How to Spend Money to Increase Happiness

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We are always concerned about making more money because we think that it will give us a better life, and we will end up being happier. But how exactly can you spend your money to increase happiness?

In an article in US News titled “Why Money Really Can Buy Happiness” Author Susan Johnston explores how we can use our money to increase happiness.

Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships.

I found many similar articles that support this statement. We as human beings get the most satisfaction from social behavior and we try to form bonds and relationships with others.  Think about the things that bring you the most happiness, is it your job, or material things you buy, or is it spending time with family and close friends? Relationships with others seem to be the most important thing we need, more than money or success. However, I have also found many articles that show how you can use money to improve social relationships, and therefore your overall happiness.

Spending money on other people turns out to be correlated with happiness, which I think would not necessarily be intuitive. because humans are social creatures and giving things to other people is one of the most natural ways that we have of establishing bonds.

This statement goes back to the idea about forming relationships, if we can make others happy, most of the time it bring happiness to us. Spending money on yourself can feel selfish and some people may feel guilty about that later whereas spending money on others makes us feel good because we are bringing happiness to others, as well as strengthening that bond.This doesn’t necessarily mean that we can buy amy friendship with gifts, but we should try to form relationships first and then spend money on things that we know will make them happy.

Another thing is spending on your social network. So spending on getting together with friends, spending on experiences—things like travel. All of those are ways to buy happiness, whereas spending money on things you get used to or that consume a large percentage of your budget because they're easily compared with other people is perhaps not the wisest course of action.

To me this makes the most sense, we should spend money on experiences and memories rather than on material goods, especially if those material goods are to make yourself look better off than other people. If we spend too much time or money into trying to get the nicest car, because we want to look better than others in our neighborhood, or buying a big house to impress others, then we won’t be able to do the things that bring us more happiness. Again, those social experiences and memories we can get bring us far more happiness than trying to impress people we don’t really like.


source: money.usnews.com