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Money may not directly buy happiness, but it can remove roadblocks to happiness and set the stage for someone to be happy. Money doesn't guarantee happiness, but it sure can help. I'm not saying that poor people can't be happy or that you must have money to be happy, just that if you do have money, it can "grease the skids" and help you achieve what might be harder to achieve without money.
Agree with this and what chet wrote...also money may not give you time but it increases your options.
Do you agree with "The more we earn, the more likely we are to complain about lack of time because we equate our high earnings with a sense of entitlement to more leisure and feel resentful that time cannot be stretched."
As I said before.........
"Before you get to far down the road it helps to remember that money is an invention of man and is not natural at all. Since it is not natural the laws of nature do not apply. Mankind can make up any rules they want to to control the uses of money so there is no way to predict any outcome of money.
Money is an illusion and not a reality."
Don't buy into the illusion, see life as it is, calm down, relax since no one gets to leave the planet since we're all trapped here together.
You're serious? No offense, but do you live under a rock? This isn't rocket science or some hidden secret.
- Sex and romance: Many women will be attracted to money. Now whether you let yourself be used or not is certainly up to you.
- Business: It talkes money to start and run a business. If you have money, you may be able to open that business and do that thing that you always wanted to do.
- Travel: Maybe you always wanted to travel and that can help you with sex/romance and business.
- Creature comforts: Having nice things. Being comfortable.
- Health: Provided you don't put your money up your nose or drink it, if you have more money, you can afford better healthcare and you can afford to do those things that will help you relieve stress and you don't have money worries at a minimum.
Again, none of these is a panacea and having money alone isn't going to magically make you happy, but it will allow you to do those things that make you happy and allow you to live a more fulfilled life. The choice is always yours, and many rich people end up broken fools, so YMMV.
Peope will treat you differently if they think you have money. An example happened to me recently as I was having some painting and satellite installations done. As the installers worked I asked about some upgrades, and they had the equipment in the truck, so they put it in without question (they told me it would cost an extra $100). When they were done I asked if I could run to the ATM and get some extra cash, because all I had were out of state checks. The installer said he was ok to take the check, because I lived in a nice house and figured I was good for it.
When I was starting out and was a struggling student, it was cash for everything or a valid credit card in advance for stuff by similar contractors.
I personally think if a person makes money the greed of humans desires more. However, there are those who can balance them.
I second the observation that rich families are messed up. My grandfather inherited, and multiplied by investing, a huge sum of money. He was a real stickler and penny pincher though, and taught his kids the values of working hard. As a result, they all worked hard and became people who mattered ... two mothers, one of them a scientist; a computer engineer during the heydey (who also made a fortune); and a few others doing hard, but honest, work.
They all came out alright, in the end.
Compare that with a family I know that didn't see their dad at all, the kids drank and started drinking at age 12, made the Osbournes look like the Partridge Family. They had many millions, went to really expensive places, gambled, seemed great on the outside, but the kids were rotten, the wife a trophy wife that didn't care whether he cheated on her, or her on him, and also seemingly didn't care about the kids much.Yeah, not my definition of "happy"
More of a Great Debates topic really, but yes it does up to a point.
I think up to the point where you aren't making your basic needs, plus debt payments, plus incidentals (insurance, medical bills), plus savings (retirement, emergency) is extremely stressful. The next point of happiness is the point where you get more choices based on money...where you can wipe away your debt, you can take your family to a vacation every once and awhile, and you get freedom.
Once you hit that threshold (which is more subjective) increases in money is not a real net increase in happiness in itself, for some it can be a real net loss when they don't know how to deal with it and become over extended.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tinabean
Subsound thinks along the same lines as I do. I've been really, really poor as well as financially comfortable in life. If a person is under constant stress to provide the basics in life...a roof, food, medical expenses and transportation, then I think he/she has a definite opportunity to increase their level of happiness through financial gain. But once a person has the basics in life covered, I don't believe that money is the primary factor in influencing happiness. I believe it has more to do with relationships....to God, to self, to family to friends. Folks who acquire money or some form of "power" usually learn the friends they find who are attracted to their money/power/influence are pretty shallow and disappear as soon as any benefit to them is not realized. For me, it was very telling when the German billionaire threw himself in front of a train when he lost a PORTION of his fortune in the global market recession recently. There were a few high profile suicides with folks who were still rich, but not as rich as they once were. No, it's clear that money doesn't buy happiness but rather it is a tool. When the tool is used correctly, it can help to build more fulfilling lives for those who master its use.
Actually, I recently read a study that supports this 2 viewpoints. The bottom line was that yes, money DID increase happiness if it got you to the level that you could live somewhat comfortably...i.e.~ decent shelter, food, clothing, pay your bills etc. But beyond that point, it did not, at least in this study, increase happiness significantly.
