I just got back from a family party weekend to celebrate my oldest brother’s retirement.  One of the parts about his retirement that I admire him a bunch for is that he’s only 50 years young and he and his wife planned for this great day just ten years ago.

I asked my bro what his process was and here’s what he told me:

After reading Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, his wife and he worked through all the exercises in that book and changed their lifestyle in order to achieve the early retirement and financial independence they wanted.

They hooked on to the concept that what they spent their money on was what they valued the most.  In other words, what they spent their money on was a reflection of what they truly valued because that’s what they were spending their hard earned dollars on so that’s where their life energy was going.

After, mulling that concept over, they decided to choose where they wanted their life energy to go.  After they chose where they wanted to spend their money, then they put a plan together to make it happen and stuck to it.

Now after just a short ten years, they achieved the result that they desired and they are ecstatic for it and I’m ecstatic for them!

Using them as a role model, I wonder for myself (and I invite you to wonder this for yourself too), “Am I spending my money on what I truly value?  If not, what do I need to do differently in order to get my spending in alignment with what I truly want?”