Just this morning, I was leafing through my favorite personal finance book of all, Your Money or Your Life, when I came across the idea of the “purge and splurge” cycle. From page 148, discussing what happens after you start buckling down and paying serious attention to your financial state:

In the first month of recording your figures you might confront one of our national foibles. Your income entry might well be lower than your expense entry. You may have spent more than you earned. (It is, after all, the American way.) Seeing this reality might come as a bit of a shock. Chances are you’ll want things to change - and change now. Accustomed to budgets, diets, and New Year’s resolutions, you swear on a stack of bank statements and credit cards that next month will be better.

This is when people often go on a “wallet fast” with the kind of zeal characteristic of first-time dieters. They scrimp. They save. They deprive themselves and their families, putting everyone on beans, rice, and oatmeal rations. They concentrate daily on that expenses line, determined to cut it in half in one short month. Amazingly enough, many do. Entering the expense figure the second month, they proudly note a steep decline.

This kind of austerity, however, isn’t sustainable. By the third month expenses often rebound with a vengeance, making up for the second month deprivation.

Now what?

I’ve been there. Have I ever been there. In the years before my financial meltdown, I went through this “purge and splurge” cycle several times. I’d have one month where I really cut back and saved a lot of money, then I’d “reward” myself in the next month by massively overspending on unnecessary stuff. When the bills came in, I’d panic again and go into belt-tightening mode, just to toss it all out the door once again.

There were several big things that I was doing wrong, though - things that I didn’t see at the time because I didn’t really understand how personal finance worked. If you’re having trouble escaping this cycle, just as I once did, here are some techniques to try.

Use a longer period for evaluation. Don’t just look at your spending over one month - that doesn’t really matter. Instead, look at your spending over a long period, like six months, and compare that to your income over that period. The short term really doesn’t matter that much - the difference is made over the long term.

Focus on not just avoiding spending, but changing the underlying behaviors that lead to spending. During those belt-tightening periods, I’d still go to bookstores and electronics stores, but I’d walk out the door proud of myself for not spending. The problem was that I was still in the mindset of a consumer - I would still go into the stores, tempt myself, and just use sheer willpower to pull myself away.

There’s only so much pure willpower can do. Use that willpower instead to change the habits that tempt you. Don’t use willpower when you’re in the store drooling over a new goodie - use willpower to decide to take another route home from work every night so you’re not tempted to stop in.

Make changes that are hard to undo during the belt-tightening phase. That’s the perfect time to cancel your credit cards or freeze them up in a big block of ice. Call up your service providers (your cell phone company, your cable company, etc.) and cancel some of the services. Look at your monthly bills and see what else you can trim that will take action to undo. Doing these things will ensure that some of the savings will remain with you, even if your resolve weakens a little.

Set tangible goals on a very regular basis - and keep setting them. Don’t just promise to trim the fat. Set a clear numerical goal to reach and, when you reach it, set another goal for the next month. If a month is hard for you, set week-long goals: I won’t eat fast food this week, for example. Make the goals very concrete and clear so that the things you need to do for success are obvious, then just keep setting them over and over again. Eventually, the techniques will become natural to you.

If you make a mistake, don’t follow it with another one. So you splurged. That doesn’t mean it needs to be followed by more splurging. Recognize that you slipped and then go back to your goals. The point is to keep generally heading in a good direction - everyone slips up on occasion. The winners, though, are the ones who don’t use “I splurged already, so it doesn’t matter” as an excuse to splurge even more.

Investigate new, inexpensive things that you like to do. One big problem that people have when following a newly frugal lifestyle is that they get bored. They wonder if pinching pennies is all there is to life, and they get tempted to spend. My advice is to do some research and load yourself up with as many free and inexpensive activities as you can find. Look up your community calendar and plan for events for the next two months. Check out a series of books from the library. Keep trying things that don’t cost much until you find things that bring you a lot of enjoyment, then start using those things as your regular recreation.

