The saying that “money is not everything” or “money does not give happiness” We have heard it hundreds of times, often with the tagline “but it helps” to surrender to the evidence that practically anyone, faced with a given situation, would prefer to deal with it with enough money.
Nevertheless, several studies have tried to trace the link between economic situation and happiness (or at least expressions of it in the subjects of each study, a set of indicators that in psychology is called ’emotional well-being) and the results are not as obvious as they seem.
But if we look at those that have been tested, studies have indicated the salary that people need to be happy, have analyzed why money does not make us as happy as we hope and have even raised the ideal ways to spend your money to be happy.
The salary of ‘happiness’
There is a kind of perfect “happiness” salary.
A well-known 2010 study by Princeton researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton found that people tend to feel happier the more money they make, up to a point that Kahneman and Deaton estimated at about $ 75,000 per year per person for a salary of the time in America, about 66,900 euros in direct transposition, although taking into account other differences such as the existence or not of public health, we could speak of a lower figure in our country. In general, between 4,000 and 5,000 euros per month.
The research concluded that once that threshold was passed, the increase in wealth did not make the participants feel happier, falling in decreasing increments.
The idea that underlying is that we need money to meet basic needssuch as access to health care and a safe place to live. To this we add later, in line with the Maslow pyramid, other needs until we reach a point of self-realization where more money does not usually bring major changes once an individual has some financial freedom so as not to feel burdened.
Happiness is a lot like charging more than the one next door
Another study looking for answers to this issue took a different approach, and concluded that humans are happy as long as we are certain that we charge more than our environment. This is because we have an evolutionary tendency to compare ourselves to other people.
Studies suggest that when we feel like we can’t maintain the same standard of living as our peers, we feel unhappy. Something similar to the typical scene in which a person changes cars when he sees his neighbor’s new one parked next to it.
In one way or another, psychology also applies the concept of hedonic adaptation to personal finances, which explains that people know how to adapt to various situations in life, whether they are considered good or bad.
That explains, for example, that when we get an increase in income, we rejoice, but after a while, we tend to want another raises or we find needs that need a higher income.
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