• Financial independence comes with knowing your net worth, your current earnings, and your past expenses.
• Budgeting and evaluating subcategories in your income and expenses sheet will help you assess much more than just money.
• Invest your hard-earned money so that they don’t depreciate in time.

If you‘re ready to transform your relationship with money, keep on reading, as we’ll explore each lesson in detail below!

Any good plan has a foundation or a starting point. If you want to improve your relationship with money, you’ll first have to find out how much of it you’re spending. Start by tracking all your past income and summing it up. Use old resumes, paychecks, or even information from the Social Security Administration.

Sum it up, and make sure to include cash gifts and other income received in your life. Now, take a look at how much you currently have. Include cash, money in the bank, stocks or bonds at the current market value, and your fixed assets, like a car or a house. Liabilities like mortgage, car payments, and debts should be accounted for as well.

With budgeting comes a clearer record of your income and expenses. While it gets easier to track your expenditures, you get a fresh perspective on something bigger than that. Your life energy-to-satisfaction ratio. Let me explain!

Essentially, when you’re trading your time to work and get paid, you’re giving away precious life energy. All of this will be in exchange for money that you use to buy necessities and pay for a life worth living. Now, if you put that down into numbers, you’ll see that you’re paid a certain hourly rate. But it takes time to prepare for work and money to buy work supplies, such as clothes or razors. Therefore your net income per hour may be much smaller than you thought.

To put that into perspective, ask yourself if what you’re working for has a good life energy-to-pay ratio, and if not, consider lowering the costs associated with eating out, for example. If you don’t feel like giving away 20 hours of your life to pay for restaurant dates, you’ll have to reconsider this habit. If you’re comfortable and it aligns with your value, reconsider other expense categories.

Studies suggest that people who focus heavily on money, positions, or conventional success are highly probable to suffer from depression and increased anxiety. Instead, invest your precious hours worked and your money into things that relate to yourself and make you happy.

One of the last parts of this book is about investing, which implies placing your money in assets such as bonds, stocks, or even real estate, to produce more income in the long run. So, where do you start? People often think about investing as something risky, but that’s just because they don’t know how to do it.

Essentially, you’ll want to opt for the safest securities out there, especially if you’re new to the game. You don’t need a financial advisor, but you will need to decide how much you want to allocate each month. This allocation will be based on how much you’ll need in the long run. Also, it’s safe to assume that you need to put aside six months worth of expenses before you start.

Investing is risky in the short run, as your securities can drop in value and you’ll find yourself in need of that emergency fund. However, they can produce a lot of wealth in the long run, so you’ll want to play that game by opting for treasury bonds, exchange traded funds, and when you start to understand the game a bit more, you can pick certain companies yourself, but only with a small percentage of your investing funds.

Your Money or Your Life explores the idea of money from a broader perspective, starting with the importance of calculating your net worth, all the way to investing your spare funds. The book will help you budget better. Learn the basic principles of investing, start an emergency fund, calculate your real pay and many more! Reading this book is a must for anyone looking to reach financial freedom and get serious about their money status.

The 35-year-old person who wants to start being more money-conscious and save for retirement. The 23-year-old graduate who has a great interest in finance and investment opportunities. Or the 28-year-old who wants to take charge of their financials to live a more meaningful life.

“If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough.”

-Vicki Robin