Just a few pages later in Your Money or Your Life, Dominguez and Robin nail the most fundamental key of all:

There are two keys to making this process work for you:

1. Start.
2. Keep going.

That’s really it - success in a nutshell.

Each Friday, The Simple Dollar reviews a personal finance book.

I’ve been looking forward to reading this book for a while. Getting a Life is a pseudo-sequel to Your Money or Your Life, which I absolutely loved and have referred to countless times on The Simple Dollar. Although it’s written by different people, it’s endorsed by the authors of Your Money or Your Life and they wrote the introduction to this book.

So what’s different about Getting a Life? Rather than setting forward a conceptual plan, as Your Money or Your Life does, this book focuses on how people have applied the plan in their lives. Most of the people discussed - including the two authors, Jacqueline Blix and David Heitmiller - are people who defined the 1980s definition of “yuppie” in that they fit perfectly the luxury consumer-oriented upper middle class of today.

Does this book provide any revelations? It did, but not necessarily in the direct way that I expected. Let’s go through the book and see…

Digging Into Getting a Life

The book opens with an introduction by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, the authors of Your Money or Your Life, that offers an interesting argument for why thriftiness became “uncool” during the last half of the twentieth century, and most of it boils down to time famine and affluenza - in other words, a desperate sense of not having enough time and the desire to buy stuff to fill that hole. I basically agree with this argument, as I was basically a consumer spending addict not all that long ago and I still definitely feel that my life suffers from a time famine as I sit here at 4:30 AM writing this review.

1 - The Way We Were
The book opens with David and Jacque telling their stories of a life of overspending, coming from two completely different perspectives. Jacque started off in an upper middle class home with a father that held a white collar job, enjoying all of the trappings of that life and coming to expect such material lavishness. David, on the other hand, started off rather poor in a small town and held strong “back to earth” environmental principles, but eventually abandoned them after the death of his first wife. Reading the stories, I identified a lot with David, as much of the story sounded like the first few years of my professional life.

2 - Psychology of the Good Life
Of course, that lifestyle has some psychological downsides, and this chapter addresses those. Both Jacque and David found themselves with various negative feelings in relation to their lifestyle, from Jacque’s therapy to David’s continual need to keep finding bigger and better thrills. Over time, these aspects added up to a general malaise in their life, an overall sense that all of the material goals that they were chasing weren’t really filling any hole in their life.

3 - Seeds of Change
For both of them, the seeds of change were planted by watching friends and relatives pass away at a young age, requiring them to come face to face with their mortality. They also both realized that in order to maintain their lifestyle, they would both have to work until near the very end of their expected lives, leaving them no retirement to enjoy together. More specifically, Jacque began to really investigate aspects of consumer culture as part of her new job in academia and the conclusions of those investigations left her rather unnerved. This eventually led them both to discover, first, The Tightwad Gazette, and then Your Money or Your Life. This chapter, like the others, tells many stories beyond just that of Jacque and David, but they all had a common thread - somewhere in all of their lives, something had happened that had planted a seed of change, something I’ve really been digging into as of late.

4 - Before You Take the First Step
This chapter is basically a reader’s guide for how to approach Your Money or Your Life based on how a lot of others have read it before. The suggestions mostly revolve around reading it and trying things out that make sense to you first and not just blindly following the order given in the book, and also doing it together if you’re in a couple-based situation. I agree strongly with the latter and have been hinting at my wife to read the book with me sometime soon, although she’s already on board with most of the ideas presented.

5 - Stepping Through the Steps
This portion of the book is eighty eight pages in length, easily the longest chapter in the book. The length is largely due to the fact that it cut-and-pastes most of the highlights of Your Money or Your Life right into this chapter. In fact, if you wanted to just read that book in a nutshell, the highlighted sections of this chapter would do that for you. This chapter deals mostly with how different people have worked through the nine steps presented in Your Money or Your Life, offering tons of examples of what things look like for real people. If you are interested in the plan but really wish you could find others interested in following it, too, this chapter might really be a help.

