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Mindy: Does money buy happiness? If you’re pursuing FI, you’ve probably wondered, will reaching financial independence actually make me happy? We pursue FI because we believe it will help to make us happy, or at least have a better chance of being happy. Today, we’re getting the opinion of the world’s leading happiness researcher on exactly this topic. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. My name is Mindy Jensen and with me as always is my happy outside his net worth co-host, Scott Trench.
Scott: Thanks, Mindy. It’s so great to be here. And today, we’re going to chat with a content creator. Look at that. Look what I did there. Yeah, right? This is going to be a really wonderful episode. Today, we’re going to be joined by Dr. Matt Killingsworth, who is the leader in the world researching happiness. He has pioneered studies, created original data sets. He is a senior fellow at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the founder and director of trackyourhappiness.org, which is a completely free and wonderful tool that everybody listening to this podcast should sign up for immediately. Um, and I have. Dr. Matt Killingsworth has pioneered research in the field of happiness and disproven a study you might have heard of from years back that said happiness plateaus at a $75,000 income or something like that. He has much, much deeper and more comprehensive research and is a true privilege to get to a chance to chat with him and learn from him today. I I will go so far as to say is, Matt is if not the best, in the top one, two, five arguably, almost anyone would would argue that you are among the most well- researched, most knowledgeable people on this subject in the world at this point. Is that too high of praise to give you matters, is that an accurate description of where you’re at?
Guest: I won’t confirm, but I won’t necessarily disagree either.
Scott: I think the argument is that you’re the best. and and we’re so grateful and thankful that you’ve decided to come on Bigger Pockets money and share your wisdom with us today. It’s really an honor. We’re so excited to talk about this.
Guest: Happy to be here.
Scott: So, can you give us a little bit about your background and how did you how did you get started studying the relationship between money and happiness?
Guest: For me it really started with an interest in happiness itself. I think a bit like the premise behind fire and trying to think about like how do I craft a life that I really enjoy, craft the life that I want to live. I found myself wondering, I was working as a product manager in the enterprise software industry like, what is it that we’re all kind of trying to achieve here? I’m moving along in my career and being successful, but kind of what is that ultimate outcome that we’re all striving towards? And as I thought deeply about that question, the answer that I arrived at was some version of human happiness. Like we care about things to the extent that they make our lives better. Probably a lot of people have had that thought, but for me it sent me back to graduate school and to get a PhD, and now I’ve spent the last, you know, almost 20 years sort of studying this question of what is human happiness? What are the causes of it? How do we pursue it? And I’ve run one of the world’s biggest studies trying to understand it called Track your Happiness, which you mentioned. Within all of that, you know, there there are a lot of different things that contribute to happiness and we’ll probably talk about a number of them today, but one of the most studied topics and one that I think is of great interest to everyone is the relationship between money and happiness. Obviously, we spend a lot of our lives at least during the time period when we’re employed, working in large part because we get paid to be there. And so we’re kind of constantly making this trade-off of, you know, how am I going to spend my time potentially working to earn money. But on the other hand, I care about that money, maybe because I hope it’s going to make my life better. And so I think we all really would like to understand the relationship between these two things. I can tell you more about kind of where the scientific literature was, some of the things that I did and I found, but that was kind of my lead up to to happiness generally and then, you know, money I think is one important part of that.
Scott: I’m so eager to jump to the conclusions, but I’m going to hold myself back a little bit because I I know some of them and I think it’ll be more helpful for me and and for maybe people listening to understand how your research evolved? What were the questions you asked at first? What did you do to discover what you’ve discovered? And what surprised you along the way?
