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Can money buy happiness? If money can really buy happiness, how much would it cost?

Of course, there’s a lot of things that money can’t buy. Saying money can buy happiness does sound superficial. Perhaps to some, money and happiness are two concepts that should not even be talked about together. Well, that’s exactly contrary to what I think - money and happiness has A LOT to do with each other!

In this last part of Money Mindset Series, I like to sum up by talking about money and its relations to two important areas of our life: career and relationships .

Before I carry on, I like to qualify that I’m not the mercenary sort who believes that having lots of money equals having happiness. I do agree that money cannot buy happiness. However, in our world today, money has a lot of influences on other areas of life which leads to fulfillment.

The chart below shows the positive influence that you will have on career and relationships when you manage your money well. I will elaborate on them next.

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This blog is about leading a balanced life focusing on career, relationships and money. You can read more about balancing your life here. These articles are written for you. If you find them useful, feel free to subscribe for regular updates as new articles are posted. It's FREE. :)

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In part III of The Money Mindset Series , I highlighted the need to invest and grow your money to facilitate living a balanced life. In order to have money to invest, it makes sense to save and be frugal about money. There is no point in talking about investing if you are living paycheck to paycheck.

In this part of The Money Mindset Series, I will elaborate on consumer spending - the mindset behind it and how it is detrimental to living a balanced life . Specifically, we will examine the following mindsets:

• Living an expensive lifestyle is happiness.
• The temptations of instant gratification.

BUYING YOUR DREAM LIFESTYLE - A MINDSET FROM MODERN ADVERTISING

Everyone one of us desire a certain lifestyle. A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living as expressed by their interests, motivations, activities, desired experiences, and beliefs. The lifestyle that you pursue is closely related to your definition of happiness. It is influenced by your childhood experiences, parents’ lifestyles and your peers.

At the same time, our ideal lifestyle is also heavily influenced by marketers and the mass media.

In order to entice consumer’s money, some marketers project a promise to the dream lifestyle through their products. Unfortunately, this form of messaging also results in a prevailing notion that consumer spending is the path to fulfilling our deepest desire. The following advertising examples will make my point:

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One common challenge that I hear about developing additional sources of income is: “I don’t have the time to work for another source of income.” It is obvious that underlying this is the old school money thinking . I can certainly understand the mindset behind this as I once belong to this category of people - thinking that labor is the only way to generate income. This is not true; besides active labor, there are other ways of generating income.

In part 2 of the Money Mindset Series , we have debunked the traditional mindset that hard work alone is no longer the currency of the 21st century. We need to move away from working hard, to working smart. At the same time, I’ve highlighted that to enjoy better job security and life balance - we need to develop additional sources of income.

In this part of the Money Mindset Series , I like to elaborate on one way to generate passive income through wise investments of your money. At the same time, I like to challenge some traditional money mindset related to investing:

• The savings account is the best investment as it has the lowest risk.
• Investing is gambling.
• You need to take high risk to enjoy high returns.
• I need lots of money to make money (or invest).

When I was young, I remember hearing horror stories from my parent about relatives being burned at shares trading and lost their entire fortune overnight. For those of you whose parents have lived through the Great Depression, I’m sure you will find such stories very familiar. For me, I grew up connoting investing to high risk speculations that I should never ever touch. Much later in my life, I realized what a costly mindset that was! I had lost so much time and opportunities to grow my money.

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In the first part of the Money Mindset Series, I highlighted some money mindsets that may be hindering our financial success and living a balanced life. In the rest of the series, I will take some common mindsets and expand on them. In part 2, I like to address the following common mindsets with regards to work and money:

• I have to work really, really hard to get rich.
• Striving for wealth won’t allow much time for anything else in life.
• I love my family, so I should work really hard to provide for them.

THE OLD SCHOOL MONEY THINKING

The old school money thinking teaches us to study hard, get good grades and get a well-paying job. Next, work hard and wait for the annual increments. If you are good at your job, there may be promotions every 3 to 5 years. With this concept, your income will increase over time as shown in the chart below. It definitely looks like a good idea, having the security of guaranteed income every month which is increasing every year. It does seems that good life is ensured with this approach… or is it?

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Do you want to be rich? Do you want lots of money?

It’s likely that 9 out of 10 people will answer ‘Yes’ to these two questions. However, do you know that only 2 out of these 9 truly believe that they want to be rich? Deep inside, The remaining 7 out of 9 people actually don’t want to be rich because they either don’t feel good about being rich OR they don’t like what is required to be rich. Essentially, their money mindset is not aligned with their financial goals. This is one key reason why so many people struggle with money.

There’s a chance that you are one of the 7 who say they want to be rich, but actually don’t want to be rich.

The first of the 5-parts Money Mindset Series is aimed to help you reveal your hidden money mindset, understand them and realign them to your financial objectives, so that you can finally stop this struggle with money.

