There are two kinds of money, says Japan’s best-selling self-improvement millionaire Ken Honda : happy money and unhappy money. Happy money is the kind that you use to buy your mum flowers or save for Glastonbury; unhappy money is the kind you use to begrudgingly pay your rent, bills and taxes.

“Whether you make a lot of money or very little, your money can be in either flow,” so choose the happy flow: rejoice when you receive money (it can be as simple as smiling) and give generously and “with joy”, whether it’s to charity or friends. Buy a stressed colleague a cup of tea and tip that waiter a little extra — it’ll make you happier, too.

There are so many ways regular old money can become Happy Money:

• helping a struggling family member out of a bind
• sending a few dollars to those affected by a hurricane
• raising money by selling cookies for a homeless shelter
• investing in a business or community project
• receiving money for work or services from satisfied clients.

• What is Better Happiness or Money?
• Does Money make you Unhappy?
• Is $80000 a Good Salary?
• Why is Money the key to Happiness?
• Why Money will never make you Happy?
• How Having good looks can bring Happiness?
• Is Money Important in Life?
• Why Being Rich is not Important?

What is Better Happiness or Money?

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.

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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.

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.

The point is that if you can’t be content, you’ll never lead a rich life, no matter how much money you have. The key to money management—and happiness—is being satisfied.

It’s not how much you have that makes you happy or unhappy, but how much you want. If you want less, you’ll be happy with less. This isn’t a psychological game or New Age mumbo-jumbo, it’s fact: The lower your expectations, the easier they are to fulfill—and the happier you’ll be.

That’s not to say you should lead an aimless life of poverty; quite the opposite, in fact. But most people confuse the means with the ends. They chase after money and Stuff in an attempt to feel fulfilled, but their choices are impulsive and random. Their “retail therapy” doesn’t address the root cause of their unhappiness: They lack goals and an underlying value system to help guide their decisions.

Does Money make you Unhappy?

Many people think that they will be happier if they just had more money. What are the facts, here?

Well, research shows that it’s certainly difficult to be truly happy if you live in poverty. If you’re always hungry or cold or living in unsafe surroundings or always owe somebody money, happiness can be elusive. So, below a certain income level, poor people are in fact less happy and less satisfied with their lives than most of us.

But above the poverty level, things get complicated.

Researchers at Princeton University analyzed data from a sample of over 450,000 adults in the United States. These respondents reported their annual income, and they rated how much they experienced positive emotions on the previous day.

Emotional quality was assessed by questions asking people to think about the previous day and to rate how much happiness and enjoyment they experienced, and how much they smiled and laughed.

The results showed that, up until an income of somewhere between $60,000 and $75,000—in 2010 dollars—more money was associated with feeling a little bit more happy. So a higher proportion of people who make, say, $70,000 tend to be happier than people who make, say, $40,000. The difference isn’t large, but it is statistically significant.

Money “Fixes Problems”

The reason that money increases happiness up to a point seems to be that having a certain amount of money helps to fix certain problems in life that make people stressed out and unhappy.

If my car breaks down, and I don’t have enough money to fix it, that’s stressful. If I have a health problem and not enough money, I have two sets of worries—my health and my money. If I get divorced and there’s not enough money for legal costs and keeping up two houses, the financial issues make the breakup worse than it would otherwise be.

So, it’s not so much that money makes people happy as that money can help to solve problems that would otherwise lower our happiness. So, having a certain amount of money helps take the sting out of our adversities.

Is $80000 a Good Salary?

Overall it’s a good salary but it depends on the location. Many people who live in SF, NYC, LA, and other top tier cities would say it is not so high. In SF for instance the median 2016 household income was $84,160. If you are single in NYC or SF you could certainly live decently on 80k but with a family and kids it would be hard.

That said, most people in the US don’t live in top tier cities. You can live very nicely on 80k in the vast majority of places in the US, including off the top of my head, places like North Carolina, Texas, the Midwest including Chicago, upstate NY, Las Vegas, etc.

And if you look at national average household income 80k is actually pretty high. Nationally median household income was only $56,516. The fact is the majority of Americans work their entire life without ever getting close to 80k a year so all things considered it’s a good salary.

Why is Money the key to Happiness?

One of the biggest questions that makes its way into many people’s lives is, “does money make you happy?”.In a short answer to the question, yes. In fact, it has been proven that the more money you make, the more likely it is for you to become happy.

