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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.
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