From: Strata Rose Chalup (strata@virtual.net)
Date: Wed Aug 16 2000 - 23:13:10 PDT
There is an excellent book called _Your Money or Your Life_ that does
just that, and essentially helps you build a virtual spreadsheet to
evaluate what things really cost you in "life-units". It attempts to
bring out some of the hidden costs of one's employment as part of
weighing how much is really net income. The first set of exercises
primarily involve noticing what you are spending, categorizing it, and
tracking it. You keep a budget pad on you and record literally every
penny that you spend, to gauge the accuracy of your assumptions about
expenses.
Example: Spending $24/week on dry-cleaning * 48 workweeks/year = $1152
post-tax dollars, at 28% tax bracket = $1600 gross dollars == maybe you
really could afford to take a job that paid $1600 less a year if you
didn't have to dress up at it.
The next phase of the exercises involves judging the income vs
expenditures by your values. The book also helps you identify, or at
least gives you tools with which to identify, said values. It warns you
that if you lie to yourself in the process of value identification, you
have no one to blame if what you build isn't what you really want.
The next phase involves building a budget for what matters to you, and
then figuring out how to meet that budget. The goal is either to
"retire" early (don't get hooked on their investment advice, it's
99.999% risk-free Treasury stuff) or just manage your life so you can do
more of what you want and make choices.
Highly recommended.
_SRC
Jeff Bone wrote:
> [...]
> OTOH, it's a vastly simplifying assumption to look at
> everything through an economic lens. ;-) When taking that
> perspective, which is pleasantly and satisfyingly quantitative, > *everything* has a cost.
> [...]
-- ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Strata Rose Chalup [strata@knownow.com] | strata@virtual.net, KF6NBZ Director of Network Operations | VirtualNet Consulting KnowNow, Inc [http://www.knownow.com] | http://www.virtual.net/ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Aug 16 2000 - 23:13:38 PDT