Studies have shown that a growth in income, even if it is not a large amount, results in an increase in life satisfaction. Although many people may argue that it is family, life experiences, or respect that makes you happy, money makes these things more accessible, which in part, allows you to be able to become a happier person all together.

Many people have a misunderstanding of the phrase, “money can buy you happiness”. Many believe that the phrase means that if you have money, you automatically become happy and carefree. 

Of course, happiness cannot be bought, but the things that you use your money to buy can lead you to become happy. Research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you.

Many people are respected because of the car they drive, the clothes they wear, the house they live in, and many other materialistic items that someone can obtain.

But most of the time it is money that affords these people to be able to buy these things that make them respected by their neighbors. Essentially, money itself isn’t what makes an individual happy, it is the things that money allows them to do that makes them happy.

Studies have shown that people who make an annual income of $75,000 or more are recorded to have a higher capacity of happiness, while those who make under the annual income of $75,000 are recorded to be not as happy.

In fact, there are very few instances in which money leads to a decrease in happiness. These instances are not due to the fact that the person who is less happy makes a lot of money, these instances are due to a low income earning individual living amongst neighbors that bring in a higher income than themselves.

There is truth in the statement, “money can buy you happiness”. The more money you make, the more likely it is for you to become happy. This is due to the opportunities that money allows you to create.

With money, you are able to buy things or have new experiences that you would not be able to achieve without having a substantial amount of money, which will result in the increase of your overall happiness.

It is money that makes happiness easier to reach by giving you the chance to act upon ones wealth. Money can make you happy, but only if you use it to present yourself with things that make you happy.

Why Money will never make you Happy?

In a recent ESPN article about Kyrie Irving leaving Cleveland, former teammate Channing Frye said “happiness comes and goes in the NBA.” Wait, what? These guys are playing the game they dreamed about their entire life. The league’s median salary is $2.5 million. How does happiness come and go?

In the last three years with the Cavaliers, Kyrie went to three straight finals, won one of them, and made $50 million over that time. But it wasn’t enough to keep him happy.

There was a report out today that Rob Gronkowski, super human tight end for the New England Patriots “didn’t enjoy himself in 2017.” Gronk’s base salary was $8 million last year, or $500,000 per game. But it wasn’t enough to keep him happy.

Regardless of one’s bank account, happiness comes and goes in the NBA, in the NFL, and in life.

We can understand why Kyrie and Gronk weren’t happy, despite all the money they’re making and the houses that they’re living in and the cars that they’re driving. One of the best and worst things about the human mind is how quickly we adjust to a new reality.

Dan Gilbert, social psychologist and author of Stumbling on Happiness showed that people who recently became paraplegics are just as happy one year later as people who won the lottery. 

Relative to where we thought our happiness would be after winning the lottery, we adjust downward, and relative to where we thought our happiness would be after losing our legs, we adjust upward.

In Judd Apatow’s Netflix special, he spoke about the Porsche he got and what little joy it brought to his life. The joy you get in buying a Porsche doesn’t come on the day you buy it, it comes from imagining how you’ll feel on the day you buy it.

More money doesn’t provide more happiness because just like buying a fancy car, we overestimate how happy we’ll feel when we finally get it. It’s an internal buy the rumor sell the news event. And you can only imagine the pain and disappointment that comes from making more money and then realizing that isn’t filling the hole you thought it would

Another reason why more money doesn’t necessarily make you happier is because of the stress that comes with lifestyle creep. The more money you make, the more money you spend, and this is an incredibly difficult thing to keep in check.

One of the best lines we’ve ever seen on money comes from David Enrich’s The Spider Network. One of the character’s father said, “Money can’t make you happy, but it does allow you to be miserable in comfort.” 

Everyone loves money and the freedom it affords us, we just think that people overestimate how happy they’ll be when they make more of it. We think most people reading this will agree with this concept in theory, but not in practice. Like many things in life, it’s an idea that is hard to truly believe until we experience it for ourselves.

It’s difficult to be happy if you don’t have enough money. If you’re constantly stressed about paying your bills or putting food on your table, there’s not much room for happiness. But once you’ve got the basics covered, more doesn’t go very far.

How Having good looks can bring Happiness?

Beauty is the path to happiness—by way of money. A new series of studies shows that attractive people earn more money and marry better-looking spouses, and that the economic benefits of being good looking make them happier than their homely counterparts.

Logically, you’d think that efforts to improve one’s appearance would somehow lead to more happiness. But researchers say makeup, designer clothing, and plastic surgery aren’t the answers.

