This book is a classic work of personal financial advice for the amateur audience, and for good reason.  Instead of focusing on specific investment strategies or telling you what to do, Your Money Or Your Life explores your relationship to money.  And my experience is that most people are surprised at what they discover!

Although Your Money Or Your Life often gets lumped in with books on "financial independence" and "how to retire early," its goal is generally a lot less lofty.  It occasionally holds out the prospect of early retirement as a reward, but I think this is understood to be a "blue sky" best case scenario, something to shoot for, rather than the specific goal of the book.

Oddly enough, I think the advice in Your Money Or Your Life  is actually less timely right now, during the recession, than it would have been during the boom years.  When times are tight, people are pretty good about evaluating their own spending and finding ways to cut back. The problem is that everyone should have done this five or six years ago.  

The overall message is "live within your means."  Even, in some cases, below your means.  What an un-American message!  Your Money Or Your Life had a frumpy air when it first reached success in the late 80s and early 90s.  Of course, with hindsight, it's obvious that it was on the right side of the line all along.  

The book walks you through several outlines of how to track your money, focus on where you are spending money (and aren't!), where you want to be in the future, and what you need to do to get there.  It leads you without issuing judgments or commands, which is very helpful for its intended audience (i.e. not wealthy people looking to invest, or stockbrokers looking for strategies).

I think the most revolutionary part of Your Money Or Your Life  is its concept of "life energy" as it applies to your personal finances.  

Let's take every hour of your life as a unit.  You get 24 units per day.  If you are like most people, you will spend an average of one unit per day in your commute (half an hour each way being the national average).  One unit on a lunch break, plus eight units working, equals ten units per work day.

This means that your actual income is the amount you earn per day, divided by ten.  Not eight, as we normally think of it.  You devote 10 hours per day to your job; therefore, divide by ten.  Now you can use that per-unit figure to start really assessing where you spend your time, and why.  Don't forget to add in the cost of gas on your commute, the cost of the lunches you end up buying even though you know you shouldn't, and the cost of maintaining your wardrobe.

The classic example of this is two parents with a small child.  One parent earns more than the other.  Often, the cost of the lower-paid parent is nearly the same as the cost of daycare per day.  If you divide up by the lower earner's true per-unit cost, the couple may actually SAVE money if that person doesn't work.  

Your Money Or Your Life can make you confront some difficult truths in your life.  As far as I'm concerned, there is no higher purpose for a book on personal finance.