Back in the late 80’s, I bought an audio tape course called Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence.
It was a course taught by Joe Dominguez about our relationship with money and things…and about how to change the relationship and change our lives.
Later, the tape course became the book Your Money or Your Life, co-authored with Vicki Robin.
This book was really kind of a precursor to all the books about simplicity that came out in the mid 90’s.
I think that what made this book a little different is that simplicity wasn’t the only goal…it was the end result of the process of getting “right” with your concept of money.
It was the first book that I read that made the connection that the money we make can be looked at as being something we trade for our “life energy”….and the things we choose to purchase are also things traded for our life energy.
It was a pretty powerful realization.
I make some goofy purchases. It’s a hard habit to break…it’s hard to get off the gerbil wheel and slow down long enough to consider anything, much less what I’m spending my money on.
This book was an early start towards getting more conscious of my spending habits.
Joe Dominguez’s idea was that after a period of hard work and saving, that we could have enough money to invest so that we could live off the income and use our life energy to do something that mattered to us.
It wasn’t a get rich quick (or slow) scheme…it was a way to free ourselves from the “norm” so that we could live very frugally and do what we loved and hopefully help some people with our lives.
I think at the time, he was suggesting that we put our money into something that paid 8% interest…like a Treasury Bill…and live off the money that the 100,000 dollar savings we’d accrued would produce.
I’m not sure how the plan plays out now…I don’t know what pays that kind of interest that they would consider safe.
Here’s a YouTube video of Vicki Robin from 2010 that talks about Joe Dominguez and the book….
This is the only picture of Joe Dominguez that I could find.
Read the short biography here:
http://www.financialintegrity.org/index.php?title=About_the_New_Road_Map_Foundation
This audio course and the book were a big deal to me…and the movement that Joe started …and that Vicki and the guys at the New Road Map Foundation continue is still very vital and necessary.
Also…here’s a link to Vicki Robin’s current blog about eating locally and how our choices impact the planet….