Money can buy Happiness?

The voices in our head 

We’ve all heard the phrase ‘money can’t buy happiness’  – with all the anecdotes to support it. Miserable billionaires, depressed lotto millionaires. Is it really so? We all know that poverty certainly doesn’t buy happiness, what does?

We have some pretty unhelpful double standards that we try to live by. Having ‘stuff’ and living life ‘loud proud and conspicuous’ is classified as ‘successful’ and is envied and emulated. The fact that that ‘conspicuous consumption’ is often funded by massive debt is considered irrelevant – unless you are declared bankrupt. It’s a fine line. The more debt, the less it takes to tip you over the edge into bankruptcy or debt review and the stigma that goes with it.

You don’t have to be massively in debt to get into financial trouble, so forget all those smug thoughts about how much better you are than your neighbour. Retrenchment of just one of the bread winners in a family can be enough to tip the finances into real trouble, especially early in their careers with children and new bonds. A bad accident or cancer scare can devastate your finances – even on medical aid. Loss of just one major client in a business can devastate its cash flow and owners are usually the first to take a pay cut. Anyone supplying the government exclusively is sitting on a knife edge – you can go months or years before being paid. The only protected employment left is in the government, they are also the only ones that have been ‘solving’ our unemployment problem in the last 8 years (paid for of course with tax-payers money, why else do you think the tax rate went up?) Years of below inflation increases in the private sector has eroded everyone’s disposable income – not helped by way above increases from monopolies like Eskom, water, services. We are all less well off than we were in 2007, and for those that didn’t have enough slack to begin off with, there are no more notches left to pull in on the belt.

So, what creates happiness and can we bottle it? Obviously thousands of books have been written on the subject, but one of the biggest factors is the ‘absence of stress’. Financial stress is only one small part of that, sure. There is family and relationship stress, career stress, health stress and others – but financial stress is a big one – and it can impact on all the others. Financial stress between couples is the biggest cause of divorce. This stress can be caused by couples with incompatible financial behaviour (saver versus spender) or two big spenders having to live with the fall-out from their financial behaviour.

Action: Your personal financial plan should go beyond the numbers, you need to look at your lifetime objectives and the financial behaviour that might be preventing them happening. You deserve a trusted adviser or coach who will give you sound financial advice that doesn’t necessarily line their pockets.

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