Review: Your Money or Your Life

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read “Your Money or Your Life” when it first was released in late 1992, based in part on a quick review I read in “Whole Earth Review”. I found it life changing in tying earned and spent money to the time a person uses to earn that money through work and investments. It made me realize that life could be considered an optimization model, and given my propensity to enjoy numbers, I took that message to heart. I recall the simple steps that Dominguez and Robin defined to understand the simple concepts and integrate it into your life. I also recall the author’s dedication to using government bonds as his only investment. Having taken a few finance classes in college, I could see the flaws in that tactic, and lived my life with a much broader investment portfolio than this book originally promulgated. But I also lived my life considering how time equals money.

Here, 27+ years later, Vicki Robin has updated the book. I wanted to reread the new version to see if Robin’s recommendations had changed, and if I had changed. I sensed some of both. Robins rewrote sections of the book to make them sound different and to offer some different specific advice, while maintaining the original short list of steps. The changes that struck me were the broadening of recommended investments to be more compatible with modern “financial independence” thought, focusing more on low cost broad market index funds including stocks and bonds. I also sensed the earlier sections of the book contained more philosophical content than the original edition. Perhaps it’s just my failing memory, but I seemed much more “new age-y” this time around. I also noticed that Robin includes a number of specific things to try to reduce expenses that, after I’ve read dozens of FIRE (financial independence, retire early) books in the past decade, were nothing new.

But those steps still resonate, they are still practical and usable. But I ask myself if I would have taken so much of the books message to heart if I had first read it today to start my path to optimize personal finances, and I believe so. The basis of the book – measuring your real earnings and determining the real cost of things, then deciding if the thing you are buying is worth the time you put into earning the money for it – that’s still valid and key. And the long term measurement of the growth of your assets and the ability to live off of your assets is also the basis of thought of any working person who dreams of retiring, early if possible. As a starter book, this is still one of the best. For those already on the path to financial independence, this is likely just a good discussion about how you already live. I’ll maintain my 5 star ranking as this is one of the handful of books that have greatly impacted my life.


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