by Trent Hamm
Trent: If someone were to walk away from “Your Money or Your Life” with just one idea in their head, what would you like that idea to be?
Vicki: I would pick Money Is Life Energy. We live in a financial, economic, and money system that to most of us is incomprehensible, out of our control, and unfair — yet vital to our survival. We are stuck in the scramble to get some into our wallets so we can get what we want and need.
We develop ideas about what money means — prestige, power, bad, good, a tool of the devil, evidence of God’s blessings, helpful, harmful. Our daily transactions with the pieces of paper and metal and plastic in our wallets are distorted by these unconscious — so doubly powerful — emotionally-charged ideas. Plus we live inside a collective delusion that more is always better — which drives us to stress, clutter, and debt, never having questioned that assumption or discovered how much is enough for us.
When you understand money as YOUR life energy, the hours of your life you invest to put dollars in your wallet, it becomes something knowable and limited. It is the hours of your life. This transforms spending, because you see everything from a cup of coffee to a new car in terms of “does this merit the hours of my life invested to get it” rather than “I want it, I deserve it, everyone else has one, expense be damned, I’ll put it on my credit card.”
Trent: What is the biggest change in the overall message of the book since it was first printed?
Vicki: Our original emphasis was on providing a way to retire early so you can liberate your life energy for your true purpose. Our original seminar was called “Transform your Relationship with Money and Achieve Financial Independence.” I’ve come to see that there are two parts to this powerful whole systems approach: there’s transformation and there’s independence. People go to half time, take sabbaticals, change professions, move to less expensive areas, engage in barter, and even stick with their jobs but do them more boldly. All of this comes from the transformation. The first definition of “financial independence” we give — liberating your mind from the thrall of the consumer culture — is the crucial step that leads wherever the individual chooses to go.
Trent: One common problem that people have is that their spending tends to closely match their income level — if they earn more, they spend more. This makes reaching the long-term goals of Your Money or Your Life very difficult. Do you have any thoughts on avoiding this trap?
Vicki: Doing the steps in Your Money or Your Life leads naturally to avoiding the trap of ratcheting up spending in tandem with rising income. When you confront the fact that you are spending more than you earn, month in month out, it induces a natural desire to save. One practice that can help is delaying impulse buying. Go ahead and want it — the jar of chocolate syrup, the flat screen TV — and then walk out of the store. If you still want it in a week, consider buying it. Another practice would be to ask, “What else could I spend these dollars on.” Often when we impulse buy just because we can, we fail to realize there is a trade off - that some other way of spending resources is sacrificed.
Trent: Since the book was first printed, society has changed quite a bit with the advent of the internet, of globalization, and so on. How do you think the big changes in society over the last decade or two have affected the message of Your Money or Your Life?
Vicki: The current economic meltdown makes financial independence thinking and practices more important. The distortions in the larger system are becoming daily more apparent. A proven pathway to a more balanced relationship with money, getting out of debt, having savings, and putting values and people first is crucial. I hope people learn to attend to what has true value, to view frugality as freedom, integrity and self-respect. This is a sane way of life and the way humans have lived for millenia...and will again.
Vicki Robin & Monique Tilford will be leading a workshop June 12-14, 2009. Click for details.
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