Well, happiness levels tend to increase with more money so that’s one marker.
Do you really believe there's no upper bound to that effect?
I’m not sure.
For the person who would be happy with a nice apartment in the city and a second home on the beach in Florida half or more of a $10m stash could be spent on real estate. Say that leaves $5m for a retirement WR of $175k. Taxes and carrying costs on the residences could take maybe $125k, leaving about $4k a month to live. Would she be happier to spend $5k+ a month? Maybe there’s family who could use a little help…maybe there’s grandkids?
Perhaps there’s a limit. But $10m—nice as it is—is probably not it for many people.
I have a beautiful city apartment and a summer home on the ocean in one of the most stunning locations on earth. They cost me less than 300K combined.
In a consumerism society, there will always be a way to spend more money on things that are relatively modest in terms of their benefits. No one is arguing that there isn't.
That's a feature of the MMM philosophy, not a flaw.
By focusing on spending less, you can sometimes be pushed to be more creative about your options and truly assess the value of them.
I always wanted a waterfront summer home. This is just something I always knew I wanted. By focusing on finding less expensive options, I pushed myself to explore less common locations. I made hundreds of phone calls researching different areas of the country.
I landed on a spot in the middle of nowhere, talking to a real estate agent who used to work in the same industry I used to work in. He and his wife were about our age, child free, similar professional backgrounds and interested. They were from Toronto.
They had taken a vacation out here one year and fell so in love with the area that they impulse bought a house that weekend. Then after coming here for a few summers, they dreaded going back to Toronto, so they left their life, their careers, and moved here.
I was like...well fuck, that's a hell of an endorsement.
There was a property that would make for a good AirBnB investment, so I figure "fuck it" I would buy it, spend a summer renovating it for rental, but also see if this place was as magical as it sounded.
And that's how I ended up buying a property 31 hours away on a remote island off of an island at the edge of the earth in a place I had never even visited. It was also an insanely good deal due to timing, so I didn't want to pass up this particular property.
Within a few weeks of getting here, I absolutely fell in love with the place and the people and now we live here as much as humanly possible and literally everyone who talks to me can see that I absolutely light up when I talk about it. My therapist says buying this house was the smartest decision I've ever made in my entire life.
My point is that if I had endless money and no reason to be actively frugal, I wouldn't have pushed myself to research the entire country, I would have just purchased a lovely river front cottage within an hour of my house, and it would have been lovely, but not massively happiness increasing like this house is. This location is world famous for its astounding nature and incredible people.
Having near-limitless money is convenient, but convenience is not always optimal. Frugality forces the kind of analysis and creative thinking that really pushes you to be introspective about the value of your lifestyle decisions.
Having the money to solve problems with obvious solutions is AMAZING. I'm a big fan of having enough wealth. The amount of cash I've thrown at health problems in the past few years is substantial and I'm insanely grateful to have just piles of capital to throw at expensive problems. I don't want to have to contemplate if thousands of dollars on walking aides is worth the investment, I just buy the expensive walking aides no matter how briefly I benefit from them.
BUT, while there are many decisions out there that simply benefit from more money, there are many, many more that benefit from deeper introspection and insight about self and happiness.
I'm sure that for many people, the expensive city condo and the expensive summer home really are the optimal choice, and spending millions on them really is the best use of their resources. Cool, good for them. But my point is that the cornerstone philosophy of this place is that people put blinders on and just look at the more expensive options as default "better," when there are often creative solutions outside of someone's comfort zone that might be far superior and just not considered.
I found MMM when DH and I were making absolute shit piles of money and we were kind of listless and bored with the lifestyle that more money could buy us. Neither of us were delighted with our jobs either and were on track for climbing the ladders we didn't really want to be on.
Our superiors were wealthier, but utterly miserable and we didn't really want their lives. Mustachianism pushed us to really quantify and qualify what we wanted from our lives, and it turned out that a much, much lower spend produced better outcomes.
Which worked out AMAZINGLY well when I became suddenly disabled and we lost my income, which was double his. So having an AWESOME quality of life that we could readily afford already on his lower income was fucking phenomenal.
And since becoming disabled, that same creative, frugal decision making has resulted in our quality of life steadily increasing since I lost my career.
So while I fully understand that other people have different preferences and lifestyles that truly benefit from more than 10M, ours really wouldn't. And we've put in an enormous amount of work reflecting and communicating to figure out what truly works for us.
I would say if a couple can go through losing a career, the bulk of their income, one partner developing severe chronic pain and losing their ability to walk properly, all during the pandemic, and they manage to come out the other side much happier, then something went right.
And I solidly credit that to our earlier years of exploring the value of spending less to get more.
A bunch of us recently did the Yale course on the Science of Well Being, and virtually every single lesson in the course was something that DH and I figured out through frugality. Not because we always spent less, but because we critically assessed every single trade off in our lives for the maximum benefit.
DH and I now both have careers we absolutely love. We both pivoted away from making more money and towards doing more meaningful and enjoyable work. We both have a deep commitment to health and fitness. Frugality pushed us both to give up alcohol, which actually makes socializing more fun and allows for much richer memories. It pushed us bot to socialize with friends at expensive restaurants, but to do challenging things together, which creates deeper bonds. It pushes us to travel with our animals instead of kenneling them, and that pushes us to try out some really unusual, off the beaten path spots, and focus more on nature-based adventures than tourism.
Most of all, and this is by far the most important thing. It's pushed us to really, heavily invest in loved ones. A 3 hour phone call with my dad on a Sunday morning, sitting on my deck that my neighbour built for me for free, watching the whales play in the harbour costs me a few cents for the tea bags in my pot, and is worth more than any activity I could go out and pay for.
I've worked with seniors for many, many years and few regret not spending more, but most regret not spending more time investing in love.