Guest: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so I was really passionate and curious about understanding happiness and the causes of happiness. And to be able to do that, I created this platform called trackyourhappiness.org and in fact it’s still up and live, it’s totally free. Anyone listening can go sign up and and try it out if they want to. And basically I use that to sort of initiate what eventually became arguably the biggest intensive study of happiness in the world. The way that works is, I guess a lot of research on happiness uses what you might call ordinary surveys. So I might at one point in time ask you a bunch of facts about your life, how much money you earn, what kind of job you have, what country you live in, maybe some aspects of your personality, some other kinds of things, and then ask you some questions about your level of happiness. And we figured out a lot about happiness from those kinds of surveys. But the approach that I took in my research was to really say, we’re really missing a big part of what actually composes human life. And that is, what do we really experience on a day-to-day basis? And there was this amazing method. If anyone has read or heard of the book, Flow or Finding Flow by a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, I think that’s the correct pronunciation, but my apologies if it’s not. He invented all the way back in the 70s, this method called the experience sampling method, which is basically the idea of pingging people in the moment as they’re going about their actual everyday lives, and then try to understand what was their experience at that moment and another moment, and another moment across a bunch of different moments. And you basically get this window into what are people actually experiencing. When I was a graduate student, you know, I was looking around at the scientific literature and seeing, you know, where’s this amazing method. I mean, Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, who nevertheless was a psychologist, someone I later had an intensive collaboration with myself, you know, he said, this is the best way to measure and understand happiness. But when I was a graduate student looking around and seeing, but where are all these, you know, great scientific studies using the experience sampling method, there were very, very, very few. And it was because this method was really, it was expensive, it was cumbersome to use. When studies were conducted, they tend to be at like 12 people. This was around the time that smartphones were just coming onto the scene and I sort of put together my background in engineering, in economics, in software development and said, hey, we can take this amazing method that, you know, many people say is the best best method for measuring and understanding happiness and maybe deploy it on a massively larger scale, on a bigger scale than we’ve ever been able to do before. And that was the inception of Track your Happiness. So I basically thought, you know, could I use these phones that millions of people were going to soon be carrying around to kind of report in on what is my actual life like? What am I feeling? What am I experiencing? What am I thinking about? Who am I spending my time with? And this whole aspect of what we really spend our time doing instead of being mostly opaque to scientists, we could now collect data on it and understand how that contributes to the quality of our life.
Mindy: So, we’ve all heard the phrase, money doesn’t buy happiness, but you’ve never seen somebody crying in a Lamborghini. And yes, and, but money solves money problems. Money doesn’t solve your relationship with your daughter. Money doesn’t solve your relationship with your mother. Money solves money problems. So yes, money can make you a little bit happier because when I’m not worrying about paying my bills and where am I going to get food for my kids, my my stress level is much lower. But it only solves money problems. And I think that is one of the biggest issues that I have with some people who are on the path to financial independence. They’re so focused on, oh, I can’t wait to quit my job that they don’t think about all the other things that they need to incorporate into their lives to truly be happy. What are some of the things that you find makes people happy that aren’t money? Because, you know, everybody just thinks that once I reach financial independence, everything’s going to be great.
Guest: First, I just want to pause and agree with you and I can tell you how I think about that and this really emerges now from, you know, many years of my own research and and other folks’s research. Happiness is something that really arises from a a portfolio of factors. So, you know, kind of in the same way that, you know, when you’re investing, you maybe don’t want to put your entire net worth into one stock, when it comes to happiness, well, happiness is produced by a lot of different things. One of the important insights that can create for us is the reality that no single factor is going to be enough. If you focus only on getting, you know, the most money, you’re you’re kind of ignoring a large set of other factors that are also really important for happiness. And that’s true for any single factor. I think people tend to get kind of over fixated on fixing one aspect of their life and the reality is a lot of other things are probably going to play an important role. So back to your question, money may be important and I suspect we’ll we’ll talk about that in our conversation today, but what are some of the other things that also matter? I’ve now collected a lot of data on the kinds of things that explain why some people are really happy, some people are really miserable, some days are really fantastic, some days are really miserable. You know, what explains those differences? And I would say some of the big categories, there’s one category that I would kind of call all the different circumstances of your life. So, you know, your income, your wealth, your financial situation is one part of that, but there are a bunch of other background characteristics that are kind of hard to change. Some of them you can’t change too much at all like, you know, what’s my personality or what country was I born into? Or there might be some other things you can move around more slowly, things like your financial situation, your level of education, maybe your, you know, long-term relationship situation, but kind of put that in like your circumstances bucket. There’s another bucket of how you spend your time. So, do you spend your time on things that, you know, you consider time well spent, that you think are enjoyable. Another thing that I think could be relevant for kind of fire conversations that I see in my research is that, you know, we’re also happier when we’re kind of really engaging ourselves. Some people might imagine I’m going to work super hard, kind of be miserable, earn a bunch of money and then be able to kind of, you know, sit on the beach and sip margaritas or something. And at least when I look at what are the kinds of lives that people really enjoy, they really involve some degree of like challenge, effort, some degree of difficulty. So I think crafting a life where that’s at least part of the mix of of what’s going on could be important. In addition to kind of how we’re spending our time, the the social dimension of life is super important. You know, what percentage of your life is social, what percentage of time are you spending with people you like, your friends in particular, we often have our, our co-workers, our family, um, but are you kind of making time for this enduring social network that you have, the quality of your relationships, a bunch of other things in kind of the social domain, you know, are you around people you trust and who trust you? We could probably name a lot of different factors in that domain. Another big category is kind of your mind. The first kind of famous study I did in this project was a project on the relationship between happiness and mind wandering. And mind wandering is literally just, are you thinking about something other than what you’re currently doing? And it turns out for the average person, they do that almost half the time. So the amount of time that we’re actually focused on the present moment and what we’re thinking about when we aren’t is another big contributor to happiness. That’s kind of a flyby of just some broad categories, but you could quickly imagine that there are 60 or 80 or 100 things that are all kind of important. You know, money is, you know, one or two or three of those, uh, but there are a lot of other things that are important too.
