There is more to life than nine-to-five.

– Your money or your life

What does money mean to you? The author defines money as “something we choose to trade our life energy for.” The entire book is built on this premise: you may think you’re spending money, but in fact you’re spending your limited life. Many people drain themselves at work during the week, then compensate by spending on weekends—“We make a dying at work so we can live it up on the weekend.”  as the author puts it.

With this habit of “compensating through consumption,” people get trapped in an endless earn-and-spend loop. To sustain this lifestyle, we must keep working and endure a life we don’t actually enjoy. To break this cycle, the author proposes a nine-step method to help readers re-examine their relationship with money. Through this process, we learn how to live more joyfully and meaningfully, how to align our spending with what truly brings us fulfillment, and how to stop wasting our lives on things we don’t really care about. As we build savings and eventually reach financial independence, we gain the freedom to devote our precious life energy to what we genuinely love—rather than spending a lifetime bending our backs just to survive.

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9 Steps for Redefining Your Relationship with Money

Step 1: Making Peace with the Past

1. Calculate how much money you’ve earned in your entire life so far.
   
   Include not only full-time job income but also part-time jobs, tutoring, lottery winnings—everything.
   
2. Calculate your net worth: What have you got to show for it?
   
   All tangible and intangible assets count—furniture, clothes, books, phones, etc. Estimate their value and include them.

Step 2: Being in the Present — Tracking Your Life Energy

1. How much are you trading your life energy for? Establish the actual costs in time and money required to maintain your job, and compute your real hourly wage.
   
   This includes not only commuting and overtime, but also the costs of coping with stress—massages, impulsive shopping, zoning out in front of the TV—as well as expenses required because of work (clothes, coffee, commuting, social meals).
   
   For example (all dollar amount in NTD), imagine someone earning a monthly salary of $36,000. Their official weekly working hours are 40, but they average 2 hours of overtime each week. They spend 1 hour commuting every day, and commuting costs $70 per day (5 hours and $350 per week). To relieve back pain caused by poor posture at work, they get a weekly massage—1 hour and $800. They spend $2,000 a month on clothing for work (about $500 per week), and about 1.5 hours each week shopping for clothes, doing makeup, and coordinating outfits. To stay awake on workdays, they buy a $50 coffee each day ($250 per week). Because work is so stressful, they take a one-week trip abroad every six months to decompress—$60,000 per trip. Spread over 52 weeks, that’s 6.5 hours and $2,300 per week. After getting home from work each day, they’re so exhausted they need an hour of mindless TV before they have the energy to do anything else. Eating near the office is $10 more expensive per meal than eating near home—an extra $50 per week.
   
   Given all these assumptions:
   – Weekly salary: $9,000
   – Actual weekly hours worked: 57 hours (40 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 1.5 + 6.5 + 1)
   – Additional weekly costs: $4,250 (350 + 800 + 500 + 250 + 2,300 + 50)
   – Actual hourly wage: $83 ((9000−4250)÷57) instead of $163 (9000÷55)
   
   I find this incredibly interesting. When people talk about calculating their “real hourly wage,” they usually only take overtime into account—maybe commuting, at most. But the book includes the cost of dealing with the stress and unhappiness caused by the job as well.
   
   Once you factor in these visible and invisible costs, the real hourly wage ends up far lower than expected. And when you see that number, that supposedly “high-paying job” may suddenly not look high-paying at all—losing much of its appeal. You might even choose a job with a lower salary on paper but a much higher real hourly wage.
   
2. Keep track of every cent that comes into or goes out of your life.
   
   While calculating all your expenses, you also need to account for every bit of income—your salary, money you find on the street, lottery winnings, part-time income, and anything else. Everything should be recorded accurately.

Step 3: Where Is It All Going? — The Monthly Tabulation

1. Create a monthly income–expense summary.
   
   Categorize spending based on your personal lifestyle¹—not traditional categories like food/clothing/housing/transport but categories that reveal your real values.
   
   Sum up monthly income as well.
   
   Your spending patterns reflect what you truly care about—not what you say you care about. Reviewing these numbers helps you understand yourself better and makes changing habits easier.
   
2. Balance your monthly income and outgo totals
   
   If you’ve been tracking your expenses consistently, then
   “total assets at the beginning of the month + income − expenses = total assets at the end of the month.”
   This step ensures that you truly understand where your money is going.
   
3. Convert each spending category into hours of life energy spent using your real hourly wage

Step 4: 3 Questions that Will Transform Your Life

For each category, ask:

1. Did I receive fulfillment, satisfaction and value in proportion to life energy spent?
2. Is this expenditure of life energy in alignment with my values and life purpose?
3. How might this expenditure change if I didn’t have to work for a living?

Mark each category with:

• o (neutral; fine as is)

• – (not worth it / misaligned / would be eliminated after FI)

• + (very worthwhile / aligned / would increase after FI)

Expense	Amount	Hours of Life Energy Spent	Q1	Q2	Q3
Rent	310	30	o	o	o
Utilities	27	2.6	o	o	o
Gas	37.88	3.6	–	–	–
Charity	16	1.5	–	o	+
Entertainment	50	4.8	o	o	o
Dining out	6.03	0.6	o	o	o
Clothes-Essential	10.74	1	o	o	o
Clothes-non-essential	25.45	2.4	–	–	–
Misc.	13	1.2	o	o	o
Total	496.1	47.7

Pay special attention to the “–” categories—they reveal where your life energy is being wasted. “+” categories can be expanded to increase joy.

Unlike typical FIRE books that emphasize extreme frugality, this book encourages spending more on what brings genuine fulfillment. True financial independence is not about deprivation—it’s about optimizing joy.

