Spendthrift Lifestyle Not Worth Plug Nickel, Book Says

In a way, I guess, this new book I am fondling could be called subversive to the American Way. It would drain blood from the face of any proper retailing guru.

This book is called "Your Money or Your Life," and I will quote at random:

-- "We are spending so much of our precious time earning in order to spend that we don't have the time to examine our priorities."

-- "If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough."

-- "More marriages are wrecked by money than any other factor."

-- "The consumer feeding frenzy that's been stoked by advertising and easy credit for a quarter of a century will slow down."

There are many more of those, tons of them. "Your Money or Your Life" deals with the lucre we earn, not as a friend but as an enemy out of control. We don't know what the hell we spend - or why.

We just do. We are heaven-sent to buy, grab, obtain, acquire and covet any dingbat thing in a store window, anything to make us smell better, look sharper, cause attention or elevate our alleged status.

We will work 60 or 70 hours a week to put ourselves into debt to buy stuff. Half of it gets thrown in a closet or garage. Much of it we don't even know we have a week after we hand over that magic gimme-gizmo, the credit card. Just sign here. No pain.

Do you know what a "gazingus-pin" is? Neither did Joe Dominguez until he made it up.

You see, Joe is a financial expert; he's a one-time Wall Street hot shot who gave the race back to the rats. He decided what was enough. For some 30 years, Joe has lived on $6,000 yearly from investments. He gives away all the money he makes to worthy causes.

So does his partner, Vicki Robin. She wrote this new book, "Your Money or Your Life," a summation of a course Joe has taped for many years.

Joe's tape, "Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence," has sold 30,000 copies at $60 a smack. All profits went to worthy, nonprofit enterprises. All royalties from the book eventually will be so disposed.

Vicki did the writing because she likes to write: "I love words, they are a sensuous pleasure." Joe does most of the talking.

Both lecture. Vicki takes off soon on a nationwide book-promotion tour. She will be featured tomorrow on the CBS network show "This Morning."

Anyway, I spent part of Labor Day - very appropriate - with Joe and Vicki. What is labor? What is work? Joe sees it as "life energy" - a drudging pain in the butt if you do it to acquire stuff you don't really need.

Joe, the one-time Wall Street analyst, is at peace with himself. Vicki, too, has no identity problems. Their mission in life is to help people cope with money - not to hate it, but to understand it, to see it in a different way.

"Are we at peace with money?" the book asks. Probably not. Most of us see money as an enemy, an implacable, elusive, maddening temptress we can't get enough of.

Together, they have taught thousands of people to see money not as a fleeing foe but as something that can be taken in pleasurable ways and spent on worthwhile things.

Joe and Vicki, who live in the North End of Seattle, are becoming nationally known and respected. They get 50 to 100 letters a month from people thanking them for past help.

As the New Road Map Foundation, they get another 300 letters a month wanting more information about dealing with money problems.

Joe worries that parents don't stand up to their kids. One reason much family money is spent foolishly is because of kids - they want expensive sneakers or some "in" thing, like $100 skateboards. A whole habit pattern of careless, needless spending is developed.

That means, of course, gratifying shallow wants. Just ask, you get. The old man goes out and busts his neck to make more and more money. To buy things they don't need, he becomes the biggest rat on the treadmill. Both parents work, because "We can't do without!"

Do without what? The best economists, the most reliable pollsters, have proved that 20 percent of our money is wasted. Down the tube, because we haven't learned the nature of money, what it is, how to handle it, when to use it.

There's a loose end dangling around here somewhere. Ah, yes. That little word of Joe's - the gazingus-pin. That's what you pick up off the counter and don't even need.

It's called impulse buying. The tender, deadly trap.

Emmett Watson's column appears Sunday and Thursday in the Northwest section of The Times.