Integrity = Freedom?

as part of my journey to time freedom, I came across Joe Dominguez’s work on Transforming Your Relationship with Money (later turned into Your Money or Your Life).

He lays out nine steps and all of them are useful. But for me, a few of them really hit home.

The first was simple: Calculate Your Net worth.

This is one of the key FIRE metrics. I still track it monthly to this day. It became a kind of scoreboard—not in a stressful way, but in a “pay attention” kind of way.

The second was tracking every dollar.

At first, that sounded tedious. But it turned into the most useful of habits.

Dominguez calls his 9 steps the “Tao Jones” (vs Dow Jones) — it’s a kind of meditation. And that’s what it became for me. When you track your spending daily, you start to see your decisions more clearly. You notice patterns. You start asking better questions.

Am I getting value from this?

Is this aligned with what I actually care about?

You begin to make better spending decisions.

Then there was the idea of the”cross-over point”—when your investments generate enough income to cover your expenses.

But I took this further. I didn’t just track where I was—I started projecting where I was going based on my monthly spending, income, and anticipated cash flow from investments. Spreadsheets, graphs, rough estimates… I wanted to see when freedom might actually become real.

After a few years of following his Method, something unexpected happened.

As I worked these steps over time, I noticed a shift—not just in my finances, but in how I showed up.

I started acting with greater integrity.

In my spending, in my saving, and in my work.

Not that I lacked integrity before, but this was different. I was more intentional, more accepting, and more consistent.

And as I increased my integrity - so did my income.

I didn’t plan that, it just happened.

Which led me to a thought I didn’t expect: Is this the key to the 9 steps? Increasing your integrity?

Maybe integrity isn’t just a moreal idea. Maybe it’s a practical one.

Maybe it’s a path to freedom.

These 9 steps were critical in my success, and I’ll share a couple other resources that helped me along the way in future posts.

But for now, a few questions:

Do you know how much You’ve earned over your lifetime?

Do you know your current Net worth?

And if things CONTINUED as they are - when would you reach your own crossover point?