Your Money or Your Life: Saving Money, Maybe Your Life

I saved plenty of money through years of following an earlier version of this book. While I've lost the discipline and am now fighting to get back to it, I've been in a much better shape to respond to having lost a job in one of the U.S.'s worst job markets of 2010. So far, my mortgage is current despite months of unemployment.

It might have been a different story if I hadn't spent years carefully tracking how much I was earning, asking myself whether the ways I'd spent what I'd taken in was worth the time it took me to earn that money, and remembering to spend less in categories where I experienced less satisfaction in previous months.

Because I had savings, I was able to make creative use of time after my layoff. My work you can see here on Squidoo is part of that. I've been less desperate to find a job than I would have been. I haven't yet seen how I'm going to find my way to long-term financial self-sufficiency, but I believe simply by being able to maintain my mortgage and hang on through this crisis, I've contributed significantly to my neighborhood. The Great Recession (some of us are asking when does it become the Lesser Depression) might bring the gift of more of us saving, more of us living closer to the frugal way advocated in Your Money or Your Life.