Money = Life Energy

In the book, “Your Money or Your Life,” Joe Dominguez provided a definition as “Money is something we choose to trade our life energy for.” For the month of July, we decided to try to track every penny we spent. It was much more difficult than I thought it would be. It started out easy, especially after we signed up for Xpen$er, which lets you send yourself a text message to track an expense. That was much easier than writing things down!

But then, as the month went by, we started saving receipts again with the best of intentions to track them later. Since we’ve both switched to Macbooks, the first week we purchased Budget – Money Management Made Simple. We’re still learning how to use it, but I like it better than Quicken (which I’ve used for over 10 years). I like the emphasis on “Where is the money going to come from?” rather than “Where did the money go?”

We also read the book Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology, which was timely. The main character writes about his 18 month adventure living with an Old-Order Mennonite community, as part of his master thesis at MIT for the Science, Technology and Society program.