About three years ago I ran across an interesting book by Joe Dominguez, “ Your Money or Your Life”. Fittingly, I found this book in a used book store. I read through the book fairly quickly and was truly impressed with Joe’s message.

While he titled his book “Your Money or Your Life”, what he was really exploring was our definitions of success and happiness. Taking a look at his own life, and those of the people around him, he began to realize that money didn’t bring true happiness. He began to see how we equate happiness and success with the accumulation of things and how,  in the end, these things didn’t really bring us happiness, either. So, we accumulated more things and so on. All of this accumulation required ever more amounts of money which required that we work more to obtain.

Moreover, because we like to “keep up with the Joneses”, we weren’t content to use the money we already had to accumulate stuff, we would extend ourselves with debt to do it. And that made us work even harder, now not only did we have to work to obtain stuff, we had to work to pay for the stuff we already had.

And we still didn’t feel happy.

So he proposed another way. He proposed a series of steps to help you redefine your life and your relationship with money that would, he believed, transform your life. In fact, he suggests that working for a living as most of us currently do is simply the wrong way to approach things.

Now, at this point, I have to stop and point out that what Joe does is create a situation where you are evaluating your purchases and expenses not in terms of dollars spent, but in terms of time. the late Randy Pausch, of the Last Lecture fame, talked about the value of time, too. In a speech at the University of Virginia in which he talked about time management he made this comment:

So if you want to come into my office and talk about the money, I’ll throw you out, but if you want to come into my office and say: “I’m not sure this is a good place for me to spend two years”, I will talk to you all day and all night because that means we’re talking about the right thing, which is your time, because youcan’t ever get it back.

Time is the commodity we need to be considering and when we measure our success in terms of how we use our time, we find some interesting things

Here are the steps he created. Give them a try, you might be surprised by what you find. I know I was!

  • Make peace with the past Get a real idea of what you’ve earned in the course of your life, and figure out what you have to show for it.
  • Being in the Present. Track where your money is going. How many times have you said “where did all the money go?” Understanding where it went is crucial to any kind of financial management plan. That includes figuring out what your “real” hourly rate is. That is, including time, clothing, travel costs and so forth, what are you really earning for your time. And, is it worth that amount of your time.
  • Keep up with your ongoing expenditures. That’s right, you should know where doggone near every penny you spend went.
  • Ask yourself these three questions:
    • Did I get fulfillment, satisfaction or value in proportion to life energy spent?
    • Is this life energy expenditure in line with my values and life purpose (This, of course, necessitates the identification of life purpose and values.)
    • Would I still make this expenditure if I didn’t have to work for a living?
  • Develop graphs to follow your progress, see where you’re spending your life energy and your relationship with money.
  • Getting the things you really need and want while minimizing your costs.
  • Maximize your “return on investment” for your time.
  • Finding the point at which money is no longer important, because you have all you need.
  • Learn how to get the money you have to work for you, so you don’t have to.

The interesting, and I think appealing, thing about Joe’s techniques is that they are 100% doable, if you’re willing to put forth the effort. More over, who wouldn’t prefer to let their money work for them so they can follow their bliss, rather than continuing down the same old path?

If you want to know more about Joe’s ideas, check out www.yourmoneyoryourlife.org or FinancialIntegrity.org and transform your relationship with money.