Your Money or Your Life - Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin.

Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence
Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
1992, new ed.
Buy new or used from Amazon.com

SimpleLiving.net The website has lots of information and resources including free Online Study Groups to work through the material in the book.

This is a good book if you are even slightly Green or feel attracted to the Simple Living movement. Dominguez and Robin concentrate deeply on subjects that are addressed more generally by other writers: discovering your values, getting your spending into alignment with your values, and focusing on achieving financial independence. The goal is to achieve the point where your earnings will support you without working at all, or working at the level and kind of work you want to do. . .

Their approach is radical because they don’t accept the idea that more is automatically better. Their effort is to help you become conscious that you are exchanging your life energy, the limited number of hours you have on earth, for money. Is it worth it? The goal is figure out how much is “enough”—enough for you to achieve a life that will make you happy because it fulfills what is most important to you. They have a well-defined and simple system of tracking your income and expenses and rating the value to you of your expenditures, which pinpoints exactly where you can cut costs in order to save. Their investment strategy is extremely simple and conservative, no need for an advisor—they recommend long-term Treasury bonds, and they recommend doing it yourself.

This is a start-from-the-beginning inspiring book which will change your life if you persist and follow the program. There is a new edition with some new information, but the fundamental program remains unchanged and you can buy a used version of the older edition. This approach has new resonance now that it's become clear that a lot of those high salaries and inflated home prices had no basis in reality, but were just castles in the sand that have now been washed away.

See also Choosing Simplicity by Linda Breen Pierce, which tells the stories of people who changed their lives according to the principles set forth in the book and how it worked out for them.

Links: Earth Connection

Simple Living Resources
James and Tyra Arraj--A Guide to Valuable Resources, Important Information and Exotic Tidbits

Intentional Communities website-- Intentional Community is an inclusive term for ecovillages, cohousing, residential land trusts, communes, student co-ops, urban housing cooperatives and other related projects and dreams.

How much do you know about the environmental impact of your choices?

The Great Green Web Game

Northwest Earth Institute
series of discussion courses, developed in Portland, but available to groups anywhere in the United States:

LocalHarvest -
Founded in 1998, LocalHarvest is now the number one informational resource for the Buy Local movement and the top place on the Internet where people find information on direct marketing family farms.

Community Supported Agriculture -
CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, is a relationship of mutual support and commitment between local farmers and community members who pay the farmer an annual membership fee to cover the production cost of the farm. In turn, members receive a weekly share of the harvest during the local growing season.

Slow Food U.S.A. -
Slow Food U.S.A. is an educational organization dedicated to stewardship of the land and ecologically sound food production, to the revival of the table as centers of pleasure, culture, and community.

Earthsave -
Educates people about the powerful effects our food choices have on the environment, our health and all life on Earth, and encourages a shift toward a healthy, plant-based diet

PUBLIC RESOURCES

VISITOR INFORMATION

Links: Earth Connection