Mindy: So, this idea of time wandering or mind wandering, if I am constantly mind wandering to like the same thing or the same few things, according to your study, does that mean that I should be pursuing those things instead of what I’m doing when my mind is wandering?
Guest: I would say the most simplistic way to sort of translate what the study found is really that you might not want to be mind wandering too often. Even when people are doing something that’s not very pleasant, they’re actually in a happier state when they’re just focused on whatever that is. It’s natural that our minds are going to wander some of the time, but if you’re kind of constantly in your head and not focused on what you’re doing, that doesn’t seem to be the ideal state.
Scott: Can we simplify some of the things we’ve learned here and can you maybe give us, you know, a picture we can merge from the conversation with around what is a fictional happiness, you know, persona or construct that has many of these ingredients or the best aggregation of these ingredients. And what’s an example of one that has a really poor mixture of those ingredients. Maybe that’s a good way to take away some of the learnings that we have here.
Guest: A good life would be a life that’s highly social, so spending a lot of your time in a state of interaction with other humans, especially people you like, especially during your leisure time, having good relationships, being in an environment where you feel like there’s social trust, you feel respected and valued, you feel like you matter to the world and to other people. That’s kind of in the sort of broadly social domain, a situation where you’re very present focused on whatever it is that’s happening, maybe things you love doing, maybe things you don’t love doing quite as much, but you’re sort of able and willing and interested in being kind of fully engaged in whatever that is. So, kind of getting your attention focused on the right things and with the right sort of quality of attention that you’re bringing to whatever is going on. You know, we’ve probably all had a conversation with someone where it seemed like their attention wasn’t with us, you know, they were thinking about something else. That probably wasn’t so great for either of us. It probably wasn’t great for the person on the other side and it probably wasn’t great for the person who was really distracted. Especially with technology, but a lot of other things, I feel like distraction is just becoming more and more common and I think the ability to hold on to our attention and spend it in the right ways is super valuable. Another way to think about a good life is, you know, are we are we spending time on things that we value? You know, a premise of fire is is that, you know, I’m gonna be able at least after retirement to to kind of spend my time on things that I value. Well, you can be doing that when you’re working and when you’re not working, but kind of thinking about, you know, literally what percentage of my time would I say is time well spent? That’s a percentage you’d like to be as high as possible.
Scott: Love it. Some of these things, you know, you can jump right to, oh yeah, money would help with some of those and some money does not seem to help with, but what I think is really fascinating and, you know, in addition to the these observations about happiness, you know, what makes a good life is how money correlates with people’s perception of that. So, can you walk us through what your research has uncovered about the correlation between money and happiness?
Guest: We’ve known for a long time that there’s some degree of positive correlation between money and happiness. And I say we, like science and you know, the broader public as a result. So, we know that in general, if you take rich people and poor people, there’s going to be some difference in happiness. But in about 2010, there was a very famous study that found what we might describe as a plateau between money and happiness. So, it said, you know, at first, happiness rises with income, but then it happiness plateaus beyond around $75,000. You know, I talk to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people about happiness. Sometimes if they know one fact about the relations, you know, sort of the scientific study of happiness, that might be the one fact that they know. And it turns out that fact is probably wrong. That original study actually studied two kinds of happiness and the one that appeared to have this plateau was actually the sort of emotional or experienced dimension of happiness and that’s exactly the one that kind of my research program is probably collected, you know, the best data in the world on how people really feel as they’re going about their daily lives. And what I found when I looked at that relationship between money and people’s day-to-day experienced happiness, it just kept going up. There was absolutely no sign of a plateau anywhere around that threshold. So, we’ve known for a long time that money and happiness have this at least directionally positive relationship. One of the things that I’ve shown in my research is that there probably isn’t a plateau between money and happiness where we once thought there was. So, in my data, I see it certainly still going up to three, four, $500,000 a year. I then found some data from millionaires and show, well, the millionaires are significantly happier than the people earning many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. I’m now in the process of collecting data from people who are super wealthy, so we’ll see how far that line goes. But I, you know, even just in my own thinking, you know, I think 15 years ago, kind of in my scientific career, I accepted this finding as true. Surely there’s some level where kind of money just stops mattering completely. Now, as I’ve gone out and collected really good data on it, every time I sort of push on that idea, it sort of crumples. It seems like this line keeps going up. So, you know, that that’s good and that’s bad. It it’s good in the sense that there’s kind of potentially more happiness to capture as your financial situation improves, but it also sort of complicates things if you sort of imagine, well, I just need to get to this one modest level and then nothing really matters beyond that. It kind of gives you an easy way to imagine pivoting away from caring very much at all about money. And this kind of says, well, you know, money is just one of many things that matters for happiness, but it probably keeps mattering, all else equal, it’d be nice to dial it up a little higher if I could.
