Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin

This book’s full title is Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence. This is written by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez with a forward by Mr. Money Mustache. Vicki Robin has her own website here.

It is a bit preachy but some ideas are worth stating. At one point she says if you have 10 dresses and felt you have nothing to wear – – the trill of getting is greater than the joy of having and using. But if you have ten dresses and have enjoyed waring all of them for years you are frugal (and happier). Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them. Your success at being frugal is measured not by your penny-pinching but by your degree of enjoyment of the material world. (This is on pages 165 to 166 in my paperback).

I liked the attitude of no blame, no shame about dealing with the past. If you were foolish with money in the past, forget about that and only focus on what you will do in the future. What I do not find practical was advise to invest in real estate for renting. Personally, I rather invest in the stock market. You do not have to deal with people as you do if you have real estate for renting. I know people who have done this and they do have some horror stories.

I invest in companies in the stock market. You can get in trouble if you go after short term capital gains. This can be fine in a strong bull market, but you can lose big time in a bear market. I just ride out bear markets. I have good dividend paying stocks and they come back after each bear. During the bear, I still get dividends and every bear market I have been in, my overall dividends have increases. Of course, there are always companies that cut or suspend their dividends in a bear market. However, there are also companies that increase their dividends in a bear market.

There is a review by a blogger on Physician on Fire. There is a review by Mary Wisniewski on this personal finance site. There is another good review on Zen Habits.

See a money or your life summary by The Swedish Investor on YouTube. There is short and good review by Yath Prem on YouTube. Vicki Robin speaks at Microsoft Research. Vicki Robin also speaks on Detroit Public TV.

An index of the books I have reviewed are on my website at Books. I have three blogs. The first talks only about specific stocks and is called Investment Talk . The second one contains information on mostly investing and is called Investing Economics Mostly. My last blog is for my book reviews and it is called Non-Fiction Mostly. Follow me on Twitter.