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Your Money: The Missing Manual by J.D. Roth
Chapter 1. It’s More Important to Be Happy Than to Be Rich
"Happiness, not gold or prestige, is the ultimate currency.”
—Tal Ben-Shahar
You don’t want to be rich—you want to be happy. Although the mass media has convinced many Americans that wealth leads to happiness, that’s not always the case. Money can certainly help you achieve your goals, provide for your future, and make life more enjoyable, but merely having the stuff doesn’t guarantee fulfillment.
This book will show you how to make the most of your money, but before we dive into the details, it’s important to explore why you should care. It doesn’t do much good to learn about compound interest or high-yield savings accounts if you don’t know how money affects your well-being.
If personal finance were as simple as understanding math, this book wouldn’t be necessary; people would never overspend, get into debt, or make foolish financial decisions. But research shows that our choices are based on more than just arithmetic—they’re also influenced by a complex web of psychological and emotional factors.
This chapter gives you a quick overview of the relationship between money and happiness. You’ll also learn techniques for escaping the mental traps that make it hard to be content with what you have. As you’ll see, you don’t need a million bucks to be happy.
How Money Affects Happiness
The big question is, “Can money buy happiness?” There’s no simple answer.
“It seems natural to assume that rich people will be happier than others,” write psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener in Happiness (Blackwell Publishing, 2008). “But money is only one part of psychological wealth, so the picture is complicated.”
There is a strong correlation between wealth and happiness, the authors say: “Rich people and nations are happier than their poor counterparts; don’t let anyone tell you differently.” But they note that money’s impact on happiness isn’t as large as you might think. If you have clothes to wear, food to eat, and a roof over your head, increased disposable income has just a small influence on your sense of well-being.
To put it another way, if you’re living below the poverty line ($22,050 annual income for a family of four in 2009), an extra $5,000 a year can make a huge difference in your happiness. On the other hand, if your family earns $70,000 a year, $5,000 may be a welcome bonus, but it won’t radically change your life.
So, yes, money can buy some happiness, but as you’ll see, it’s just one piece of the puzzle. And there’s a real danger that increased income can actually make you miserable—if your desire to spend grows with it. But that’s not to say you have to live like a monk. The key is finding a balance between having too little and having too much—and that’s no easy task.
NOTE
A recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research showed that, in general, our feelings for material purchases fade more quickly than they do for experiential purchases. Material goods depreciate: The day after you buy something, it’s usually worth less than you paid for it. Experiences, on the other hand, appreciate: Your memories of the things you do—vacations you take, concerts you go to—become fonder with time because you tend to recall the positives and forget the negatives.
The Fulfillment Curve
American culture is consumption-driven. The media teaches you to want the clothes and cars you see on TV and the watches and jewelry you see in magazine ads. Yet studies show that people who are materialistic tend to be less happy than those who aren’t. In other words, if you want to be content, you should own—and want—less Stuff.
NOTE
Because Stuff has such an important role in your happiness (and unhappiness), it deserves a capital S. You’ll read more about Stuff throughout this book, especially in Chapter 5.
In their personal-finance classic Your Money or Your Life (Penguin, 2008), Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin argue that the relationship between spending and happiness is non-linear, meaning every dollar you spend brings you a little less happiness than the one before it.
More spending does lead to more fulfillment—up to a point. But spending too much can actually have a negative impact on your quality of life. The authors suggest that personal fulfillment—that is, being content with your life—can be graphed on a curve that looks like this: