your money or your life

[Amazon]

your money or your life is a book!  schmolli-reviews is branching out from just reviewing movies!  how exciting.

anyway, your money or your life is basically a nine-step process for getting out of the rat race.  there are so many ways to mislabel what we are talking about here that i am not sure how to describe it otherwise.

for example, if i say it is about "early retirement," then most people think we are talking about quitting your job and sitting around the house all day.  or travelling.  whatever it is that you think you will do when you are too old to work anymore.  but that is both wrong and dumb.

here is another example.  say i told you to imagine you did not have to work for money anymore and this book will help you get there.  you might be thinking to yourself that we are talking about a way to get rich, but that is also wrong. and dumb.

how about if i said the book was about how to achieve financial independence?  that probably evokes images of "born with more money than you could possibly spend in a lifetime" or "what the hell is financial independence, are you talking about being rich?"  both of those are wrong, but maybe not dumb because "financial independence" is not a commonly used term, so why would you know what that means.

your money or your life did two things for me.  first, it pointed out that "retirement" does not mean you have to stop working, it just means you can stop working for money.  what would you do if you did not have to work for money? would you work for something else? second, it reminded me to apply a data-driven approach to retirement.  like a lot of people, i have been saving for retirement without any consideration for what retirement means.  if retirement means a mansion at the top of beverly hills, then i guess you need a lot of money for that.  but if retirement just means living comfortably...probably a lot less expensive.

actually, this book did a lot more for me than those two things.  it pointed out a bunch of obvious things i should have been doing that i was nonetheless not doing.  it helped me figure out what "enough" means.  it told me that everything was going to be ok.  probably some other stuff, too.

your money or your life gets five charts taped to your refrigerator.