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Scott: It’s just brilliant research. I mean it’s it seems intuitive and and that study it was I remember that study from, you know, 2010. And I’m like, that doesn’t really make sense, but I guess, and you kind of trust it because it’s it’s it’s science and but it didn’t it didn’t really intuitively make sense. What you’re saying makes a lot more intuitive sense. Do you have the next level of of depth though in answering why that translates to happiness?
Guest: I’ll first just add a really important caveat and it’s a caveat that applies to pretty much all modern research on money and happiness, including the one that said there was this plateau, which is that happiness tends to vary and this is going to be a little bit, I’ll try to make this not very mathematical, but it happiness varies with like the logarithm of income, which is basically to say that happiness varies with like percentage changes in income, not raw dollars. Like if you give a dollar to Jeff Bezos and you give a dollar, you know, to someone earning minimum wage, those dollars mean very different things. So it’s definitely the case that like an extra dollar matters less the more you have of them. But the sort of pattern that I find is that happiness seems seems to rise linearly with sort of the logarithm of income. And that sounds complicated, you don’t really need to understand it. The main point is just that like a 10% difference in income sort of predicts the same difference in happiness for everybody. Whether you’re high or low income, kind of if you were 10% higher, you you would at least our predicted to move up about the same amount in happiness. That’s just an important piece to kind of understand about this relationship. Why are money and happiness related? There are a few different answers to that. So, when I published kind of my first big paper on this topic, I attempted to answer that by saying, well, what is it that is psychologically changing for people who have more versus less money and kind of what, what can sort of mediate that relationship? And the strongest factor that I could find that explained it within my data was actually people’s sense of control of their lives, kind of their like freedom to live the life they want to live. So one way to interpret this relationship, about 75% of the relationship between money and happiness could be explained by the fact that when people have more money, they’re they’re essentially more in control of their lives. So you could imagine how, you know, especially in a place like the US, there’s a a lot that you can do when you have money and resources and there’s a lot of way that kind of your life is more constrained and contained and maybe not fully under your control when you don’t have many resources. One important thing that the money is doing is kind of giving people freedom and and and choices.
Scott: One of the things that I think that this translates to it makes sense to me like of course, more freedom, more choice, more opportunity to pursue happiness and and I think, you know, perhaps inversely, less misery, less unhappiness, right? Uh that’s related. I think you’ve covered that in a lot of your work as well. When I think about one thing that is it seems to be absent from your work is this most of your work is focused on income and not necessarily wealth. And the fire movement I think is an interesting spin on the pursuit of happiness to a large degree because it more income probably translates more happiness because it accelerates the goal of fire. But implicit in the goal of financial independence and early retirement, um or any of the many variations of that is I’m going to declare a number enough to achieve this this happiness that I’m setting out to achieve for myself. And that’s an I think an interesting spin and implicit, maybe unique to the fire movement among many Americans. Do you have any any hypotheses or ways you’d go about, you know, any any initial research, any any hypotheses or exploration of that topic of is once financial independence, you know, being met, then the next marginal dollar maybe adds a little bit of incremental quality of life, but that’s really a breakthrough point for people.
