Your Money or Your Life: how to tell how many hours of work the things you buy really cost

What is Your Money or Your Life about?

Joe Dominguez was a financial analyst on Wall Street who, in 1969, just before turning 31, stopped depending on a paycheck by following a nine-step program he had worked out for himself. He taught it in seminars for years, and his partner, Vicki Robin, helped turn them into a book, which Viking/Penguin published in 1992. Robin revised and updated it in 2018, and today it's published by Penguin Books.

The title plays on the robber's line: your money or your life. The book's question is how much of your life you hand over in exchange for money, and whether what you buy with it is worth those hours. It isn't a book about strict budgets: it's about saving through mindfulness and good habits.

Sources for this part:Penguin Random House, Vicki Robin, sitio oficial de la autora

What are hours of life?

The central idea is that money is something you trade your life energy for: the hours you have in this life, which are limited and don't come back. When you go to work, you hand over hours in exchange for pay. So every purchase doesn't just cost money: it costs the hours you worked to earn it.

The book doesn't ask you to stop spending. It asks you to ask yourself, category by category, whether what you got was worth the hours it cost and whether that spending fits what truly matters to you. According to the authors, whatever fails that test tends to shrink on its own, without a money diet.

Sources for this part:Your Money or Your Life

How do you work out your real hourly wage?

Dividing your salary by the hours on your contract isn't enough. The book asks you to subtract from your income what you spend only because you have that job, such as commuting, work clothes or meals out, and to add to your hours all the time the job takes up: the commute, getting ready and even the time it takes to unwind afterward. The result is your real hourly wage.

An example with round numbers: you earn 1,200 a month for 160 hours of work, so at first glance your hour is worth 7.50. But you spend 200 a month on transport and lunches because of work, and 40 hours a month commuting. Your real income is 1,000 and your real hours are 200: your hour is worth 5, not 7.50.

If your income changes from month to month, the book suggests using a monthly average or a typical week. What matters isn't accuracy to the cent but having an honest figure to compare against.

Sources for this part:Your Money or Your Life

How many hours of work do the things you buy cost?

Divide the price by your real hourly wage. With the example above, where an hour is worth 5, a pair of shoes at 50 is 10 hours of life, a subscription at 15 a month is 3 hours every month, and a daily coffee at 2 is about 12 hours a month if you buy it all 30 days.

With that figure in hand, ask yourself the book's questions: did I get satisfaction in proportion to the hours it cost me? Does it fit what I value? Sometimes the answer is yes, and it's fine to keep spending there without guilt. Other times you find you're handing over a whole afternoon of work for something you barely remember.

Sources for this part:Your Money or Your Life

Why track every expense?

To turn your spending into hours, you first need to know what it is. The book asks you to keep track of every cent that comes in and goes out, because what you think you spend rarely matches what you actually spend. Then, every month, you add it up by category and convert each total into hours of life.

Public agencies agree. Mexico's Condusef says that during the first month your only task is to write down absolutely all your expenses, from your morning coffee to the smallest tip, and add them up by week, fortnight and month. The CFPB, in the United States, suggests tracking everything you spend for a month, and Brazil's Susep says to write down every expense without forgetting a single real.

Finanzas para Todos, in Spain, describes a similar method, kakebo: a daily written record of your income and expenses, organized by category, so you can later decide where to cut back.

Sources for this part:Condusef, Comisión Nacional para la Protección y Defensa de los Usuarios de Servicios Financieros (México), Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB, Estados Unidos), Susep, Superintendência de Seguros Privados (Brasil), Finanzas para Todos, Plan de Educación Financiera (CNMV y Banco de España)

Who is it for, and what should you keep in mind?

It suits anyone who feels their money slips away without knowing where, and anyone who wants to spend less without living on a diet. Thinking in hours changes the question: it's no longer “can I afford it?” but “is it worth what it costs me?”.

It has two risks. The first is turning it into guilt: the book insists it isn't about depriving yourself, but about spending on what fulfills you. The second is giving up on tracking in the second week; that's why it helps to have a quick way to log and to do it on the spot, not at the end of the month.

The book's end goal, living on an income that doesn't come from a job, is a long road that goes beyond this post. Here we stick to the part you can start today: knowing what your hour is worth and where your money goes.

Sources for this part:Your Money or Your Life

How to do it in Oslo

In Oslo you log an expense in seconds: tap the + button in the middle, choose “Expense”, enter the “Amount”, the “Category” and what you paid with under “Paid from”, and tap “Save”. It works offline and syncs on its own when you're back online. On days you don't spend anything, tap “I didn’t spend today” on the Today screen: it counts too.

To see where it goes, check “Where it went this month” on Today, category by category, and “Latest movements”. Everything you've logged is in More, Your money, History, where you can filter by account or category, and the search icon on Today, “Search movements”, finds any expense by note, category, account or amount. Logging, Today and your history are unlimited on the free plan. Reports with charts of your periods come with the Personal plan.

Oslo doesn't convert your spending into hours: you do that division yourself. Work out your real hourly wage once, take each category's total at the end of the month and divide it by that figure. You'll see, for example, how many hours of life went on Food or on Fun.

Sources for this part:Your Money or Your Life