Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Fully Revised and Updated for 2018

Financial Independence has nothing to do with rich. It is the experience of having enough—and then some.

Money is something you trade your life energy for. You sell your time for money. It doesn’t matter that Ned over there sells his time for a hundred dollars and you sell yours for twenty dollars an hour. Ned’s money is irrelevant to you. The only real asset you have is your time. The hours of your life.

Endless desire is one of the pitfalls of human nature, and one of the first things you need to cure if you want to get ahead more quickly.

The bottom line is that we think we work to pay the bills—but we spend more than we make on more than we need, which sends us back to work to get the money to spend to get more stuff—that sends us back to work again!

People in industrialized nations used to be called “citizens.” Now we are “consumers”—which means (according to the dictionary definition of “consume”) people who “use up,” “waste,” “destroy,” and “squander.”

Enter the concept of “standard of living.” A new art, science, and industry dubbed “marketing” was born to convince Americans that they were working to elevate their standard of living rather than to satisfy basic economic needs.

the three sirens of consumerism—comfort, control, and convenience—are

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a hidden hierarchy based on what you do for money. That’s called jobism, and it pervades our interactions with one another on the job, in social settings, and even at home.

we now meet most of our needs, wants, and desires through money. We buy everything from hope to happiness. We no longer live life. We consume it.