The edition of this book that I have is 24 years old, and is fairly dated. The methodology the authors use for tracking daily expenditures and budgeting has been greatly simplified since then by tools such as Quicken. I found their methodology for tracking spending way too complicated and I know I would never do it on a daily basis, but their logic is sound: if what you are doing every day is taking more out of your total real energy (not just money), you shouldn't be doing it. I have read many other books about financial planning that state this far more elegantly using much simpler tools, but I expect the current edition is updated to use these tools, so I didn't spend much time with this one.