Your Money or Your Life – Official Website – Vicki Robin

A participant in the current Discover Your Enough Point class wrote this when he signed up:

Back in 1993 after I got out of college I got a job making good money and lived with my folks.  I blew every cent and just had fun!  I wouldn’t call it fast living but I sure didn’t keep anything extra around.

But a few years later when I went to go to grad school (And would get a huge bump in income when I was done) I realized how little I had to show for all my effort.   And I never wanted it to happen again. So in my last few months of grad school I read every book on money I could find.  Some were crazy (Day trading, commodities, etc) others simple common sense.

Thats when I read YMOYL.   (more…)

We do know, thanks to Jim Hansen and many others, that 350 PPM (parts per million) is the most carbon we should  in the recipe for air. We now have 387 and rising. This “too muchness” reflects our collective incapacity to know how much is enough – and once there, stop. We don’t like limits.

Parents know that setting healthy limits makes their children feel safe. Studies show that if a playground has a fence, children will play freely everywhere. No fence and they stay close to the door. 350 is the fence but where are the adults to who’ll commit to it so we can safely and freely play on this planet playground. Hopefully everywhere. Hopefully all of us fans of Your Money or Your Life who have discovered that stopping at enough liberates our lives, that the debt and stress of consumerism was the prison after all. This capacity to recognize and stop at enough is what we’re exploring in the teleclasses.

I remember 20 years ago I was at the first US hearing on sustainability with Alan Atkisson. There he wrote the Dead Planet Blues. Here are the words I can now find (more…)

I’ve opened a “tele-class school” and you’re invited. It’s for people who want to ground the Your Money or Your Life approach in any part of their lives where it all get’s too much: over-busy, over-spending, over-eating, over-worrying, over-committed and over-whelmed. There are 2 free introductions or sign up now for the 4-week class.

Discover Your Enough Point, the 4-week teleclass, helps you shift from confusion to clarity wherever and whenever you are in over your head. It’s only $65 and equivalent to a full weekend workshop – minus the food, travel, lodging and carbon footprint expenses.

Someone in the current class says: I am getting a lot out of the class.  I very much appreciate this great opportunity to learn so much more about myself, my habits, my choices and my life. (more…)

I talked recently with some friends about their money struggles. The Recession ate their Retirement. They intended to stop working in two years and enjoy the nest they’d feathered lo these many years. Now they just don’t have enough money.  Our conversation inspired me to offer a free tele-class on Rethinking Retirement. The Your Money or Your Life approach liberated their thinking – and I think the conversation itself liberated some new ideas in me. The teleclass will be a rich conversation with prompts – ideas and questions – from me, but lots of time for you to share your woes and wows and discover together what retirement means now. But back to my friends… (more…)

Finally I’m controversial enough to have drawn friendly fire. A reader challenged “Enough” as a Trojan Horse for the a “Green/we are not sustainable” political agenda, and “More” not caused by the consumer culture, but by a deep fear of extinction in the competitive battle for resources. He said:

“This Enough reminds me of what the liberals, socialists, and commies have done: (more…)

Really now…even asking this question via email is absurd.  At the risk of one email too many, I want to tell you about the last free teleclass on “Your Enough Point.” It was a taste of things to come for those who take the 4-week class, Discover Your Enough Point (two classes, same content, one starting Saturday at 8 AM Pacific Time t’other at 5.15 PM Monday). Of course I’m hoping you join the class, but if not, here’s a tidbit from the free call. When I asked people to talk about the “too muchness” in their lives, email came up far more (more…)

One of the few personal finance blogs I read on a regular basis is Get Rich Slowly by J.D. Roth.  He had two great posts in the past few days that I wanted to share with you.  The first one was about (more…)

David Brooks and I don’t always see eye to eye, but his Oped in the NYTimes today is a ten. In The Next Culture War he speaks pragmatically and strongly for the moral imperative of material restraint – a stand that will make strange (and wonderful) bedfellows. He says:

If there is to be a movement to restore economic values, it will have to cut across the current taxonomies. Its goal will be to make the U.S. again a producer economy, not a consumer economy. It will champion a return to financial self-restraint, large and small…A crusade for economic self-restraint would have to rearrange the current alliances and embrace policies like energy taxes and spending cuts that are now deemed politically impossible. But this sort of moral revival is what the country actually needs.

Why the need for a “moral revival” now? Well, the signature of the US has been, since the beginning, two values that restrain one another: greed and frugality. (more…)

When we updated Your Money or Your Life last year, we took out a lot of the hints and tips on how to save money in chapter 6.   We knew that some of them had become outdated and that the Internet had emerged as a new and powerful cost-cutting tool.  Today, I want to share with you three ways that I recently used the web to save money:  (more…)