Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How much money do people need to be happy?

qz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 273 posts

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#181

Post by meuk »

LaurensBER wrote: post #161
howeyc wrote: post #17

Kind of makes sense to me, once you get to a point where you're set. That is you can easily afford the main things (housing, food), plus the extras (electronics, vacations, hobbies) you need a much larger income to "move the needle" so to speak. You still need to work 40 hours a week or whatever, and only get X weeks of vacation. Having a 180K salary instead of 150K doesn't change any of these obligations, or change…

> Of course, stepping from 40K to 100K in salary is practically life altering. Unless you absolutely suck at budgets you can easily get out of debt and start having real vacations. You can afford hobbies, etc. I live in the Netherlands where 40K is quite a reasonable income. I really dont get why you would need 100k to do the things you need. Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal? People here in general don…

I also live in the Netherlands and feel the same. I make less than 2k a month and already don't know what to do with my money. That being said, it probably helps if you have a reasonable healthcare system. If you get ill in the US, you're basically screwed.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#182

Post by IkmoIkmo »

faitswulff wrote: post #178
LaurensBER wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, stepping from 40K to 100K in salary is practically life altering. Unless you absolutely suck at budgets you can easily get out of debt and start having real vacations. You can afford hobbies, etc. I live in the Netherlands where 40K is quite a reasonable income. I really dont get why you would need 100k to do the things you need. Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal? People here in general don…

I don't know how health care works anywhere else, but health expenses can range from $250 for a standard checkup, which I just got (note: it's supposed to be covered for free, but apparently insurance companies are now rejecting claims willy nilly in order to save money) to $10,000 for delivering a baby, to astronomical numbers for anything else. It really leads to a persistent feeling of danger, so yes, making 100k…

> It really leads to a persistent feeling of danger, so yes, making 100k instead of 40k could literally save your life, or at least keep you from being an indebted loan shark victim for the rest of your life.

Right, that problem just doesn't exist in the Netherlands.

Basically everyone pays, I would guess, around $150 a month median for insurance, with a standard deviation of probably around $25. That covers anything life threatening and quite a bit more.

There's a bit of co-pay on things like dental and there's a mandatory own-risk of about $500 a year on certain procedures.

If you're about 10% below the median income in the Netherlands you get an insurance subsidy which tops out slightly above $100 a month.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#183

Post by IkmoIkmo »

aldanor wrote: post #163
LaurensBER wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, stepping from 40K to 100K in salary is practically life altering. Unless you absolutely suck at budgets you can easily get out of debt and start having real vacations. You can afford hobbies, etc. I live in the Netherlands where 40K is quite a reasonable income. I really dont get why you would need 100k to do the things you need. Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal? People here in general don…

I guess that is the whole point? I.e., you stop needing to be frugal and/or don’t have to count € when spending money on basic things like food or transportation. Also, more things become ‘basic’. Another point that makes a difference is that if you ever want to get a mortgage and buy a house, the maximum the banks will give you is a constant multiplier times your annual salary. In Ireland it’s 3.5x — good luck tryin…

> the maximum the banks will give you is a constant multiplier times your annual salary.

The multiplier isn't constant or fixed but dependent on interest rates. So there are certainly multipliers that work in certain periods, like about 4x now in the Netherlands. But that'll go down once rates rise, it's only a constant insofar as the long-term interest rates appear somewhat constant (or rather, sticky) in a given period of time. At the end of the day they look at ability-to-pay, and interest rates factor in to that, which are variable.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#184

Post by patd »

chii wrote: post #175
phaemon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bread" is also a colloquialism for money. It's the same joke.

I have never heard any rapper refer to money as bread!

Here is one where they use bread, dough and cheese to mean money: https://genius.com/105625

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#185

Post by cdoxsey »

I'm always struck by this proverb:

> “Two things I ask of you, Lord; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.