Step 5: Making Life Energy Visible

Plot your monthly income and expenses on a line graph. Display it somewhere you can see daily as a reminder of your path toward FI.

Step 6: Valuing Your Life Energy – Minimizing Spending

Spend consciously.

Develop skills to maintain and repair things, plan ahead, comparison-shop, avoid replacing items unnecessarily, and embrace DIY. Reducing expenses lowers the amount of life energy you must trade for money.

Step 7: Valuing Your Life Energy – Maximizing Income

According to the book, the sole purpose of paid employment is to earn money. Fulfillment, contribution, and social impact can come from unpaid work as well.

Because you are trading your life energy, you should maximize income as long as it aligns with your health and values—so you can reach FI sooner and gain freedom.

This raises a question I personally wrestle with as I reached CoastFI: “Should I choose a high-paying job I don’t love to reach FI sooner? Or a lower-paying job that makes me happier now?”

Step 8：Capital and the Crossover Point

Each month, calculate your investment income:

Assets × long-term interest rate ÷ 12 = monthly investment

Plot this on your chart.

When the investment-income line crosses your monthly-expenses line—the Crossover Point—you have reached financial independence.

Step 9: Managing Your Finances

Learn about long-term investment options so your capital can reliably generate enough income to cover your daily expenses.

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Finding Your Values and Life Purpose

How to Discover Your Values

Ask yourself:

1. If you don’t have to work for a living, what would you do with your time?
2. What have you done with your life that you are really proud of?
3. How would you spend the next year if you knew it was the last year of your life?

How to Discover Your Life Purpose

Try one of these three approaches:

1. Work with your passion, on projects you care deeply about.
   You’re looking for something you’d gladly no-holds-barred would give your life to, not something you use to get away from your life.
2. Work with your pain, with people whose pain touches your heart — help people whose suffering resonates with you.
3. Work with what is at hand, with the opportunities that arise daily for responding to the simple needs of others — small acts of service in daily life.

Or ask:

1. What have you always wanted to do that you haven’t done yet?
2. What brings you the most fulfillment?

What if you still can’t find them?

Your purpose doesn’t need to be grand or world-changing. Write down something—even if it’s unclear. Over time, as you compare your actions with your values and adjust both, clarity will emerge.

When you review your monthly spending, you may notice that your actions don’t always line up with your values or your sense of purpose. When that happens, you can either adjust your behavior or revise your values and purpose. Through this ongoing process of calibration, your values and mission gradually become clearer—and your life starts to align more closely with them.

As someone who still feels uncertain about life direction, this part comforted me. Perhaps the path reveals itself through getting on a path and exploring.

You Are Not Your Job

The book points out that modern society confuses paid employment with work, leading us to derive identity and self-worth from our jobs. When asked “What do you do?”, we respond with “I’m an engineer” rather than describing what we actually do.

After losing my job last year and traveling in Sri Lanka, I struggled every time someone asked me this question. Without a job title, I felt strangely empty—as if a piece of my life were missing. It made me realize how much of my identity had been built around work.

The book also notes that because we overvalue paid employment, we neglect other essential forms of work—caring for loved ones, self-reflection, personal growth, and creating a meaningful life. These get squeezed into the scraps of time left after “real work,” and rest is viewed as unproductive.

Perhaps this is why many people deteriorate quickly after retirement—they don’t know how to live without the structure and identity work provides.

If we recognize that paid employment is only one small part of our overall “work,” we can free ourselves to pursue things that truly matter. Maybe we’ll even realize we don’t need as much money as we thought—and part-time work could give us more life in exchange for less income. Your life is bigger than your job.

Life After Financial Independence

What does life look like when you no longer need to work for money?
The book says: enjoy idleness, rest, and doing nothing for a while. Then, most people naturally seek meaningful next steps—traveling, studying, pursuing long-held dreams.

As someone who has spent months in a low-energy, lethargic state post-layoff, this reassured me. Maybe I simply need more time.

Financial freedom means you don’t have to work for money—but you can if you want to. You gain the freedom to choose, to follow your desires, and to craft your ideal life. That freedom—not money—is the essence of FI.

Final Thoughts

Everyone has a different definition of “enough.” Only when we slow down and discover what enough means for us can we truly live our own life. The world is noisy—and it’s easy to drift along without questioning. But when we define our own “enough,” we reclaim control of our life energy.

The book talks about the relationship between spending and happiness as a reverse parabola. In the early stages, as we spend more, we’re able to meet our basic needs, enjoy small daily pleasures, and even indulge in a little luxury—so our happiness rises with our spending. But after a certain point, more spending actually starts to reduce our happiness.

The peak of this curve is our point of fulfillment—our personal “enough.” By asking ourselves those three questions each month and adjusting our spending over time, we gradually move closer to that point where our happiness is maximized.

When you think about it, this isn’t an easy task at all. The moment this idea crossed my mind, I suddenly remembered something said in the podcast Gooaye: “The only reason I can make money in the stock market is because there are so many idiots in it.”

If we apply that analogy to the pursuit of financial freedom—or even life freedom—the logic holds: it’s precisely because this path is difficult that financial independence is possible in the first place.

May we all find a way to live a freer, more authentic life.

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附註：

1. The book suggests that during your first month of expense tracking, you shouldn’t categorize anything yet. After you’ve collected a full month of data, you can then create categories based on your actual spending. From there, you can design a customized tracking system that works specifically for you. ↩︎
2. In the book, the author uses the yield of the 30-year U.S. Treasury bond. ↩︎