Age Your Financial Attitude for Greater Happiness

It seems that old, white male Republicans have an edge on happiness.  Before you go “ewwwwww – who wants to be one of those”, I’m not proposing that anyone change genders or political affiliations. However, let’s consider the financial fine print of these findings (or at least my interpretation of them). Read more

Money May Satisfy But Does Not Bring Happiness

I am intrigued by the relationship between money and behavior. Knowing something about it helps me understand why I and the people around me do some of the crazy things that we do with our money and our time.

We often hear that “money can’t buy happiness.”  This suggests that society in general is aware of and believes in the truth behind the words.

So why doesn’t society act like they believe it? Why is there so much political discourse and media focus on who has money and who doesn’t? Read more

Want to Buy Happiness? Do Something.

Psychologists are fascinated – and rightly so – with discovering what aspects of our lives are likely to bring us happiness.  That fascination includes studying and measuring how spending money in different ways can influence our happiness both positively and negatively.

I think that we should pay attention to this research.  Anytime we can understand our own behavior when it comes to spending, we improve the odds that we will spend our discretionary income in ways that are less wasteful.  Considering all of the credit-partying we have been doing as a society over the past 10-15 years, maybe we all need a crash course in learning why we did it and how it failed us.   Read more