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One of the most common reasons for unhappiness is money issues. Your success at managing and handling money has a lot of impact on other areas of your life like relationships and career. For example, I have heard of many stories about couples who constantly quarrel about money, and also stories of people who are stuck to their unsatisfying job because they need the money to pay bills/debts. These are examples of people whose quality of life are being affected by poor money management:

• If the couples know how to talk about and manage money as a couple, there will certainly be less arguments because of money.
• If a person knows how to manage money and not get him/herself into debt, then he/she will have more freedom to move to another more satisfying job.

Money matters are important matters, and you should give some conscious thoughts to how you currently handle money and the mindset behind it.

When I first examined my money mindset, I was surprised to find some beliefs that were actually hindering my success at money matters. I didn’t realize that I had such mindsets until I did a guided exercise to review it. Some of my mindsets are good and aligned with my goals, but some of not aligned and I was unknowingly sabotaging myself against my financial goals.

I believe you will benefit from this exercise too. As such, I will be posting a ‘Money Mindset’ series in the coming days to help you be more aware of your money mindset.

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I started this blog with the intention to provide my insights on living a balanced life through personal development. Over time, I have crystallized this mission into the three-legged stool concept.

The diagram shows a three-legged stool: my depiction of a balanced life. Each leg of the stool is a key pillar needed for life fulfillment as follows:

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In his article Tackle Any Issue With a List of 100, Luciano shows us how to tackle any issue with a list of 100 possible solutions.

Today, I like to share a list of 100 great personal development resources to improve your Career, Relationships and Money - in accordance with the aim of A Long Long Road. So, here goes:

CAREER AND WORK

Work In General

1. Should You Report Sexual Harassment in the Workplace - well, the title speaks for itself.
2. Should I Report Ethical Misconduct At Work? - we all may face this judgment call in one point or another in our career. Should we report it?
3. Why do Some People Consistently Inspire Others to Follow Their Lead? - some qualities of great leaders to inspire you.

Career

4. Telework is Good for You - teleworking can really help to strike the work life balance, when done properly.
5. How To Stop Being So Afraid Of Changing Careers - changing career may be a very scary thing, but it’s can also bring a lot of happiness and fulfillment if done correctly. So how do you take this brave step?
6. Exploring Career Choices - what are the career choices to a great life? This articles shows you the considerations to help you think it through.
7. Accessing the Hidden Job Market - other than the normal job agencies and classified ads, there are other hidden channels to seeking a new job. Here are some tips about hidden job market.
8. One Critical Factor That Will Make Or Break Your Career - no matter how great you are at work, you will not be professionally successful without this.
9. What Is Most Likely To Help You Reach The Top? - a similar theme to the previous post.
10. Top 5 Reasons to Quit a Job - common reasons to quit your job, and dealing with them.
11. How to Sell Yourself (and Why Your Career Depends On It) - it’s true, no matter how great you are at your job. Nobody’s going to know about it until you do a little self-marketing. Here’s some tips to do it correctly.
12. 10 Tips for a Successful Meeting With The Boss - when meeting with your boss, you need to be prepare to save his/her time and leave a good impression. Here’s 10 tips to help you along.
13. What To Do When The Recruiter Calls - we all faced this at one point or another in our career, a recruiter. Here’s how to handle the recruiter.

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Since young, I had this bad habit with money: I couldn’t save. I would save money for a while, and once I’d accumulated some savings, I would spend everything on some big ticket items and reset my savings balance to zero.

After I started earning income, I would set a goal to save some money each month. However, by the end of each month, I would have spent almost every single cent I earned and had very little left to save. Even when I managed to save something, some big ticket purchase would come along and ate up all my savings.

It was pretty frustrating. On one hand, I knew I had to save some money; on the other hand, I kept sabotaging myself by impulsive spending. There were also times when I had to use my savings due to emergency or unforeseen spending like medical bills, vehicle repairs, household maintenance…

For many years, I kept oscillating between saving, spending, saving, spending… As such, I never really have any savings until recent years.

Now, I have set aside an emergency fund to last me more than 6 months if I’m retrenched, and I have another basket of money saved up which is growing every year. I mentioned there are 3 levels of financial freedom; the first level - financial stability can be easily reached with a proper saving strategy.

This is my simple surefire way to help you reach financial stability through saving and also prevent you from spending what you’ve saved:

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The good thing about money is not the luxuries or goodies it can buy for you, but it is the freedom that it affords you to do the things you want to do.

Why should schools teach personal finance? It’s because a fulfilling life depends on it!

Does personal finance fit into the theme of living a balanced life? In my opinion, it’s a resounding “Yes!” One of the four key pillars of a happy and fulfilling life is financial stability. Being financially sound has far reaching effects on other areas of your life. Probably more than you understand or expect.

The aim of this blog is to deliver practical and actionable tips to help you live a balanced life. Other than advocating high moral sounding principles of courage and integrity, which are necessary for spiritual fulfillment; we also need to balance that with life’s practicality of having to pay the bills and our needs to bring bread to the table everyday.

An unbalanced approach to life skewed in either direction will not help in achieving happiness.

THE OLD SCHOOL THINKING ABOUT MONEY.

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