Your Money_ The Missing Manual - J. D. Roth [6]
Yup, Enough gets a capital E, too. You'll learn more about deciding how much is Enough later in this chapter. (And don't worry: There aren't any more words with goofy capitals ahead.)
Unfortunately, in real life you don't have handy visual aids to show the relationship between your spending and your happiness; you have to figure out what Enough is on your own. But as you'll see in the next section, because we've been conditioned to believe that more money brings more happiness, most people reach the peak of the Fulfillment Curve and then keep on spending.
Caught Up in the Rat Race
Typically, as your income increases, your lifestyle grows with it. When your boss gives you a raise, you want to reward yourself (you deserve it!), so you spend more. All that new Stuff costs money to buy, store, and maintain. Gradually, your lifestyle becomes more expensive so you have to work harder to earn more. You think that if only you got another raise, then you'd have Enough. But in all likelihood, you'd just repeat the process by spending even more.
Psychologists call this vicious cycle the hedonic treadmill, though you probably know it as the "rat race." People on the hedonic treadmill think they'd be happy if they just had a little more money. But when they get more money, they discover something else they want. Because they're never content with what they have, they can never have Enough.
Most Americans are stuck on this treadmill. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (http://tinyurl.com/census-inc), in 1967 the median American household income was $38,771 (adjusted for inflation). Back then, less than one-fifth of U.S. families had color TVs and only one in 25 had cable. Compare that with 2007, when the median household income was $50,233 and nearly everyone had a widescreen color TV and cable. Americans now own twice as many cars as they did in 1967, and we have computers, iPods, and cellphones. Life is good, right? But despite our increased incomes and material wealth, we're no happier than were in the '60s.
Note
In case it's been a while since your last math class, here's a quick refresher: If you have a set of numbers, half of them will be greater than the median, and half will be less. The median is usually different from the average. For example, in the group of numbers 2, 3, 4, 5, and 101, the average is 23, but the median is only 4. (If economists talked about average incomes instead of median incomes, their numbers would be skewed by billionaires like Warren Buffett.)
Since 1972, the National Opinion Research Center has been polling Americans about their happiness (http://tinyurl.com/norc-gss). As you can see in the following graph, the numbers haven't changed much over the past 35 years. About one-third of Americans consistently say they're "very happy" with their lives (http://tinyurl.com/gss-happy), while a little less than one-third say they're "pretty well satisfied" with their financial situations (http://tinyurl.com/gss-satfin).
Figure 1-2. Info from the National Opinion Research Center's General Social Survey
If Americans are earning more, why aren't they happier? We've been led to believe that prosperity brings peace of mind, but it turns out your grandfather was right: Money isn't everything.
The bottom line: Money can't make you happy if your increased wealth brings increased expectations. In other words, if you want more as you earn more, you'll never be content; there will always be something else you crave, so you'll need to work even harder to get the money to buy it. You'll be stuck on the hedonic treadmill, running like a hamster on a wheel.
The hedonic treadmill leads to lifestyle inflation, which is just as dangerous to your money as economic inflation; both destroy the value of your dollars. Fortunately, you can control lifestyle inflation. You can opt out, step off the treadmill, and escape from the rat race. To do that, you have to set priorities and decide how much is Enough. The next section shows you how.
How Much Is Enough?
Kurt Vonnegut used to recount a conversation he