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Your Money Or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence

Your Money Or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez & Monique Tilford

The Nine Circles Puzzle

The nine-circle puzzle is a fine exercise in thinking outside your ordinary mental boxes and in discarding assumptions. Most people who can’t immediately solve it have assumed that they’re not allowed to go outside the imaginary box defined by the nine circles. There is nothing in the rules that says you can’t extend your lines out to the edges of the paper—or even beyond. Another common assumption is that those round things are dots instead of good- sized circles, which have a top, center and bottom.

Now look. As you can see, you can’t solve the puzzle by staying inside your customary frame of reference. This book is about learning how to think in new ways, how to look beyond what you “know” to be true and discover your new road map for money.

Financially Independent Thinking One of the keys to creating your new road map is what we call “FI (financially independent) thinking.” This is the process of examining those basic assumptions that you have unconsciously adopted, of evaluating your old road map. FI thinking is noticing that you no longer need to cut off the ends of the ham, that limited frames keep us from seeing solutions and that “More Is Better” is no longer the name of the road to happiness.

FI thinking is about cartography—making your own map, one that accurately depicts the terrain of your life as it actually is today. This map will allow you to choose your own path through the territory of your earning and spending—and to integrate that path with the rest of your life. FI thinking is essential for anyone who wants a clear, relaxed relationship with money. Until you can think independently, you can’t be independent. Until you can deliberately and dispassionately question your own inner road map for money, you will be stuck in classic financial dead ends, such as:

• Spending more than you earn.
• Not liking your job, but not having a way out. Needing two paychecks to make ends meet.
• Just when you get ends to meet, seeing someone (your boss, the government) move the other end.
• Being so confused by money that you leave it to the experts, who in turn feed on your ignorance.

The Results of FI Thinking FI thinking is about applying consciousness to the flow of money in your life. Just reading this book will initiate FI thinking in your life, but there is more. Actually doing the simple steps outlined here will transform your relationship with money. You will go from FI thinking to FI living. FI thinking will lead naturally to Financial Intelligence, Financial Integrity
and Financial Independence. Financial Intelligence Financial Intelligence is being able to step back from your assumptions and your emotions about money and observe them objectively. Does money really buy happiness? Does everyone really “gotta make a living”?

Is money really something to fear or covet, to love or hate? If I sell the majority of my time for money, will I really be secure? In order to gain Financial Intelligence you first need to know how much money you already have earned, what you have to show for it, how much is coming into your life and how much is going out.

But that isn’t enough. You also need to know what money really is and what you are trading for the money in your life. One tangible outcome of Financial Intelligence is getting out of debt and having at least six months of basic living expenses in the bank. If you follow the program presented in this book, it will lead inexorably to Financial Intelligence.