Does Money Bring Happiness?

During any discussion about making more money and achieving financial freedom you will have a few persons trying to play down the importance of having money, saying money is not important, or else something to the effect that the pursuit of wealth is in some way evil, that having money is the surest way to hell. (But have you ever heard a wealthy person complain about having money?)

Let us approach this question another way. Does not having money take away something from your life, make you less happy?

We need money to bring us the essentials of life. For the basics  food, clothing, shelter, for meeting educational expenses for ourselves and our children, medical expenses for our family including parents. We need money for a life of comfort beyond just the basics  for good food, for a big enough house, for our cars, to eat out once in a while, for entertainment, to support our favourite causes and our favourite charities. We need money to take care of contingencies.

In short, we need to have enough money so that you are not worried about money.

Not having money takes away from the quality of our life, and difficulty in meeting essential expenses and the resultant stress could even add to relationship problems. Not having money does take away from our happiness.

However, several international surveys, covering different cultures and lifestyles, have found that having much more money than we need for all the above does not make us any happier. In other words, being comfortably rich can contribute to our happiness, but being filthy rich does not necessarily make us happier.

The first step on your way to wealth and financial freedom is your acceptance of wealth as a pleasant necessity, and the pursuit of wealth as a legitimate and moral activity.  

The pursuit of wealth does contribute to our happiness and well-being. It is the single-minded pursuit of wealth, to the exclusion of all else, that takes away happiness.

A comfortable financial position makes you free to focus on the truly important things in life.