6 - Your Money or Your Child’s Life
I found this to be the most enjoyable chapter in the book, mostly because I’m quite drawn lately to issues of personal finance dealing with children, as I have two of them at home with the oldest just starting to become aware of money and of the pervasiveness of consumer culture. The conclusion here is pretty clear, and had crossed my mind before: the principles of Your Money or Your Life are quite applicable to parenting. In fact, many of the changes I’ve made in my own life (and in the lives of the people in the chapter) were triggered by children - it is incredible to consider the sheer impact that a child can have on every aspect of your life.

7 - Who Am I Now?
Getting a Life really taps into an interesting underlying issue here, looking at how individuals define themselves. For many people in the United States, our job is the definition of who we are - and that is often a complete misrepresentation of who we actually are. Shouldn’t we define ourselves by our passion and where we’re moving with our long term goals? Lately, in non-professional conversations, I’ve come to refer to myself as a freelance writer, nodding to both this site, to MSN, and to a few other places. I’m not quite there yet to make it my livelihood, but it’s what I’m passionate about. Even though it’s not my primary employment (and that’s why I find myself writing at 4:30 AM), it is an employment and it is something I’m incredibly passionate about.

8 - Your Money and Your Health
This is perhaps the biggest leap in the book. Here, the argument is that getting your financial and personal life in order is incredibly valuable for your health, as it vastly reduces your stress and often improves the quality of the food you eat and the exercise that you get. While I agree with this in principle, I don’t think that living a simpler life is a direct route to better health. Better health is a series of choices that a person makes, often quite independent of other factors such as voluntary simplicity. I would agree that choosing a simpler life is one of those health-affirming choices, but I think it’s a bit overstated here.

9 - Simplifying Life
This is perhaps the most practical portion of the book, offering a huge number of very specific suggestions on how to live a simpler life. Some of these overlap with the suggestions from Your Money or Your Life, but many do not. What I found particularly interesting is that not all of the advice is strictly cheaper in terms of raw dollars and cents, but they all do lead towards a simpler existence. A few of the suggestions hint at other concerns as well, such as pointing towards organic products and hints of fair trade products and a blanket avoidance of “convenience foods.”

10 - The Way We Are
As the book begins to wind down, this tenth chapter gives an excellent picture of the impact of frugality on the financial lives of couples, even giving a balance sheet for their monthly and annual expenses. What these people have discovered - and show as clearly as can be shown in a book - is that frugality opens the door to countless opportunties in life. If you’re able to not spend much, then you’re not required to chase a high-salary job that stresses you out. Instead, you can chase other goals, ones that are more in line with your passions and talents.

11 - Getting and Having a Life
The book closes with a point that many people overlook when evaluating such major changes in life. Even though this plan offers a lot of benefits, it’s often still not very easy, and that’s because we’re human. We make mistakes, we tend to overanalyze at times and underanalyze at others, and we often trick ourselves into thinking we’re doing the right thing when we’re not. The key is to let it go - just try to live your life in the best way you understand, don’t worry about the small mistakes unless they become endemic, and practice making good decisions until they become natural to you.

Buy or Don’t Buy?

If you thought the pieces of Your Money or Your Life that talked about elements of the plan in the lives of others were incredibly powerful, Getting a Life is a must-read. While it wasn’t the amazing experience that the original book was, I found Getting a Life to be quite enjoyable on its own. Perhaps it’s because I enjoy reading about how others apply ideas in their own lives - and I enjoy writing about it too - but parts of this book really hit home for me.

On the other hand, if the real-life examples in Your Money or Your Life weren’t very powerful to you, you can skip Getting a Life. This book really does consist almost exclusively of discussions of how real people implemented Dominguez and Robin’s book, and if that sounds unappealing to you, this book is going to be a waste of time.

