Money has long ceased to provide happiness. >80% of my salary ends up in a savings account, no idea if I’ll ever touch it.
Hey you guys, how for away do you think that mirage is?
Salary? No. Stipend, yes. Give me enough to comfortably live on and pursue interests and hobbies with no requirement for work. That’s the closest money would get to making me happy.
1/3 median home price for area of employment.
No amount will make me happy.
Once your basic needs are met, the equation becomes: Salary = Expenses + Savings. So, the questions becomes, how much savings makes you happy?
If you are happy to work in your job until “retirement age”, a small savings rate will do, in theory; that is if the salary is adjusted for cost-of-living and tax.
Are you happy working this job for the rest of your life? Full time (whatever that means in your work culture)?
I’m happy with my salary.
I actually like my job, and the salary is enough for me and the rest of my household to live off of while making down-payments on the house and the car. Now, if only I was a happy person…
Something like 100k€ would enable me to do all the traveling I want to do and simultaneously save up enough money for a comfortable early retirement. Currently I’m focussing more on having a job that isn’t soul-crushingly stressful and full of overtime though.
I figure I’d have severely diminishing returns past 6 figures, and I would (and do) trade income for less hours with a better work environment well before that.
I’m already in the area of diminishing returns, where none of my daily problems are really money related. To have any significant impact I’d probably have to double my salary, so I could afford exotic cars and stuff like that.
You could hire a cleaner, pay to have your lawn mowed, take your clothes to be washed for you and afford to fly somewhere on vacation a few times a year. Those are luxuries that many people can’t afford.
I see your point, but as another person pointed out, machines take care of lots of things. Washer/dryers and dishwashers are already ubiquitous. I work in IT so I wear t-shirts and jeans directly from the dryer, no ironing or anything else. We also have robot vacuums that can even wipe the floors. We don’t have a lawn yet, but when we do we will get a robotic mower as well. And having a person cleaning up I think would teach the wrong things to our kids.
As for flying somewhere, we usually spend our vacations flying back to our families, so maybe that counts?
I think once you hit 6 figures (in Europe at least) there’s very little extra “happiness” from higher salaries.
Robot mowers are pretty crappy. I’d recommend getting a nice zero turn instead, zip right through the lawn in no time and it’s pretty fun.
Machines have handled some of that. A vacuum cleaner still takes time, but it’s much faster than what came before, as with the washing machine…it’s not really comparable to the situation a century ago. And you don’t have to deal with random people having access to your house.
The lawn point is true, though the point of a lawn is kind of that it regenerates itself well, and unless you need something that you can run around on that repairs itself pretty quickly, you don’t really need one. Also, in the US, grass lawns really a tradition inherited from England, where it makes a lot of sense in terms of climate…though in the US, some places are really not all that well-suited to it. In the Southwest in particular, even maintenance aside, it really makes more sense to do other forms of landscaping unless you really, seriously have use for a lawn. Though I guess it still can be helpful to have a gardener, even in much lower-maintenance stuff.
Flying costs something, but it’s comparatively inexpensive these days compared to other forms of travel. I drove across the US a few years back when I had some free time – admittedly, not trying to get across as quickly as possible – and when you factor in hotel stays, fuel, and all that, even disregarding human time it’s considerably cheaper to fly.
googles
Yeah, it’s headed even further that way. Looks like I can fly from San Francisco to New York two weeks from now on Travelocity for $255 round-trip. The fuel alone for a car would run something like that.
That’s not to say that there aren’t luxuries out there to be had, just that I think that technology has helped spread out some past luxuries more-broadly.
I am fine with my current salary. None of the problems I have are due to having too little money. It is more that I have hardly any time to spend that money and live a fairly lonely life. None of that would be fixed by a higher salary, which is why I have little motivation to try to get promoted.
Money buys time friend
Not if it’s a salary
I would suggest volunteering at animal shelters on your days off might help with the fairly lonely life. The one by me let’s you check out dogs to go to the beach with and return.
For me, other factors are much more important than the salary.
A tedious job with unpleasant colleagues would never make me happy, no matter how high the salary. On the other hand, if I had a job that was fun and had nice colleagues, I would be happy with a salary that only covered the essentials.
Also, I would rather have a salary that only covers the essentials for 30 hours a week than a salary twice as high for 60 hours a week. What good is money if I can never spend it?
There are more factors that are more important to me than the salary. How much physical labor is involved in the job? Do I have to work at night? Do I work shifts or do I have flexible working hours? Does the employer offer a pension plan? Are there any other benefits? Where would I have to work, close to friends and family or far away? …
Yeah, there really isn’t just one threshold value that would make me happy. More is better of course, but there are too many other factors.
Though it’s probably worth mentioning that I don’t have any children and don’t plan on having any.
Universal basic income and universal healthcare so I (and everybody else) don’t have to worry about a job, being able to work, retirement, disability, and employers will have to offer meaning, increased quality of life, and actual respect to attract employees.
These social safety nets would be a huge win for worker’s rights too. If you can tell a job to go fuck itself on the spot, they can’t operate without treating people right.
At current purchasing power, about 120k. Anything beyond that becomes nice to have, anything below and you’re giving something up.
around three fiddy
I don’t have a solid answer.
Money alone isn’t going to make me happy. Yeah, it removes a lot of one type of stress. But it can also be a trap. Like, I’m doing solidly okay in my job, but it’s enough that I can’t easily quit and start over in a different career, even though I stopped caring about this one a decade ago. And a high-paying job can come with a lot of other stressors, things that keep you working harder and longer hours than you otherwise would.
$100k would probably seem pretty good for a long time, given where I currently live. If I had to live in NYC, I’d probably say more like $500k.
