Quotes from Vicki Robin

To be frugal means to have a high joy-to-stuff ratio. If you get one unit of joy for each material possession, that's frugal. But if you need ten possessions to even begin registering on the joy meter, you're missing the point of being alive.

Along with racism and sexism, our society has a hidden hierarchy based on what you do for money.

So much dissatisfaction comes from focusing on what we don't have that the simple exercise of acknowledging and valuing what we do have can transform our outlook.

So what if you've been blowing every paycheck on "rewarding" yourself for surviving another week?

Truly maximizing their potential, some students do two years of college in high school through the Running Start program.

If you were money, would you hang out with you?

meaning, creativity, flexibility, and a sort of rapid prototyping not just of jobs but of entire careers.

Just as we can get caught in outmoded habit-patterns passed down through generations, we can also get trapped by our habitual thinking just as much as—and just as erroneously as—people who maintained until recently that the earth was visibly and verifiably flat. We also get stuck in unconscious and invisible boxes that limit our ability to think in new ways.

Where people work less they buy more . . . business is the exchange of goods. Goods are bought only as they meet needs. Needs are filled only as they are felt. They make themselves felt largely in the leisure hours.

The Hoover Commission agreed. Leisure was not, in fact, an excuse to relax. It was a hole to fill up with more wants (which, in turn, required more work to pay for them). Somehow the consumer solution satisfied both the industrial hedonists hell-bent on achieving a material paradise and the puritans who feared that unoccupied leisure would lead to sin. In fact, the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

People in industrialized nations used to be called "citizens." Now we are "consumers"—which means (according to the dictionary definition of "consume") people who "use up," "waste," "destroy," and "squander.

Learn to choose quality of life over standard of living.

the Social Security Administration has also kept a record.

We take our identity and our self-worth from our jobs.

Having more is an endless horizon, no matter how much you have.

the new consumerism promoted all the deadly sins (lust, covetousness, gluttony, pride, envy) except perhaps anger and sloth.

To let go of clutter, then, is not dearth (lack); it's lightening up and opening up space for something new to happen

is a way to approach life so that when asked, "Your money or your life?" you say, "I'll take both, thank you.

What's needed isn't change; it is transformation. Change seeks different solutions to intractable problems. Transformation asks different questions so that we can see the problems in a new light.

But while the online education business has a very low bar entry—anyone can piece together a few web services and, voilà, have paying students—success is not a guarantee.

By late 2017, consumer debt had topped $3.7 trillion, more than double the total at the end of 2000. That's more than $11,000 for every man, woman, and child in the country.

Who Is This Book For? This program works for anyone who earns or spends money—not because anyone can be rich, but because everyone can discover for themselves how much is enough . . . and have that. It helps you transform your relationship with money—and we all have one. In fact, "enough" is the radical promise of Your Money or Your Life.

Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for. We

Some of us just accept debt as a part of adult life and trod on, shackled by consequences we don't fully understand.