HerMoney Podcast Episode 182: Having ‘Enough’ With Vicki Robin, Author Of 'Your Money Or Your Life'

Trying to make the most of hermoney podcast episode 182? You are in the right place. Below we break it down in plain English, with practical tips you can actually use.

Key Takeaways

• What does it really mean to have “enough”?  Every day, we’re confronted by messages from advertisements and society telling us that we...
• Without even realizing it, it’s easy to fall into a thought process that goes a little something like this: If I consume more, I’ll be happi...
• But that’s just not true.  This week’s guest, Vicki Robin, co-author of the seminal book “Your Money Or Your Life,” challenged a whole...

What does it really mean to have “enough”? 

Every day, we’re confronted by messages from advertisements and society telling us that we need a new car, new clothes, a new phone , new everything. Without even realizing it, it’s simple to fall into a thought process that goes a little something like this: If I consume more, I’ll be happier. But that’s just not true. 

This week’s guest, Vicki Robin, co-author of the seminal book “Your Money Or Your Life,” challenged a whole generation of people to think critically about what they were really working toward financially, and how they could live authentically in a consumer-driven world.  

Vicki and her late partner and co-author Joe Dominguez are largely credited with sowing the seeds of the FIRE movement (Financial Independence, Retire Early) as it is known today. Vicki says the reason the FIRE movement has been such an awakening for so numerous people is because it’s given them a steering wheel with which to take control of their financial lives , which they can use to steer themselves away from debt and other money struggles. For so numerous people, it feels like an awakening, she says, “like someone just sent me a life ring in a vast sea, and I’m being reeled in.” 

Vicki speaks some hard and necessary truths about the concept of “enough,” and how we can fully embrace what’s “enough” for us. She reminds us that you have to want something else more than you want stuff, and tells us that for every purchase, you need to ask yourself: Is this making me happy? Is this thing really worth the number of working hours I’m going to invest in it? 

Unfortunately, nothing in society today is inspiring us to think critically about how much we’re spending , every day, we are encouraged to consume. Oftentimes, the only way out of the spending cycle is introspection, and making a conscious effort to think about the future in the present. For example, asking yourself: In five years’ time, what would I like to be doing with my life? or, What are ten things I’d like to do before I die? 

While on the topic of consumerism, Vicki also talks about environmental impact , people who reduce their overall consumption also reduce their carbon footprint. In this way, she says, living authentically means living without excess. 

Then, in Mailbag, Jean and Kathryn talk about how to build credit scores and credit history for young people, how to save for retirement if your employer doesn’t offer a 401(k), and what to do with a balance remaining in a 529 college savings account. Lastly, in Thrive, Jean talks about balance transfers on credit cards, and whether one might be right for you.

Want to learn from some of the world’s most successful women? Subscribe to the #HerMoneyPodcast so you don’t miss a beat!

Transcript

Jean Chatzky: (00:06) HerMoney is brought to you by Fidelity Investments. You deserve time off, your money doesn’t. Learn how to make your money work just as hard as you do at fidelity.com/demandmore. HerMoney comes to you through PRX. Hey everybody, thank you so much for being with me today. It’s Jean Chatzky and this is HerMoney and I am, well, I’m thrilled, actually, to tell you that Vicki Robin is in the studio with me today. She’s not in Seattle or near Seattle where she typically is. She is on the road. She’s in New York and, for those of you who don’t know Vicki, she has made such a difference in the way millions of people over the last couple of decades have decided, which is a very key word, have decided to live their financial lives and have decided how to manage their time. Vicki and her late partner Joe Dominguez, who wrote a really seminal book called Your Money or Your Life, challenged a whole generation to think about what they were really working for and how they were living, whether they were doing it authentically or just trying to keep up. And the two of them together are really credited with sowing some of the seeds of the FIRE movement as it is today. Vicki, of course, though, did not stop with her first book. She’s written others including Blessing the Hand That Feeds Us: Lessons From a 10 Mile Diet where she explores food and farming and sustainability. She’s got a popular Ted Talk. She’s had quite the journey and she is here to fill us in on all of it. Hi Vicki.

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Vicki Robin: (02:04) Hi Jean.

Jean Chatzky: (02:05) So nice to have you here and in person and I don’t want to get stuck in the past, but I do want to just give my audience who may not know of your amazing work, a little taste of where it started. Can you just give us a little bit about how you got on this journey to begin with?

Vicki Robin: (02:27) Well I wrote Your Money or Your Life with Joe Dominguez who had developed in the 1960s a strategy for his own early financial independence because he looked at it like military service. You do your financial service. He wanted to be out by the time he was 30 and he did it in a very, very, very traditional way that we have completely forgotten or overwritten in this society. He earned as much as he could without violating his integrity or his health. He saved as much as he could without like driving himself into, you know, sort of like unhealthy penury. And he invested the money in the most secure way he could so that he could throw off an income. And he kept track of every penny that came into and out of his life. And so he carefully, carefully examined every expense and said, is this expenditure buying me the life I love? Is it in line with my values? Does it make me happy? That’s his system. It’s like as simple as it could be, I say Ben Franklin is rolling over in his grave. And doing that he had determine how much is enough. And once he had crossed over that point where he had income from the savings equal to his enoughness,

Jean Chatzky: (03:41) The amount he needed to live.