Guest: I do see some evidence that uh having some resources and wealth is helpful or spending less than you earn is helpful, kind of having a financial cushion, even controlling for the level of income, kind of having some financial stability there really seems to be helpful. So I think one of the perhaps many ways that people sort of pursuing fire might benefit is simply having that cushion puts you in a very different situation than someone who’s, you know, spending every dollar as soon as it comes in because, you know, you’re kind of one bad day away from disaster, even separate from a question of kind of when can I retire. There isn’t a ton of research on wealth and happiness simply because for most people income is a much bigger part of their sort of financial situation. As I mentioned, I am collecting some data right now from people who are very wealthy where their wealth is, you know, by far the bigger part of what’s going on. So I may have some more things to say in the future. My prediction is that wealth is probably helpful and probably at least as helpful as kind of equivalent income. Exactly how that breaks out in terms of like the shape of the curve, is there a level where, you know, you really hit diminishing marginal returns on greater wealth? I’m not sure we really know the answer to that yet. Part of that frankly is because people who have lots of money don’t tend to, you know, fill out happiness surveys. You really have to go find them and so, you know, that’s what I’m doing now with some, you know, very high net worth folks but uh this is an area that’s been harder for science to explore. Even my kind of first big study showing that the relationship between money and happiness keeps going up to, you know, many hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, that’s the first study that I know of that even was able to really explore that range of incomes. Almost every study you’ve ever read about in the news about money and happiness has really been looking at kind of the low to middle end or the $100,000 a year, maybe $150,000 a year. We’ve really had very limited visibility beyond that.
Mindy: Have you found any correlation between knowing what the definition of enough is for you and happiness? I’m starting to look into this a lot more because I’m noticing that there are people in my community who have enough and they’re not really pushing anymore, or they’re pushing and now it’s a game. But there’s also people in my community who have never defined enough for them and because enough never will have a definition, they always will want more. Have you done any studies on this or have you looked into this at all or has this popped up in any way?
Guest: I don’t have a complete answer to that. There is some very interesting research that asks people how much money it would take for them to be happy or even how much money they would be satisfied with. And it turns out people always give a bit more than whatever they have. So, you know, if I’m earning $50,000, well, I’d be happy if I were earning $150,000, that would be enough. I think I’ve more commonly seen this with income as opposed to wealth, but I’m I’m guessing a similar sort of psychological trend would be observed. One possibility is people might have a target in mind, but they might find the target shifts when they reach it. And so one of the questions is, you know, do you want that to happen? Or do you really want to kind of stick to your gun? If I think, you know, $3 million is enough to retire, that’s it. I’m locked in. Am I going to kind of pull the trigger there and say that’s it? Or am I going to say, well, work isn’t so bad. I could do a lot more if I had $5 million and suddenly I extend my, you know, retirement timeline by however many more years in order to achieve that. I think that’s something we see some evidence of that. I don’t think we really know, is that a good or a bad thing? Is it better for people who have lower versus higher targets? I don’t know that we know the answers to those super clearly at this point.
Mindy: In the FIRE community, that pops up most frequently as one more year syndrome. I’ve reached my financial independence goal, but I’ll just do one more year. I I just want to make sure that it’s going to work. I’m wondering if you have any suggestions for someone who finds themselves at their F number with the idea that they’re just going to work one more year.
Guest: To me, it almost comes down to the the sort of fundamental premise of, you know, fire and financial independence. You know, how enjoyable or miserable is my job and how enjoyable or miserable do I think my life would be after retirement? Some people actually really enjoy their work and so extending that might be a perfectly fine thing to do. As a bonus, I also get some more money, but I really enjoy my work and I don’t really have a clear vision of what I’m planning to do once I retire. You know, maybe for those people extending is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. You know, on the flip side, if I am incredibly miserable at work and I know exactly what I’m going to be doing once I retire, I’ve kind of tried out all of those things and I’m certain that that’s going to be amazing. Not only is that maybe someone who should pull the trigger on retiring and living off of their resources, but also that’s someone who maybe should be thinking more about fire than the first person. You know, one of the things that I see in my research is that when I look across all the different human activities for the average person, work is the thing people are least happy doing. There’s a premise that resonates in some ways with the data on happiness with the fire movement of like, how do I dial down this thing that for many people is kind of the worst part of their day. The other things I would kind of keep in mind as I am thinking about that is, on one hand, work is unhappy for most people. The worst job of all is unemployed, if you look at the level of happiness. What are some of the kinds of things that you know, tend to be associated with unemployment? Well, it’s actually mostly not about the loss of income. Like the vast majority of the reduction in happiness that unemployed people experience is really attributable to other things. We don’t fully understand why that is, but we can probably imagine a few, like you lose your identity, you lose your sense of value, you lose the sense of structure that you have in day-to-day life, you lose the chance to kind of, you know, deploy some of your skills and talents and things you’re best at. Well, you know, if someone is on this bubble of making a fire decision or just thinking about fire in general, like, how do I craft a retirement where I’m kind of on the right side of all of those issues as opposed to almost just kind of looking like a a wealthy unemployed person?