One thing I didn't see in the comments here, though I may've just missed it, is that with more money you have more of an opportunity to give it away. You can make a real difference for people in need. I suspect not many in the HN crowd tithe, by which I mean giving 10% of your income to charity, but perhaps it's something to consider, and probably more fulfilling than a slightly nicer car.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#186

Post by zaarn »

withdavidli wrote: post #170
LaurensBER wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course, stepping from 40K to 100K in salary is practically life altering. Unless you absolutely suck at budgets you can easily get out of debt and start having real vacations. You can afford hobbies, etc. I live in the Netherlands where 40K is quite a reasonable income. I really dont get why you would need 100k to do the things you need. Perhaps people need to become a bit more frugal? People here in general don…

student loan debt. there are many that graduate with $20k-$100k+ of debt. I'm frugal/cheap, got by with 30k salary in big city a year out of school was tough. Many coworkers that were more normal in spending habits were breaking even or using savings to make ends meet. At 30k salary, I was able to save $400-$500/month in Boston. It would have been near zero if I had student debt (6%+ interest). Frightening thinking b…

The obvious fix is that graduating shouldn't require someone to go into 100k+ debts.

The entire cost for my graduation is probably come in under 1000€ total, 800€ will be tuition and the rest directly university related spending. (There is an additional 2k€ spending on stuff like a new laptop, software, etc. that wasn't necessarily required but made things easier).

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#187

Post by IkmoIkmo »

Qwertious wrote: post #100
tasuki wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with most of your points! Just one thing: you don't need a "buy/rent a jet" income to not have to commute to work daily. Retiring early appears to be surprisingly easy with decent income and good spending habits. Taking a year or two off even more so. Eg with the 80k (the more expensive car you mentioned), you can live handsomely for 4+ years in South-East Asia or Eastern Europe.

>Just one thing: you don't need a "buy/rent a jet" income to not have to commute to work daily $3mil let's you live on $50k/year for 60 years. And realistically, more than that due to interest - 2% of 3mil is 60k, so if you have it well-invested you could live off it with $50k/yr indefinitely.

With that kind of money (i.e., so much money you can risk not earning anything for 10 years straight) you can open yourself up to a higher risk-profile.

Stocks for example have averaged, inflation adjusted, about 6% in the past 50 years. 6.6% in the past 60 years and 8.2% in the past 40 years, for comparison. So let's say 6%. This is inflation adjusted, and dividends reinvested.

At that point you're earning $180k a year. Even if you spend $100k, you'll be accruing money over time while maintaining purchasing power. In 50 years, you'd add another $4m of inflation-adjusted wealth for example, but that's wildly underestimating reality as that doesn't figure in the compound effects of adding $80 to your wealth each year.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#188

Post by AstralStorm »

gowld wrote: post #85
wenc wrote: post #42

> the psychologists who conducted the study find that the one making $200,000 is probably no happier than the one making $120,000. This is because both the $120,000 and $200,000 women have incomes above $105,000, which according to their research is the point at which greater household income in the US is not associated with greater happiness. The technical term for this cutoff is the income “satiation point.” Sounds…

This research, like so many others,ignored the possibly that people want to retire before they die, so need to amass savings.

Exactly, incomplete results being similar to Odds Ratios in medicine not based on endpoint mortality, morbidity and ratings.

Not to mention subject to massive binning effect. You might have binned single people with married couples with kids, both of which have different requirements.

Re: How much money do people need to be happy?

#190

Post by IkmoIkmo »

To be honest, I'm kind of tired seeing this 'research finding' pop up over and over again. It feels the whole world is familiar with it.

What I'm lacking is a thorough study of determinants and causal effects. Not just intuition that we're satiated, but something deeper.

For example, where is the study that compares a $200k wage earner vs a $200k capital earner, to provide indications that money merely be an approximation for 'freedom' or 'lower stress'.

Where's the study that looks at whether diminishing returns to happiness from money are due to social isolation the richer you get? i.e. making $100k a year makes you look great in an $80k crowd, and still allows you to mingle with a $40k crowd. But making $5m a year detaches you completely from being able to have meaningful relationships with 95% of people without eventually being viewed as different, unable to understand their daily plight and always doubting whether people envy you or dislike you.

I don't know if any of those things are true, but they are interesting to investigate. Not another superficial article talking about 'researchers have found the most basic correlation and share superficial 100 year old intuitive ideas about why that might be which they never investigated'.

Post reply on HN