⭐⭐ Your Money or Your Life by Dominguez
| Full Title | Your Money or Your Life |
|---|---|
| Authors | Joe Dominguez, Vicki Robin |
| Year Published | 1999 |
| Date Read | October 10, 2016 |
| Rating | 2/5 stars |
If you want your hand held very tightly and things explained slowly and methodically to you, this is the book for you. Or perhaps you enjoy the mental masturbation of someone telling you how bad it is to buy stuff, subtly congratulating you for not doing so. You also might enjoy it if you like metaphors that are wildly inaccurate, like this one that tries to make you understand money through something more ‘tangible’:
“Our life energy is more real in our actual experience than money. You could even say money equals our life energy. So, while money has no intrinsic reality, our life energy does–at least to us. It’s tangible, and it’s finite.”
Maybe I’m stupid, but how is ‘life energy’ more tangible than money? You can literally touch money; can you do that with life energy?
Obviously, I didn’t enjoy the book’s tone or pacing, but even the ideas contained within it are dubious. One of the first things that the book tells you to do is to make an inventory of
every little thing in your house, only leaving out things that might be worth less than $1. Talk about a high investment of time for questionable value. Irrespective of this example, though, the book has a very low signal-to-noise ratio; you have to read through 5-10 pages of the same idea regurgitated 100 different ways before another one comes along.
I’d recommend Early Retirement Extreme instead, which has a much higher proclivity to present novel ideas. The reason I gave this book more than 1 star is because I think that for someone who isn’t as sold on the concept of financial independence, it could be useful to have information be relayed at a more leisurely pace.