Scott: We get a lot of feedback throughout the anals of the internet, not just notbiggerpockets money, but the fire, the financial independence movement in a general sense that it makes you miserable. These people are are frugal, miserly, they’re not living life, they’re giving up today in pursuit of the hope for tomorrow. And there’s anecdotes that then surface, right? I can’t believe I spent my 20s doing this. I missed out. I, you know, whatever that come up. And of course, that’s going to be the case in any large sample, there’s going to be anecdotes. But what does the data actually say? I don’t have the toolkit to actually, you know, collect the data sample on this anywhere close, not even I know, like so laughably far away from the work that you would do that you will giggle at this. But but we did poll our community and we said, you know, very simple, bigger pockets money listeners, are you happier, less happy or about the same after discovering and pursuing fire? And we found that 60% said that they’re happier out of a 900 vote sample. 7% said they’re less happy and 33% said they’re about the same. And to me that’s a really interesting, you know, very simplistic but you know data point here that the discovery and pursuit of fire translates to a significant at least self-reported increase in happiness for the population of people who respond to Bigger Pockets Money YouTube polls, which is inherently a biased population. There’s something interesting about that and it it leads me to form a hypothesis that fire has a multiplicative, you know, impact on on on happiness in the sense that one, it gives you a purpose to begin moving towards that’s concrete that has takes a long period of time that will require you to develop new mental models and and really learn and engage and and develop your brain. Two, it as a byproduct, the journey itself produces more and more stability and security and optionality in your life along the path. And last, there is the very real tangible, you know, believable prospect of within a decade or two, depending on how time goes, there’s a chance that you you might actually achieve this thing and begin to have those options and seriously explore what I’m going to do all day long every day. Do you largely agree with that hypothesis before you even get to fire?
Guest: You actually hit the nail on the head with all three of those points. Those were literally the three things I was thinking of as you were going through that. I don’t think there are good studies really proving that those are those are the case, certainly not for people who are kind of in this movement in particular, but I think psychologically, those are exactly the kinds of things that I would imagine might play an important role.
Scott: One day, we’ll have to to see if there’s a way for for Bigger Pockets Money to contribute some sort of data to your your sampling there. And see if we can prove that out and you know, of course we’ll be very biased here. Oh, we pursued fire. Of course we like it. We’re the ones that actually are listening to this podcast right now. There’s a selection bias that is inherent in that, but I’m so fascinated this because this is why we’re doing it. This is why we pursue wealth creation is for this chance at happiness, not a guarantee, but the increasing probability across a lifetime.
Guest: And I think as you said, you know, human life is complicated, like there are so many different things we have to navigate and I think something like this gives you something really concrete to work for. Even if you end up succumbing to one more year syndrome, at any given moment, you have kind of a really clear target that you’re trying to hit and kind of a notion of what your goal is, you’re probably seeing some progress every year, you have some hope for the future because of what you’re, you know, at least expecting to arrive to. I think that’s, you know, if perhaps before people kind of embark on this journey, they didn’t necessarily have any particular direction of like, what’s the destination I’m actually trying to get to in life? Should this be the only one they’re pursuing or, you know, kind of what balance it should have with the other goals in life, you know, to be determined, but I think that makes a lot of sense. I certainly can’t promise to do it off the top of, you know, in the moment, but it actually I think it would be really interesting to do a truly proper study of people kind of on this journey, tracking their financial situation, tracking their level of of happiness, looking at that over time, perhaps having some people who are kind of immediately before versus after triggering retirement in that kind of situation and just understanding, you know, what is the distribution of outcomes, including what is the level of happiness that someone pursuing fire has and how does that compare to someone that isn’t? Are they kind of suffering more now because there’s an expectation that things will be better later or are they at a similar or even enhanced level because of the kinds of factors that you just described and also, how do things change once they do retire? Do they actually become a lot happier? Do they say about the same, maybe happiness really isn’t mostly about the thing they think is, you know, changing, it’s about all the other factors in their life? Does it depend on how much they love versus hated their job? There’s a lot that could be understood.
