More with less: More life energy with less money

Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin make a wonderful breakthrough in thinking about money and life satisfaction in their bestseller, Your Money or Your Life . ^[2] Their key insight is that money is something we trade our life energy for.

In earning money, we sell our time, which is really our life energy. The effort to make a living consumes our life.

We underestimate how much life energy is being consumed by our work. We overestimate what we are getting in return. Thats a bad bargain, as Dominguez and Robin point out:

Are you working for less than youre worth and bringing home less money than you need? Or are you earning far more than you need for fulfillment? What is the purpose of that extra money? If it serves no purpose, would you want to work less and have more time to do what matters to you? If it does serve a purpose, is it so clear and so connected with your values that it brings joy to your hours at work? If not, what needs to change?

When you break the link between work and money, you give yourself the opportunity to discover what your true work is it may turn out to be totally unrelated to what you are currently doing for money.

The 80/20 Way offers more life energy for less effort :

• Through saving and accumulating money, we avoid trading our life energy for money. With enough investment income, we can stop depleting our life energy through unfulfilling work. We choose our work and our hours. By doing what is important to us and what we enjoy, we multiply our life energy.

• We might decide to use savings to subsidize our ideal life-and work-style. Maybe work six months a year, then travel round the world or undertake a project with our family. Or work three days a week, routinely enjoying long weekends. We might take a pay cut and work where we want, or become our own boss.

Instead of money ruling our lives, making work stressful or miserable, we can use money to regain control of life. We can deploy energy where were most carefree, creative, and content.

Use time and money intelligently . Make less go further. The quality and value of time soar once we control them.

Success can be self-defeating. We sacrifice our independence and time to make money, believing that more money will make us happier . It doesnt. All we do is squander our life energy at ever-higher levels of affluence.

The 80/20 Way breaks the logjam. However much or little we earn, we save, invest, and multiply money. We are less concerned about our careers than with enjoying our work. When we have built up substantial savings, they feed our independence. We spend our life on the things we care most about.

^[2] Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (1992) Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence, New York: Viking Penguin. A brilliant free 25-page summary of the book by Clare Moss and Laurence Toltz is available at www.simpleliving.net/ymoyl/fom-about-summary.asp or see the web- site www.simpleliving.net.