Economists at the University of Texas-Austin, led by Daniel Hamermesh, are fascinated with beautiful people. Guess that doesn’t make them unique. What’s special is that these economists have been analyzing years of surveys to determine correlations between appearance, income, and happiness.

In early studies, Hamermesh and his team have pointed out that more attractive people tend to make more money and pair off with more attractive spouses.

Now, researchers have reached the conclusion that beautiful people are happier, and a big reason why they’re happier is that they have more money:

“Personal beauty raises happiness,” says Hamermesh. “The majority of beauty’s effect on happiness works through its impact on economic outcomes.”

Beauty affects women’s happiness more than men’s, researchers say, and Hamermesh explained why that’s so to USA Today:

“For a woman, it just matters to walk down the street being good-looking. It hurts to walk down the street being bad-looking,” Hamermesh says. “For a man, beauty’s direct relation to happiness is not as great. It will give you a better-looking wife, a higher-earning wife and — most important — extra earnings.”

Another fairly well-proven path for a man to get a better-looking wife is to be rich—which, presumably, will then lead to happiness. So which comes first: wealth or happiness? Or beauty? At some point, this could become a chicken-egg discussion.

What’s puzzling is that other studies show that the traditional rewards of being rich—buying lots of stuff—don’t make people happy, and that happiness is something that more often comes with growing older, not growing richer. Researchers who study the super rich have also revealed that serious problems and stresses come with having too much money.

Putting the ultra-wealthy aside, though, there seems to be a consensus among researchers that it’s better to be rich and beautiful. Well, duh.

Should one strive to make more money and improve one’s appearance? As for the latter, Hamermesh said to USA Today:

“I know all the cosmetics folks and clothes folks say they can make you prettier, but the evidence for it just isn’t there,” he says, citing a 2002 study he conducted that looked at the effect of buying better clothes, hair and cosmetics.

“It doesn’t help much. … Your beauty is determined to a tremendous extent by the shape of your face, by its symmetry and how everything hangs together.”

I like that somewhat icky phrase: Isn’t your overall quality of life—family, money, friends, career, interests, and so on—determined by “how everything hangs together”?

Ultimately, it’s the people who obsess about their personal wealth and/or attractiveness that are less happy.

Is Money Important in Life?

Money is not everything, but money is something very important. Beyond the basic needs, money helps us achieve our life’s goals and supports — the things we care about most deeply — family, education, health care, charity, adventure and fun.

It helps us get some of life’s intangibles — freedom or independence, the opportunity to make the most of our skills and talents, the ability to choose our own course in life, financial security. With money, much good can be done and much unnecessary suffering avoided or eliminated.

But, money has its own limitations too. It can give us the time to appreciate the simple things in life more fully, but not the spirit of innocence and wonder necessary to do so. Money can give us the time to develop our gifts and talents, but not the courage and discipline to do so.

Money can give us the power to make a difference in the lives of others, but not the desire to do so. It can give us the time to develop and nurture our relationships, but not the love and caring necessary to do so. It can just as easily make us jaded, escapist, selfish, and lonely. How much do you need?

What is it going to cost you to get it? It is keeping these two questions in mind that gives us a true sense of money’s relationship to happiness. If we have less than what we need, or if what we have is costing us too much, we can never be happy.

We need money to eat, sleep, dress, work, play, relate, heal, move about, and enjoy comforts. We should remember in choosing our style that it comes with a price tag.

Evidence of the psychological and spiritual poverty of the rich and famous fills our newspapers, magazines, tabloids, and television programmes and hardly needs repeating here. “We always think if we just had a little bit more money, we’d be happier,” says Catherine Sanderson, a psychology professor at Amherst College, “but when we get there, we’re not.”

“Once you get basic human needs met, a lot more money doesn’t make a lot more happiness,” notes Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University and the author of the new book Stumbling on Happiness.

Yes, we get a thrill at first from expensive things. But we soon get used to them, a state of running in place that economists call the ‘hedonic treadmill’. The problem is not money, it’s us. For deep-seated psychological reasons, when it comes to spending money, we tend to value goods over experiences.

Money can help us find more happiness, so long as we know just what we can and cannot expect from it. Many researches suggest that seeking the good life at a store is an expensive exercise in futility. Money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. We should buy memories.

How much money it costs is not the issue, but how much the money costs us is important. Money should not cost us our soul, relationships, dignity, health, intelligence and joy in simple things of life.

People who figure out what they truly value and then align their money with those values have the strongest sense of financial and personal well-being.

