If I had to pick one book that has had the biggest impact on my life, it would be Your Money or Your Life by Vicky Robin and Joe Dominguez.  I have read my tattered and highlighted copy multiple times.  It changed my view of not just how I spend my money, but how I earn it.  I absolutely credit it with enabling my husband and me to retire early.

It is not a quick read and it does not promise a quick fix but I found it absolutely compelling and motivating.  It contains exercises that take some time to do, but if you actually work through them, their impact is profound and long-lasting.  

It would be impossible to deliver the value of this book in a few articles, but I’d like to share some of the main takeaways and encourage you to get your own copy and start this journey. 

The primary principle is that money is something we choose to trade our life energy for. 

Each of us has only so much time on earth and that time is not a renewable resource.  Once we spend it, it is gone. Are we spending our money, and therefore our time, in a way that aligns with what is important to us?  To help us figure that out we’ll look at two sides of the same coin: how we earn our money and how we spend it.

Most of us need to spend some of our time working to make money. Calculating how much we make per hour seems like a simple equation, but is it?  

Let’s say you make $100,000 per year and you have a full-time job of 40 hours per week with two weeks off per year (fairly typical in the US).  That means you work 2,000 hours per year.  So you make $50/hour ($100,000/2,000).

Or do you?  

How many hours do you really spend on your job? How much additional time do you spend getting ready for work, commuting, answering emails and reading work documents at night and on weekends, preparing for meetings, going to after-work functions, traveling for work? 

In my working years I rarely worked “only” 8 hours per day, not to mention all the time I spent on those other work-related activities.  I bet most of us easily spend an additional 2 hours per work-day which means working 50 hours per week, or 2500 hours per year.  So in our example of making $100,000/year, you really make $40/hour. 

But is that even accurate? We break it down further in How Much Money Does Your Job Cost You?

Read all the articles related to Your Money or Your Life:

• How Much Time Does Your Job Cost You? (this article)
• How Much Money Does Your Job Cost You?
• How Much is Your Stuff Worth?