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Comment by twistedanimator | Hacker News Reader

Hands down the best book I have read on money is Your Money or Your Life: http://amzn.com/0143115766

I'm a naturally frugal person, but the book helped me formulate new ways of thinking about money and my relationship with it. The major concept being that money is a representation of your life energy. You work X hours a day at an hourly rate of $Y. Knowing those numbers allows you to think about purchases in a new way. For instance, "That new phone will cost me 2.5 days of work" or "If someone offered me $500 or the new phone, which would I take?" If you chose the $500, then you know you don't need to buy the phone.

I would recommend Your Money or Your Life before all other financial "self-help" books. In fact, I think I'm going read it again.

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That advice seems to apply to wage slaves (hourly rate) but not entrepreneurs or salespersons (not hourly).

Many other financial books recommend developing income streams outside of selling your labor at an hourly or yearly rate, which would seem to be missing from your book.

Even the salaryman can calculate his hourly rate.

I am salaried, but when I sat down and calculated my hourly rate, I was a little shocked. I didn't factor in benefits or anything besides my after tax take home pay. It's as simple as $(2 week paycheck) / 80. What you get is effectively your hourly rate.

As a salaryman, knowing this value will help you avoid working overtime since overtime is unpaid. The more hours you work, the less your effective hourly rate. I would argue that if you are asked (either implicitly or explicitly) to work more than 40 hours a week, you should find a different job as you are diluting your own pay.

I think you're misunderstanding hammock. Indeed only (forms of) the salaryman can calculate an hourly rate.

Money as "life energy" approach helps me be thrifty, but my real struggle is how do I asses risk when I want to buy an asset. If I wanted to use $500 from my work to buy a share of SpaceX, does it provide a better return than any other investment at some acceptable risk ? I don't see the life energy approach as helping this question but I need to read the book you recommend.

Note that SpaceX is not publically traded, but it represents assets I would like to own.

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