Author
Vicki Robin
The writer who turned a seminar on money and life energy into a book that helped start the financial independence movement.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Vicki Robin left an early acting career and met Joe Dominguez while travelling across the United States and Mexico. She worked with him for decades on the programme that became Your Money or Your Life, first taught through seminars and an audio course, then published as a book in 1992 with Robin as its principal writer.
She revised the book several times, most recently in 2018, the last edition taking account of the financial independence community the original had helped create and updating its advice on investing for a new generation of readers.
Her later work moved to food and community: Blessing the Hands That Feed Us, published in 2014, recounts a month of eating only food grown within ten miles of her home on Whidbey Island, Washington.
The signature
Robin writes as a guide rather than an authority, asking questions of the reader's own numbers and refusing to prescribe what to cut. Her signature is the reframing of money as life energy, and the nine steps that turn a philosophy into a month-by-month practice.