Peope will treat you differently if they think you have money. An example happened to me recently as I was having some painting and satellite installations done. As the installers worked I asked about some upgrades, and they had the equipment in the truck, so they put it in without question (they told me it would cost an extra $100). When they were done I asked if I could run to the ATM and get some extra cash, because all I had were out of state checks. The installer said he was ok to take the check, because I lived in a nice house and figured I was good for it.
I had a similar, yet opposite experience the other day.
We live in a quiet, unassuming, lower-middle/middle class, established, semi-rural neighborhood. I consider us middle-class right now, but we were probably considered upper-middle this time last year.
We went to the grocery store, and the closest one to our home is in a very dense, poverty to lower-middle class neighborhood. I was dressed in "just going to the store" clothes, my wife looked decent and we had our two kids with us, who looked fine.
The checkout lady at the store assumed we were paying with food stamps, and ran my credit card (linked to checking) as such, so my card had to be run again due to her false assumption, she probably either based it on our appearance, the fact we had kids, or on local demographics.
Needless to say, I was a little offended. But at least she hadn't assumed we were paying with a credit card and were actually paying with food stamps, that might have been even more embarrassing.
Like everything else, theory of marginal utility applies. There is a plateau point as it pertains to the optimal value of the index of happiness as a function of accumulated wealth. This is to say, a greater effort becomes necessary to attain a diminishing fraction of extra ouput from the previous output level. Just like the top end of a car's speed envelope.
In my experience, taking into account my daily Cross of living frugally by neccessity and not by natural desire, money does very literally buy one happiness. If I had 10 times my yearly cost of living in surplus wealth I would be one happy motherf.... However, if I had 50 times my cost of living in surplus wealth I would not be much marginally happier than if I only had 10x my cost of living in surplus. The problem with the "Nay" sayers comes in when they fail to account for the position where an individual is capable and able to stop his desire for wealth accumulation when he/she reaches the aforementioned plateau point. Many are incapable of discerning that state, noted. But many of us can, which is why more money would make us happy.
I can say this with confidence, one's ability to adapt and put up with the scarcities of lower middle class living do not negate the fact that if I had money I wouldn't be burdened with the stress and struggles of doing more with less, and by its very definition would make me happiER, if not outright happy. Happy of course is a subjective contention. So count me in on the "YEA" column congressman....
As to the correlation of health and money, outside the access to healthcare,the comparison is disjointed at best. The best medicine in the world still cannot give you the genetics that make some people more desirable than others, faster than others, smarter than others etc. Thence arguing that money cannot be taken to the grave and therefore not worth pursuing in the first place is missing the point entirely. Money is a material currency of material acquisition. It won't get you to the pearly gates, but outright lack of it won't either. I rather have it. Problem comes in how to attain it without selling your soul/dignity/moral value system....which may explain why I'm lower middle class....there's always the lotto (aka my retirement plan)
I can sympathize with you. I dress VERY casually outside of my 'office job'. Sometimes I go the bank and such on weekends looking downright sloppy. Generally I get a kick out of the reaction when some teller thinks I am there to turn in a jar of pennies or something and I am really having funds transferred for a real estate deal and their attitude goes from "how quick I can get this bum back on the street" to "how can I make sure this guy doesn't tell my supervisor I was rude". Anyhow I have a business associate that is very Hispanic looking, but has lived in the US his whole life. He has told me he would never go to the bank looking like I do for fear that the teller's biases would come out -- they'd think he was a landscaper or day laborer, not a guy that owns a large number of properties and he'd get the third degree about what he was doing with all that money...
I do not think these really "discrimination" type situations, but people make all kinds of assumptions about what the sort of person that has 10x more in the bank than they make working for the bank would look like. And my friend is one of those people that is VERY "happy go lucky" most of the time, which annoys even me sometimes (especially when he knows he got a better deal than I did). Sometimes those appearances can work in his favor too, when a lender thinks that by doing business with a person that is obvious ethnic origins they can expand their "low income" outreach of "community lending", although in the case of my friend the "community" he now has residential property in is nicer than were I live and I am sure he is NOT a low income kind of guy
Quote:
Originally Posted by David Aguilar
I had a similar, yet opposite experience the other day.
We live in a quiet, unassuming, lower-middle/middle class, established, semi-rural neighborhood. I consider us middle-class right now, but we were probably considered upper-middle this time last year.
We went to the grocery store, and the closest one to our home is in a very dense, poverty to lower-middle class neighborhood. I was dressed in "just going to the store" clothes, my wife looked decent and we had our two kids with us, who looked fine.
The checkout lady at the store assumed we were paying with food stamps, and ran my credit card (linked to checking) as such, so my card had to be run again due to her false assumption, she probably either based it on our appearance, the fact we had kids, or on local demographics.
Needless to say, I was a little offended. But at least she hadn't assumed we were paying with a credit card and were actually paying with food stamps, that might have been even more embarrassing.
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Clothes /apperances belie preconceived notions...
