As we close out our month exploring the intersection of money and happiness, we’ve learned quite a bit.
We’ve learned how money and happiness are linked and how a threshold level of income avoids unhappiness. We’ve also learned a few methods for getting more happiness out of the money that we already spend.
Last week we looked at where we should be spending more money to make ourselves happier and Tuesday we explored the issue of opportunity cost and where more money would make us less happy.
Today, we’re going to take a more complicated look at opportunity cost and tackle a very tricky issue that most people struggle with: weighing the short term against the long term when it comes to money and happiness. Continue reading “Balancing Money and Happiness Over Time”
We’ve covered a lot of ground already, including a few ways to 
We spent the first week of May learning 
We’ve already learned that 
First, we can get a big picture overview. We did that last week when we looked at the 
Hedonic adaptation is one of the key forces that prevents us from becoming happier. It misleads us into thinking that the wrong things will make us happy.
What we found was that some amount of money allows us to spend our way out of intense stress and unhappiness. Once we can comfortably afford the necessities – food, shelter, and safety – our happiness goes up. After that it is more of a mixed bag.
People love to tell you that money can’t buy happiness.