Quotables: Your Money or Your Life -- Chapter 1 (part 1)

I've not fallen down on my reading of Your Money or Your Life...I've just neglected the opportunity to post interesting and helpful quotes from the chapters.

Today, let's begin looking at Chapter 1: The Money Trap the Old Road Map for Money.

• "Your money or your life." If someone thrust a gun in your ribs and said that sentence, what would you do? Most of us would turn over our wallets. The threat works because we value our lives more than we value our money. Or do we?

• Even the best of jobs have trade-offs. Midlife comes and we discover we've been living our parents' agenda. Or worse, we've been filling teeth for twenty years because some seventeen-year-old (was that really me?) decided that being a dentist would be the best of all possible worlds.

• And they call [the modern career path] making a living? Think about it. How many people have you seen who are more alive at the end of the work day that they were at the beginning? Do we come home from our "making a living" activity with more life? Do we bound through the door, refreshed and energized, ready for a great evening with the family? Where's all the life we supposedly made at work? For many of us, isn't the truth of it closer to "making a dying"? Aren't we killing ourselves--our health, our relationships, our sense of joy and wonder for our jobs? We are sacrificing our lives for money--but it's happening so slowly that we barely notice.

• Even if we aren't any happier, you'd think that we'd at least have the traditional symbol of success: money in the bank. Not so...The savings rate was 4.5 percent in 1990 [I have an older edition ;)]...The Japanese, by the way, save over 15 percent of their disposable income.

The book does an excellent job of living up to its subtitle, "Transforming Your Relationship with Money..." How we view money will determine how we treat money.

I'll post more quotables from chapter 1 later...

Check out the Prologue if you missed it last month...