Written By: Allison Spurgin

Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez’s updated Your Money or Your Life, is a simple, easy to follow guide to getting into a better place financially, as well as setting oneself up for future successes and contentment down the line.

This approximately 300-page book weaves together anecdotes, reader’s personal stories and the history and laws behind the different changes in the money-work-life balance, with solid simple financial planning methods and advice in a way that keeps the reader engaged and the lessons and teachings flowing. Through the 9 different chapters of this book, the 9 steps to gaining your life back slowly build upon each other, so the reader ends the book with a plan, purpose and hopefully an uplifted outlook on life. Some of the steps are fairly simple or obvious, like tracking your income versus expenses and making your own spending categories, while others focus on personal finance aspects that are unique to the Your Money or Your Life method. These include the somewhat controversial idea that we are not working to make a living, but rather to “make a dying” as well as the idea that one’s actual wage is calculated out to be much lower than the prescribed salary due to the additional expenses, time and stress that having a job costs a person. Many of these steps are intellectual; the reader is encouraged to consider various aspects of their life and find what they really want to do and how they can achieve that in order to not be making a dying, but rather a living and a life they want to live.

The updates to the book help to appeal more to the younger generation, as Vicki Robin came out of retirement specifically to address what she saw as a need among the millennial cohort. These updates come in the form of an introduction from Pete Adeny, the author of the popular Mr. Money Mustache personal finance blog as well as anecdotes from Grant Sabatier of Millennial Money and other young people whose lives may more closely resemble those of the new readers. Much of Robin’s advice on how to live frugally as well as how to wisely invest have undergone massive renovation from the 1992 edition and the updates are clear, concise and speak to the current times.

This book should be considered essential to those clients looking to pull themselves back from the brink of debt as well as those considering retirement and their future. It’s clear simple approach and simply mapped out guidelines will help all those in need of a financial blueprint, guide or compass to point them down the path to Financial Independence. 

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