Why Being Rich is not Important?

Many people seem to assume that living an amazing life is dependent on how much money you have.  It’s as if being rich is an instant one-way ticket to the good life.

But perhaps by focusing too hard on money as a solution to your problems, you’re missing another possibility:

You don’t need a lot of money to live a great life.

Money and the Good Life

It’s hard to downplay the importance of money completely.  After all, you need it to buy basic needs like food and housing – things you can’t live without.

If you can’t afford basic needs, more money can significantly improve your life. But if you have enough money to comfortably buy your basic needs, being rich won’t make as big a difference.

Look at it this way:

Imagine someone so poor they can’t afford decent clothes and struggles to buy food every week.  More money for that person would mean being able to afford these basic human needs. Money would drastically improve this person’s life.

Now imagine someone who has a good decent income and can buy nice things like a decent car and clothes.

If this person suddenly became rich, what more could they buy?  They could probably get an even nicer car and fancier clothes, perhaps some other luxurious items too.

But the change isn’t as drastic.  The overall quality of life hasn’t improved as much in the second example.

Once you’ve reached the point where your basic needs are filled, the value of money starts to diminish.  What you get for your money doesn’t have as big an impact.

The Things Money Can’t Buy

The reality is that many people focus on being rich because of all the attention we give to celebrities and rich people in the media.  We see them at exotic locations or living what we think is the “dream life”.

When we see this, we think “that’s the good life.  It’s all about money.”  So that’s where we focus our minds.

But that means losing sight of something that’s just as important – who you are.

There are a lot of things you simply can’t buy with money.  These are things that can positively affect your life and make it awesome.  Things like:

• Self-confidence
• A support network
• Your brain and intelligence
• A great attitude
• Social skills
• A risk-taking mindset
• Happiness

You can’t buy these things in a store.  You can’t order them online and have them shipped to you.  Yet they’re all important elements to living a great life.

Money isn’t the way you get these things.  These are things that are built and developed at any income level – not just when you’re rich.

Being rich isn’t going to change you into the kind of person who has these things.  If you won a million dollars tomorrow, you’ll still be the same person you are today.

Instead of focusing on the need to be rich, you should focus on who you are as a person.  Strive to become the person you want to be.  That’s the surest way to live the life you want to live.

Do You Really Need to Be Rich?

Remember this: you can have a ton of money and still be miserable.

Some persons would rather be someone with a modest income who has imagination, creativity and passion for living than a rich person who has none of these qualities.

We all understand the importance of money.  If you’re truly not getting enough, you have every right to go out into the world and look for more.

But if you do have enough – if you can meet all your basic needs as a human being, you should be spending more time looking inward at who you are as a person.  That’s where you’re greatest growth will come.

There’s nothing wrong with being rich.  In fact, it would be crazy to turn down the prospect of having more.  I certainly would like to have more.  But I won’t let the pursuit of money distract me from other equally important things going on inside me.

Let’s get over the thinking that money is the best path.  Being rich isn’t the perfect solution to living a great life.  There are so many other things you could be focusing on instead.

Final Thoughts

All the money circulated with love, care, and friendship is Happy Money. Happy Money makes people smile and feel loved and cared for deeply. It is in many ways an active form of love—a way in which people can see, feel, and touch. Often money can help others in a way that nothing else can.

For example, when someone is going through a major hardship, like losing their entire home to a fire, “thoughts and prayers” and “good vibes” will get them only so far.

However, I guarantee you that money will help a family get back on their feet, buy them food, and give them a temporary roof over their heads in a way that good vibes just can’t.

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Conversely, Unhappy Money is the kind of money you use to begrudgingly pay your rent, bills, and taxes. We don’t have to stretch our imaginations too far. We’ve all experienced the many forms of Unhappy Money:

• paying or receiving money as alimony after an ugly divorce
• receiving a salary from an employer for a job you don’t like but can’t bring yourself to leave
• unwillingly paying off credit cards with huge interest rates
• receiving money from someone who resents paying you—like an unhappy customer who says, “You don’t deserve it, but I’ll pay you anyway to honor the contract”
• stealing money—from anyone.

Money circulated in frustration, anger, sadness, and despair is Unhappy Money. This kind of money makes people stressed, desperate, aggravated, depressed, and sometimes violent.

It deprives people of their dignity, self-esteem, and gentleness of heart. Whenever you receive and spend money and you do so with negative energy, it becomes Unhappy Money