If you’ve never read either book, unquestionably read Your Money or Your Life first. While I found some pieces of this book to be quite powerful, it’s really only powerful in the sense that I was able to see how others had used Your Money or Your Life in their own lives. For that alone, I’m glad I read it, but the power wouldn’t have been there without reading the original first, thinking about it, and attempting to act on it.

This is the thirtieth and final part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

Your Money or Your Life has done more than any other book I’ve ever read in terms of changing how I view money. It truly brought to life the connection between the choices I make every day and the greater decisions I make about my life, and it opened my eyes to the value of frugality and day-to-day personal responsibility about my financial bottom line and that of my family. I really can’t pay it any higher compliment than that.

To me, the one single factor that makes a book essential is that it significantly affects your thinking and/or your actions. In other words, a book becomes essential solely due to the effect that it has on readers. Regardless of the quibbling disagreements I had with Your Money or Your Life over specific details, it has arguably had more impact on my life than any book I’ve ever read.

When I first read it, I was already realizing that I needed to get my financial life in order, but I didn’t see the real connection between money and daily life. I was stuck deeply in a mindset of I work, I get paid, I work some more, I get paid some more. This book revealed to me that such a routine doesn’t really have to be the plan and, in fact, isn’t entirely healthy. Now, I view life as work to do stuff I like and minimize the expense of it all so I can have more time to do stuff I like. Money is nothing more than the tool you use to maximize the time doing stuff you like.

That doesn’t mean I wholeheartedly subscribe to everything in this book. I feel, as many readers do, that in many places the political views of the authors come into place quite strongly, with a lot of environmentalism and a bit of New Age touchy-feely type material. The book also could use a much stronger section on investing advice, as that advice really only applies to people who are on the verge of having enough money in the bank to live off of the interest in a extremely secure investment - not advice on how to get there.

But that’s not the point.

The point of the book is to encourage people to rethink their life choices from the ground up in a very tangible fashion, something that very few books manage to pull off. In fact, the connection between the abstract (living an alternative lifestyle) and the concrete (figuring out exactly what that costs) is the core of the genius behind this book, and it’s why it is the only personal finance book I’ll universally recommend to any reader.

If you’d like to review all of the readings in the book club reading of Your Money or Your Life, here’s a list of each reading and a link to all twenty-nine discussions. This is a great page to bookmark if you’re thinking you may read through the book at some point in the future.

Prologue (pages xxiii to xxxviii)
The Money Trap (pages 1 to 9)
Prosperity and the Planet (pages 9 to 21)
The Beginning of a New Road Map for Money (pages 21 to 29)
Step 1 - Making Peace with the Past (pages 29 to 39)
Money Ain’t What It Used To Be (And Never Was) (pages 40 to 59)
Step 2 - Being in the Present and Tackling Your Life Energy (pages 59 to 75)
Where Is It All Going? (pages 76 to 87)
Totaling It All Up (pages 87 to 108)
How Much Is Enough? The Nature of Fulfillment (pages 109 to 112)
Three Questions That Will Transform Your Life (pages 113 to 128)
Assessing the Three Questions (pages 128 to 145)
Seeing Progress (pages 146 to 157)
Getting Your Finances Out in the Open (pages 157 to 165)
The American Dream - on a Shoestring (pages 166 to 171)
Ten Sure Ways to Save Money (pages 171 to 181)
101 Sure Ways to Save Money (Part One) (pages 181 to 197)
101 Sure Ways to Save Money (Part Two) (pages 197 to 212)
Additional Thoughts on Cutting Spending (pages 213 to 218)
For Love or Money (pages 219 to 231)
The Stunning Implications of Redefining Work (pages 232 to 246)
Valuing Your Life Energy - Maximizing Income (pages 247 to 258)
The Crossover Point (pages 259 to 268)
The Power of Working for a Finite Period of Time (pages 268 to 279)
The Freedom to Choose What You Do and Do What You Choose (pages 279 to 291)
Now That You’ve Got It, What Are You Going To Do With It? (pages 292 to 305)
Three Pillars of Financial Independence (pages 305 to 318)
Cushions Make For Softer Landings (pages 318 to 327)
Additional Resources (pages 337 to 343)

This is the twenty-ninth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

The book closes with an excellent list of resources for materials related to the themes of Your Money or Your Life. I investigated several of these and found a few well worth noting if you found the concepts in this book worthwhile.

