Conscious Consumer Spending

In their book "Your Money or Your Life," Joe Dominquez and Vicki Robin make the argument that money equates to life energy. To help you make better spending decisions, consider the amount of life energy necessary to pay for the purchase. If you earn $12 an hour and you want to spend $48 on the latest X-Box game, the game costs four hours of your life energy. Do you want to spend four hours of your life on that X-Box game? Or would you rather spend those four hours playing with your kids, going for a walk, or taking your wife out to dinner?

When you begin to look at your spending in terms of how hard you have to work to pay for the purchase, and what you have to give up in order to work those hours, spending takes on a whole new perspective.