Mindy: I live in Longmont, Colorado, which is not the epicenter, but kind of the epicenter of financial independence because Mr. Money Mustache lives here. There’s a lot of people who have moved here. It’s Colorado and our weather is amazing and everything here is perfect in every way. But I also find myself kind of in this little fire bubble where there’s a lot of us that are unemployed or semi-employed and uh, I say unemployed because retired, or could be retired but choose to work because they love what they’re doing. They’re not doing it for the money necessarily. And I find that there is just an outsized level of happiness. Everybody here is happy, you know, yeah, we have problems. Oh, my car broke down. Well, it’s not that big a deal. It’s an annoyance. The things that make us unhappy are more like annoyances that we have to deal with, but everybody would have to deal with them. Everybody’s car breaks down. So then you fix it and you move on. Or, you know, oh, I thought I made this this payment but I didn’t and now I have a late fee. Well, shucks. That’s a money problem, I can fix that money problem. We still have, you know, I have teenagers. I still have teenage issues. I’ve got two teenage daughters and let me tell you, those are the best years ever said no one who had teenage daughters. There’s things that come up that would also come up if I wasn’t financially independent, but I find that having a community, a nearby community that I can bounce these ideas off of or, you know, hey, I’m having this problem. Like we have a discord and an online chat that we can ask any question and having people available to have these conversations, this this social connection where we’re all in the same boat, I think is so valuable and you hear from people who retire early, oh, all my friends are working all the time. I’m going to go back to work because I don’t have anything to do during the day. Have you seen any sort of correlation between social networks like in person social networks and happiness? I just I think that that’s so valuable, but I also don’t want to have my experiences tainted by my little bubble here.
Guest: One way to kind of summarize some of my work is kind of like constructing the equation for human happiness. And one of the really important variables is exactly the one you just described, which is, you know, what percentage of the time am I interacting with other people, especially interacting in person? The higher that percentage is, the happier people tend to be, the lower it is, the less happy they tend to be. There’s also value in other kinds of networks. Even having this conversation, it might be more fun if we were all sitting in the same room, but you know, we’re able to kind of commune and connect and and discuss in a way that I think is also pretty meaningful. You know, just thinking about your example of other folks that are in a similar situation, some of the value is kind of the instrumental benefit of literally being able to, you know, get advice and insights from those people. But I think a big part of it is having a community of people who are in a similar situation and they’re, they’re a support network, they’re people you can talk about things with they’re kind of part of your tribe, like having a tribe that you feel like you belong to, I think is also super important.
Mindy: I’m just going to give a quick shout-out to choosefi.com/local. They have a ton of local groups. I want to say like 480. It’s not just like three. It’s people in the same community, people who understand your language and finding an in-person support group is so beneficial. I I can’t say enough good things about having people that speak your same language.
Scott: Yeah, and shout out to Tyler Alex for the SoCal or the the Southern California, Southern California Financials Ranch and Mustacheans meet up, right? Those are all over the place uh here and I’ve attended several of them at the local library right next to my kids’ daycare actually. So those are popping up all over the place because of this this item here, right? People get this. Smart people in the the finance community have followed Matt Killingsworth’s work and derivatives and are have like that there’s a science behind their these the community optimizes for happiness beyond a certain point or a certain portion of them and they’re getting pretty good at it. And I think that’s a that’s a powerful, that’s going to be a powerful correlate because that is the goal, it’s explicitly defined, it’s attempting to be scienced um by people. Uh I think in some part to your work and that’s then being achieved in in larger numbers. And I think that it’s a really strong this this conversation I think is a really strong reputation to the assertion that the pursuit of financial independence is going to make you unhappy. I would hope and it’s not proven, there’s more work to be done from, you know, and approving it out, but that’s that’s the takeaway I’m going to walk away with. And the second takeaway is that all those self-help gurus that have the wheel of life thing in their, in their workbooks were right on something all along. It sounds like, you know, pretty close to to mapping these these things out because I imagine your equation incorporates the social, the mental, the flow state, the family, the relationship, the finances here and there’s some sort of coefficient across all of those that says, of course they all get better as they get better, but the returns diminish. And so they were right. They were right all along with with some of those basic things. There’s probably better tweaks and versions of that that you have pioneered and that brings us to my last point here, which is where can people find out more about you and go down the rabbit hole of really following the best work to date on this subject if they want to optimize for happiness in particular.