Several of the online resources mentioned in this section wound up eventually pointing to yourmoneyoryourlife.org, where you can download a whole pile of resources if you explore the site a bit. Some of the resources require a small payment, while others were free. The biggest drawback is that the site appears to have been designed circa 1995, meaning it looks low-tech and the navigation is pretty confusing.

The best part of the Resources section was an extensive recommended reading list, of which I’ve already read and reviewed two: The Overspent American by Juliet Schor, What Color is Your Parachute? by Richard Nelson Bolles, and The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Daczyzyn. I quite liked all three of these books, especially the latter two, and I’m going to use this as something of a “recommended reading list” for future book reviews here on the site.

I’ve also been trying really hard to find a copy of Getting a Life, the less-heralded follow-up to Your Money or Your Life. It’s supposed to be an application of the material in Your Money or Your Life, where a rather materialistic couple actually applies the material to their own life. In other words, it’s an anecdotal complement to Your Money or Your Life, and I hope to review it soon.

The collection of additional online resources is also rather sparse and outdated. Several of the sites appear to be defunct and only one really appealed to me and provided thought-provoking information. Frugal Corner (http://www.frugalcorner.com/) was a rather interesting list of frugal resources, and I wound up following a large number of the links on that site to other resources, even though perhaps a third of the links are dead (again, it’s an old resource). Still, you’re far better off reading online personal finance blogs and frugality blogs than following these links.

In all, the resource list was somewhat outdated, but it’s useful to look at as merely a recommended reading list. I found several items I plan to read in the future from this section.

Tomorrow, I’ll give some of my closing thoughts on the book.

This is the twenty-eighth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

Finally - the last section of the book itself. Although this “book club” isn’t quite finished, this is the last piece of actual text from the book, as today’s reading finishes up the ninth and final chapter, leaving only an epilogue (which just recites the content of the book), resources, and notes.

Your Money or Your Life finishes up with several small pieces, the first one being a brief discussion strongly in favor of a cushion (one of the three pillars from yesterday). A cushion, if you’ll recall, is an emergency fund - an amount of very liquid cash that you have on hand in the event of a major crisis.

Cache, on the other hand, is much more interesting. When you reach the crossover point and quit your “real” job, Your Money or Your Life argues that your personal expenses will drop to at least some degree, leaving you with a continuing surplus even after detaching from your job. This is cache, which is effectively money you can channel into your later activities. For example, let’s say you quit your job so you can start making wooden rocking horses in your wood shop, selling some to rich families and donating others to all kinds of charities. The business would likely pay for itself and a little more, but the cache would allow you to keep making horses even during December, when you might give away every rocking horse you make.

Alternately, you might just spend the money entirely on charitable giving, or use some of it to pay for equipment for whatever you do. The point is that cache will exist in your post-financial independence life and it’s money you can use to really make a difference in the lives of others. After all, you are truly financially independent, right?

Your Money or Your Life closes with a brief discussion about a potential future where everyone jumped on this train, and looks at the societal changes it would bring. Interestingly, it looks like a capitalist boom - unemployment drops, productivity rises, urban sprawl and urban decay lessen, volunteerism and social activism grow, and consumerism decreases. Sounds like a pretty good world to me; I think that if everyone jumped on board the full philosophy of Your Money or Your Life, it might be bad, but an increase in people doing things this way might be good.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at the “Resources” appendix to see if there’s anything else of interest out there related to this book. This section appears on pages 337 through 343 in my paperback version of the book.

