical perspective and the nitty-gritty of saving pennies. One of the core concepts is that money isn’t power or esteem or even time, because you surely cannot swap it back to get more time. Money is a representation of what we have traded our life energy for. That $20 bill represents 4 hours of our lives spent working to earn it. But wait, you say, no one makes $5 an hour. I’m making at least $12 in (insert random job here). Dominguez and Robin push readers to find their real wage after calculating all the time spent getting to and from, dressing and shopping for work clothes, bitching about work after work, decompressing and taking escape holidays and THEN subtracting all of the costs of work, from expensive lunches and drinks from the pop machine to part of the cost of maintaining your car and having a nice office outfit.
The results are pretty shocking. I felt pretty good at making over $20 an hour at Aeon, but that wage was cut down to $8 when I factored in all of the extra work I did and the expenses of going there. This piece of information is critical because it lets one see exactly what you are selling yourself for. And, as an extension of that, knowing that a $40 night on the town actually cost me 5 hours, not 2, at a job that I wasn’t ecstatic about, makes the purse-strings tighten up considerable.
The other angle of the book, now that the reader is feeling somewhat miserable about how cheaply they are prostituting themselves out to company X, is to show how we can all live on much, much less money. So much, in fact, that some of his example people started earning more money by quitting their expensive jobs and working closer to home or doing all those expensive things we pay others to do for us. The authors take the reader through several ways to account for every single penny and then to look at how she feels about spending 30 hours of the month on a shoe habit or on boozing. From that feeling, frugality is internalized, not by unrealistic, external spreadsheet budgets that are as easy to break, but by a shift in values. So while that doughnut habit of mine is becoming less attractive, I don’t feel bad about spending $150 a month eating out with friends because that’s a really important way for me to enjoy both good company and great japanese food. Spending money on books is foolish because I currently have more books that I can possibly read in the next year. Spending more money on dates and girls is an absolute necessity if I want to actually get a girlfriend, and I value such a notion as getting laid here and there. Essentially, the authors are aiming at the idea of enough. True fulfillment is at that tipping point where less would leave you wanting and more wouldn’t matter - it is up to us to take a long look at how we spend our money and see what is enough and what is too much.
While some may feel this is all just stingy penny-pinching, it is, in my view, an affirmation of life and its transience. If I have to work to earn money to live, I am going to put that money to its best use, towards the best kind of life. For a guy who used to say that money was evil and soul-sucking, this book has really changed how I earn and spend money, how I spend my life. Highly recommended.
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