Book Notes

Book Title: Your Money or Your Life

Author: (Vicki Robin)

Favorite Quotes:

If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of
more is better, “enough” is like the horizon—always receding.

Summary/Opinion:
“Your job doesn’t have to be your life”
These days our jobs become much more than just paid employment. We’re often working a job that financially
supports itself. In a way, we pay for having a job, both financially and mentally. Finding a job that aligns with
your Why first instead of a paycheck, prestige, or some other pre-programmed notion can save us many dollars
and hours thinking about the course of our lives.

Action Items:

Spending money is much easier when you don’t track it and don’t have a benchmark for your expenses. Once we
realize that we’re really trading our life energy and not money, we won’t be so careless about it. And we indeed
trade our time and energy no matter if we buy a piece of milk bar or worth 50 million Tesla. Any purchase that
makes us fulfilled and that’s aligned with our values is a huge win. But anything that creates unnecessary clutter
should be cut out from our lives.

“Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.”

Notes:
Focus on making a living

As Vicki Robin suggests, most of us are making a dying instead of making a living. We have
a job that, we think, supports our life when, in fact, it becomes life itself. Once we realize that we’re
trading our most valuable assets - time and energy - we can start making a living by making choices
that support our lives, not our day jobs.

“We Aren’t Making a Living, We’re Making a Dying For so many working people, however, from
people who love their work to those who barely tolerate their jobs, there seems to be no real choice
between their money and their lives. What they do for money dominates their waking hours, and life is
what can be fit into the scant remaining time.”
Find your point of “enough”

That’s likely the most important takeaway from this book. Once we find our point of
“enough”, meaning that less would make us worried about the future and more would only create
more clutter, we can live life on our own terms. Not knowing what’s our “enough” is the #1 reason
why we hop on the hedonic treadmill trying to upgrade our life and therefore grow our salary to
support our new standard of living. Our enough is the point where we’re liberated from having to:

 live paycheck to paycheck,

 think about what’s the next step of our career,
 worry about the next day, month, year,
  put away our dreams in favour of a job,
 trade our life energy for things we don’t need.

“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough. In an environment of more is better,
“enough” is like the horizon—always receding.”

“There is a name for this peak of the Fulfillment Curve, and it provides the basis for transforming
your relationship with money. It’s a word we use every day, yet we are practically incapable of
recognizing it when it’s staring us in the face. The word is “enough.”