This is the twenty-seventh part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

According to Your Money and Your Life, the three pillars of financial independence are capital (the amount you have invested), cushion (a cash reserve/emergency fund), and cache (your saving habits and frugality). This section focuses on the capital and is perhaps the most controversial part of the entire book.

Dominguez and Robin offer nine basic criteria for investing, and these are quite interesting:

1. Your capital must produce income.
2. Your capital must be absolutely safe.
3. Your capital must be in a totally liquid investment.
4. Your capital must not be diminished at the time of investment by commissions, loads, and fees.
5. Your income must be absolutely safe.
6. Your income must not fluctuate.
7. Your income must be payable to you, in cash, at regular intervals.
8. Your income must not be diminished by charges, management fees, redemption fees, etc.
9. The investment must produce this regular, fixed, known income without any further involvement or expense on your part.

If you read through those pieces, it’s pretty clear that Your Money and Your Life does not recommend most of the common investment tools of the modern era. By these critera, stocks don’t fit the bill in any way, shape, or form.

Obviously, this isn’t going to cut the mustard if you need 10% growth to reach your goals. There is no investment opportunity that returns that 10% with that level of reliability - it just doesn’t exist. Because so many investors shoot for high returns, they ridicule this advice because it doesn’t add up to the numbers they need.

This advice, actually, leads directly to investing in U.S. treasury notes. Those completely fit the bill for this description and return 3%-6%. Another option is a very high yield savings account, again one that returns a consistent percentage. These options are very close to rock solid and pay out very regularly and consistently, much like a paycheck. The good part of such investments is that the returns are going to be the same (3%-6%) whatever the stock market is doing. The bad part is that it’s impossible to get double digit returns in a single year with such investments - you can’t do it.

That’s why this is good investment advice if you plan on living strictly off of your investments, but not so good if you’re trying to grow your investments for wealth. That’s why retirement portfolios are very heavy in stocks when you’re young, but gradually shift to bonds when you move towards retirement, eventually being dominated by bonds. They’re stable and safe and return a steady amount - but they don’t grow like gangbusters, ever.

I don’t believe this is intended for investment advice for people looking to grow their wealth - instead, it’s for people who want to live off of the income of the money they’ve saved up and don’t have a lot of interest in growing it further, but they want long-term stability. For that, I think this advice makes sense.

Tomorrow, we’ll finish up the ninth chapter, “Now That You’ve Got It, What Are You Going To Do With It?” starting with the header “Cushions Make For Smoother Landings.” This section appears on pages 318 through 327 in my paperback version of the book.

This is the twenty-sixth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

A lot of people find this final chapter of Your Money or Your Life to be somewhat controversial because of the rather unorthodox investment advice contained within. However, regardless of your financial stance, most of the advice here does make a lot of sense, even if it is extremely conservative advice.

First of all, the book makes the astute point that you should be your own investment advisor, something I strongly agree with. Most financial advisors and brokers are seeking mostly to make a profit on doing things that you can quite easily do yourself, especially in the era of the internet where most investment houses allow you to directly invest in their products with next to no fees.

A much more interesting part comes when the book argues that inflation doesn’t necessarily affect the life of the individual all that much. This argument has raised a lot of controversy over the years, and it’s not hard to see why when our grocery bills appear to be constantly escalating.

Given that, I do think there’s merit to their argument. Take an honest look at the stuff you buy today - it’s not the same stuff that you were buying fifteen years ago. In theory, you’re buying “better” stuff - or at least stuff that’s marketed to seem better than the stuff of fifteen years ago. For that “better” factor, you’re paying more.

Take a walk down the produce aisle. For the most part, the prices aren’t all that much different than they were twenty years ago. They’re somewhat higher, sure, but the interesting part is that some items are far higher while others are at the same price or lower than they were twenty years ago. Why? Production has changed. Potatoes, for example, are often cheaper now than they were thirty years ago (per pound). Until rather recently, corn was very cheap compared to historical prices.

