Your Money or Your Life – You get what you deserve?

Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman

^^^ I LOVE LOVE LOVE THAT QUOTE! ^^^ It’s on page 109 of the book. Oh, how I wish I’d thought of this when I was 20! Not that it would have mattered much then. More on that later.

Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin is a classic dating back nearly thirty years. To be clear, I hadn’t read it but probably should have. Yikes, more on that in a bit, too.

A friend recommended it about a month ago and I always act on recommendations, so I went straight to my local bookseller’s website and ordered it. When it arrived, I stopped everything else I was reading to take it in.

You see, I have a problem with money.

(This link goes to everywhere on this blog where I’ve mentioned money.)

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve worked all my life – starting at 15 1/2 with a work permit. I believe in hard work = a good paycheck = a life well lived! In that way, you could call me a capitalist!

I also believe in doing something of worth… what I call “Heart Jobs”. I’ve had two of them and self-sabotaged myself right out of both. Dare I say, “More on that…?”

Ugh.

I like and respect money.

I want the trips to see my family, and the safety and comfort that only money can buy.

I’ve tried everything to make more… from hard work to the lottery. I’ve been as ruthless as possible in my sales jobs (think: The Wolf of Wall Street) to forays into The Secret, believing I could manifest it into existence.

Cuz, see… I also need money to live.

And it’s been a thorn in my side from day-one. Just take a look at the link I shared above, where all my mentions of money are…

I’ll be damned if I haven’t tried to figure this shit out ad nauseam. <<< You know I’m getting upset because I said flat-out curse words.

Yep.

Thorn. In. My. Side.

So, I expected big things from this book because it’s a classic… and a recommendation… and it said it would help transform MY RELATIONSHIP with money.

I was disappointed.

Please don’t misunderstand. THE BOOK IS EXCELLENT! Seriously, wonderfully excellent!

But for my unique situation with regard to relationship, it didn’t deliver FOR ME what was promised. It has not and will not transform my relationship with money. In fact, it’s a bit of a rehash of everything I’ve ever read on the subject.

You see, I *truly have* read pretty-much everything written on finances. Though, there weren’t a lot of books about how to get money out of accounts your spouse hid from you or how to work while being called by the school every second day to pick up your special needs kid. But, still…

Oh, there was plenty on investments and paying yourself first with a savings account. Savings account? Those were for people who planned their lives… not those who popped out three kids in four years and bounced checks at the grocery store to feed them. Silly rabbit.

To say I never had enough is a giant understatement. This was not about mismanagement. It was about deprivation.

And, I believed, I caused it myself… either before I came to earth or at some point in my early development.

AT SOME POINT, I BELIEVED I DESERVED NOTHING, WHICH IS WHAT I GOT, monetarily-speaking.

So, when I saw this book… I was hoping to … FINALLY … have an answer to this question:

What am I doing to cause a life of money deprivation?

No can do.

What it does very well is literally EVERYTHING else, as evidenced by these 9 steps which are the crux of the entire program:

Making peace with the past
Being in the present – tracking your life energy
Where is it all going? – the monthly tabulation
Three questions that will transform your life – about fulfilment, life energy, and worth
Making life energy visible
Valuing your life energy – minimizing spending
Valuing your life energy – maximizing income
Capital and the crossover point
Investing

I won’t be adding my thoughts on each of these steps because they’re all over this blog (in the link I shared, for sure!). I will say though, that Step 1 was SUPER INTERESTING in that it asks you to to list every job you’ve EVER had and the money you made and then add up all the money you’ve made over your entire lifetime. Many people (dare I say most?) said they’d made at least a million… Me? I’m around half a mil. <<< And THERE, you might rightly surmise, is why I had a problem surviving. I have worked approximately 42 years. Divide $500,000 by 42 and you get an average of approximately $12,000 a year. *ahem* It was NEVER about extravagant spending… it was (as I said above) about not having enough. But I digress.

This book really WILL teach you more than you’ve ever known about money. But what it didn’t do for me was tell me WHY I’ve struggled to make enough to live. But then, this isn’t a book about depression and anxiety, ADHD, financial abuses in marriage, or depleted self-worth.

*sigh*

There are tons and tons and tons of exercises, personal stories, charts, summaries, questions and online supports (A few shown below. Seriously, if you plug Your Money or Your LIfe into Google, you’ll get more than 4 million hits!).