Guest: One thing people can do is go to trackyourhappiness.org. I have that’s sort of my big happiness study, but it’s also a place where you can measure a lot of these metrics for yourself. It’s totally free if you want to see, you know, what percentage of my life is time well spent, what percentage of my time am I interacting with other people? How much time do I actually spend working every day? And how do I feel when I’m working? You know, that might be relevant to how eager I should be to retire. You can measure all of those things through that tool, check your happiness a few times a day for a couple weeks and I think, you know, most people will find some really interesting insights. If they want to learn more about the kind of science side of things, they can go to matthewkillingsworth.com. You can see my latest papers, including some papers on money and happiness. And a link from there is also the place that I’ve started posting my newest research, which is happinescience.org. You can sign up for kind of, I don’t want to call it a newsletter, but you can get notified when new research comes out on happiness science. So people that kind of want to stay with the latest there can can do that.
Scott: I imagine that your recognition in leading and pioneering research in this field is in of itself a driver of happiness for you personally. And I hope that it can inspire other people to pursue similar or, you know, tangents off of off of that. I think it’s a really one of the most worthy pursuits you could have in life is the work you’re doing. So thank you very much for all your contributions and I hope it brings you a lot of happiness and enjoy as you as you continue to unlock more nuance to this subject.
Guest: Thank you very much. Yes, it absolutely does.
Mindy: All right, Matt. Thank you so much for your time today and we’ll talk to you soon.
Guest: Sounds good. Talk to you later. Thanks a lot.
Mindy: All right, Scott, that was Matt Killingsworth and that was a very interesting discussion on happiness and the factors that lead to happiness. Uh not completely surprising that a social network will help you with your happiness, but a little surprising that happiness tends to plateau in some instances and in other instances, it doesn’t plateau at all. What did you think of his commentary?
Scott: I mean, maybe I’m too close to the FIRE community and the study of personal finance and wealth at this point, but I I I mean it just all made perfect sense. His data set mapped to the realities that have become clear over the course of hundreds or thousands of hours studying this subject. I wasn’t surprised by any any of those items. I’ve also read a lot of his research that probably is a feedback loop, but but it makes perfect sense to me why why these things tie together. And I think what’s really interesting is the research that has not been done at the edges. There almost certainly, I believe, is going to be a relationship between this concept of enough, a high enough level and then doing what you want when you want with who you want is got to, right, correlate with an increased level of happiness by both removing unhappiness and giving you better and better probabilities to pursue the things that actually make you happy, for his happiness equation. So I think I think there’s a really interesting study there. That’s the bet we fundamentally make in pursuing financial independence from the from the get go. So of course I have to believe that and many of the people listening to this will have to believe it. But I think what’ll be really interesting is can we prove it over time by piggy backing on the work that Matt Matt Killingsworth has done and other happiness researchers have. I think that’ll be a fun journey and that’s that’s implicitly one of the underlying reasons why you and I do what we do, Mindy.
Mindy: Absolutely. When you spend your time doing something that causes you stress and gives you ulcers, obviously you’re not going to be nearly as happy as when you spend your time doing the things that you love, which is the whole point of pursuing financial independence, at least for me, and I would like that to be the whole point for everybody listening. I think a lot of it starts off with people who hate their job. Oh, how can I retire early? I mean, that’s how Carl started. He banged into the computer. You know, how do I quit my job early or stop working so long or whatever? And, you know, up pops Mr. Money Mustache and he starts reading and he’s like, oh, there is a different way. All I have to do is, you know, keep doing what I’ve already been doing. I’ve been investing for the future, but the future is now.
Scott: By the way, I will call out that Mr. Money Mustache, a lot of people think of him as a personal finance blog, but I I think that if you actually study the work that he’s produced over the years, he is a diligent student of happiness, the pursuit of happiness. And much of his work is really tying in how do I optimize for happiness and remove money as a constraint in that pursuit. That’s really the underlying thesis I think of Mr. Money Mustache’s collective works there. And I think he’s actually very, very advanced in this topic. Not as advanced as Matt Killingsworth, but but very close. I think the the difference is very small between them because that’s really what Mr. Money Mustache is studied over over time and why his work is so influential.
Mindy: Yep, I absolutely agree. And he’s starting to talk more and more specifically about happiness, not just money. And I think that’s great. If you would like free resources or to sign up for our newsletter, go visit us at our website, biggerpocketsmoney.com or you can find us on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram at Biggerpockets Money. All right, Scott, should we get out of here?
Scott: Happy too.
Mindy: Okay, that wraps up this episode of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast. That was good. I like that. He’s Scott Trench. I am Mindy Jensen saying bye bye lemon meringue pie.
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