Dominguez argues that a rational buyer will continually look for bargains and switch purchases in response to such price shifts, but most people don’t do that. They buy the same things on a regular basis, and occasionally dabble in whatever the “new” version of the product happens to be at the moment. Even more importantly, they focus on convenience foods, which are priced without any real relationship to the underlying ingredients. The end result? Their grocery bill does go up over time.

Is this irrational buying? I think it depends on how you look at it. Convenience foods have appeal because they’re easy to prepare, and so people often buy them looking for a quick and tasty meal. What they’re really paying extra for is time, and it’s the value of time that has really changed over the years - it’s become more valuable.

As for me, I like cooking from scratch and I know how cheap it can be. Regardless of the relationship to inflation, buying staples is far cheaper than buying prepared foods, and buying simpler versions of items is always cheaper than the “new and improved” version.

Tomorrow, we’ll continue the ninth chapter, “Now That You’ve Got It, What Are You Going To Do With It?” starting with the header “Three Pillars of Financial Independence” and continuing on to the header “Cushions Make For Smoother Landings.” This section appears on pages 305 through 318 in my paperback version of the book.

This is the twenty-fifth part of The Simple Dollar Book Club reading of Your Money or Your Life. Want to know more?

When I read this section of Your Money or Your Life, I began to think of two of my high school teachers - incidentally, the two best teachers I ever had.

They both loved their jobs, without a doubt, and they both cared passionately about their students, but there was one huge difference between the two: one of them was financially tied to the job and the other was not.

The one who was financially tied to the job did a great job teaching his subject, which happened to be English. However, he was often frustrated by the confines that the school district put on him. He was very limited on the material he could have us read, and he was also limited as to how far he could take discussions. For example, he would often directly recommend books to me, but then say that he couldn’t possibly present them as course material. Why not? He lived in fear of a reprimanding from the school board. Even though he knew of ways to get us more excited and interested in reading, he didn’t quite go as far as he could have because of fears of the school board.

Another teacher I had taught a variety of subjects, often seemingly taking on areas that other teachers wouldn’t touch. Instead of lecturing on subjects, though, she usually sat in the back of the room with us, having us all turn our desks into a discussion circle, and she’d really, really push buttons. We would discuss a topic and she would very clearly play devil’s advocate and argue hard on behalf of her perspective. People would get upset, yell, pound their fists, and even be reduced to tears. Sometimes, she would even encourage some of the students to take on contrarian views and get us arguing so intensely on subjects that we’d keep going at it outside of class and on through the next day before class as well. The end result? We learned a lot more about the subject than we ever would have otherwise. Yet, unsurprisingly, this teacher didn’t last very long at the school and quietly slipped away after just a couple of years at the (rumored) encouragement of the administration.

While both of these teachers had impact on my life, which one do you think really changed the way of thinking of more students? My English teacher mostly influenced me because he took me under his wing to a degree, but in the classroom I believe that many of the students were quite bored. However, I still actually debate my wife about some of the things we talked about when we were in the other class together.

What does this have to do with Your Money or Your Life? It’s all about that magical crossover point. The teacher who had the courage to do things her way had a deep passion for teaching, but it was the freedom of not having her finances tied to the job that made it possible for her. Her financial freedom brought her different kinds of freedom.

To me, this is a deeply profound connection, and it illustrates once again the central point here: money is nothing more than a representation of the choices we make and the values we hold most dear. The more I experience, the more I genuinely believe that getting out of debt is, at its root, just a shift in values - everything else follows from there.

Tomorrow, we’ll start the ninth chapter, “Now That You’ve Got It, What Are You Going To Do With It?” continuing until the subheading “Three Pillars of Financial Independence.” This section appears on pages 292 through 305 in my paperback version of the book.