Vicki Robin: (03:43) The amount he needed to live. Not like, like scrimping and saving, but to have everything he wanted and needed, but nothing in excess. And I can get into how I’ve applied this, eah, then he was financially independent. So I met him along the way and I thought this is the most genius thing I’ve heard about money ever. I applied it to my own little savings that I had. I was able to live on the interest income from my savings enough so that I had the freedom to learn and grow and explore, learn things that I wanted to learn. A lot of it has to do with back to the land sustainability skills. A lot of it has to do with, you know, just understanding myself and my own life and my own psychology and being a good person and helping others out, you know, the whole girl scout boy scout thing. Eventually people were really interested in like, what is this about? Joe did some living room talks with friends and eventually I became the producer ’cause I said this is really key. And for a decade we produced seminars based on Joe’s approach. Then and the end of the eighties, I went to the first national conference on something that was brand new at the time called sustainable development, which is now very corporatized. But at that time it was a question coming out of the United Nations of we’re expanding economically and population on a finite planet. We’re on a collision course. We can see it now. We can see it on the horizon.

Jean Chatzky: (05:10) We’re going to use up our resources.

Vicki Robin: (05:12) And we’re already in the late eighties, we were in a condition called overshoot. We were using more of the biocapacity the planet annually than would get regenerated through natural processes. So the crisis was already there and we were just bringing it to consciousness. I go to this conference and I realize that everybody is saying the biggest driver of environmental destruction is over consumption. But since that’s the signature, you know, we’re a consumer culture, it’s right to consume, it’s our right to consume, you know, like they’re bombing us by a tie, you know, go shopping. You know, it’s like there’s an insanity. The consumerist insanity and it was cultivated. If people understood the implications 20 years out of what was being sown, then they should be sued like the Sackler family. Maybe they didn’t. But anyway we based our society and a false premise, but the program in Your Money Your Life, when people applied our steps, their spending went down on average 20% to 25% cause we surveyed people six months, a year later and almost everybody said they were happier. So I’m there at this conference and I think we have the solution to the biggest problem on the planet, and that’s when I was like, we’re going to do this. By the year 2000 we are going to be, have moderated consumption sufficiently. We were going to like, you know, savings rate was going to be 20% that’s what we said. And we were working on some social science research that said, you know, if you can get 20% of the population thinking anything then the rest is history, you know.

Jean Chatzky: (06:49) It’ll catch.

Vicki Robin: (06:50) It’ll catch. So we were working on catching, you know, we were on Oprah and then we became a New York Times bestseller, five years in the Business Week bestseller list. You know, just all the lists, all the major shows, all the everything. And we kept counting up the audiences like, okay, we’re going to get to, we figured we’d gotten to 50% of the country.

Jean Chatzky: (07:11) And yet…

Vicki Robin: (07:11) No, no. The theory didn’t work.

Jean Chatzky: (07:11) Well I don’t know that the theory didn’t work. I think that theory works for people who apply the theory.

Vicki Robin: (07:20) No, no. I said my social theory about we were going to stop the problem.

Jean Chatzky: (07:25) The over consumption. I heard the savings rate at 20% and I’m sure you could see me roll my eyes. ‘Cause what is it 4?

Vicki Robin: (07:32) I think that’s generous. That’s really generous.

Jean Chatzky: (07:36) We’ve been through periods in our recent history where the savings rate was negative.

Vicki Robin: (07:42) Exactly. Yeah. The end of the nineties, the year 2000 I took a look at all the data and I thought, you know, I gave a decade. I would get up at three o’clock in the morning to talk to drive time on the east coast. You know, I just did everything I knew how to do to just sort of, you know, pin, put a like lots of little pins in these soap bubbles of ideas that I’m going to be, if I get, you know, if I get a new car, a new house and new wife and dog. If I get, you know, I don’t feel happy but I’m going to consume and then I’ll be happier and this completely unconscious process that, if it didn’t produce happiness but it had no ill effects, well, okay, fine. You know, but it does, there’s a remainder from all of this activity. Yeah.

Jean Chatzky: (08:29) Let’s look inward at individuals for a second because I do think the people who found your book then have found it for the last couple of decades, have happened on the FIRE movement now, are saying there’s something there. We’ve done a number of shows with FIRE proponents and I’ve seen it in my own life, when you talk about tracking the spending, following the money, I’ve done a number of money makeovers with individuals over the years. I’ve seen that happiness light bulb go off when they feel more in control. So, where are we right no

Final Thoughts

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Originally published at savingswitch.com.