Your Money or Your Life is one of the earliest books on the topic of "Financial Independence". It lays out a 9 Step Program to take anyone from their current financial situation to a state of financial independence. Not than that it seeks to redefine the readers relationship with money and redefine their goals. There is never a finish line for "more", so the goal needs instead to be "enough". The steps outlined in the Program range from great to obvious to questionably tedious. I will do all of them, to some extent.
Other themes covered in the book are those of consumerism and overconsumption. Ecological considerations. Health and mental well-being.
This book is a nine step program to FI, or FIRE.
There are 4”FI”s.
Daniel Kahnamen’s “money-to-happiness curve" levels off at about $75k now. Still no idea on regionality.
In seminars held by Vicki Robin and her late co-author Joe Dominguez, audience members of all levels of income were asked to rate their happiness on a scale from 1 to 5. Then they were asked what level of income they thought would make them happy. They consistently said they would be happy if they had 50% more than they currently did... at every level. Even those who made 50% more than others in the audience didn’t change their reported happiness in any significant way. This shows, beyond a basic threshold, there is no correlation between happiness. The average rating for everyone, by the way, was ~2.6 - 2.8. Not even the 3 that would be an average from a normal distribution.
The goal shouldn't be to have "more", because there's always "more". The goal should be to have "enough", and know when you do.
<aside> 👉🏻 Working all your time away to afford to buy things we don’t need to impress people we don’t like.
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The desire for “more” is not only a treadmill of unhappiness, it contributes to the consumption patterns that are causing global ecological harm. We are the most affluent society that has ever existed, and if everyone in the world consumed like we do in the US we would need 4 Earths to sustain ourselves.
Earth Overshoot Day is the the annual day in which we have used up the “sustainable” amount of Earth for that year.