TIP785: My Reflections on Money, Life, and Happiness w/ Stig Brodersen

You're listening to TIP. I decided to call this episode Reflections on Money, Life, and Happiness. The word reflection seems most fitting to hit the right tone. They're not commandments, not frameworks cut in stone, and certainly not universal truths. They're simply observations, things I've noticed, and patterns I keep bumping into. Money, life, and happiness are strangely intertwined. My reflections are admittedly anecdotal. That is the premise of this episode. They might apply to you or they might not. I'm still learning, still adjusting, and still getting a lot of things wrong. But if any of these reflections help you at the margins, even a little, then it's well worth our time together today. Since 2014 and through more than 180,000,000 downloads, we've studied the financial markets and read the books that influence self made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your host, Stake Brodersen. Welcome to the Investors Podcast. I'm your host, Stig Brodersen, and let's jump right to the first reflection of the intersection between money, life, and happiness. Number one, money magnifies who you are. Today, when I look at my group of friends, their financial wealth spans a wide range. Some can barely make ends meet, whereas others have more money than they could ever use in multiple lifetimes, and most are somewhere in between. For those of us who are in between and even more so for those who can afford anything in their wildest dreams, I found that incremental happiness is the best. And so what do I mean by that? Well, let me use a metaphor here about traveling, and you can replace that with any type of consumption good. If you fly economy and you suddenly get wealthy, don't fly private right away if you want to optimize for your happiness. Get excited about upgrading to economy premium, get accustomed to that, then get excited about flying business class, then get excited about that, and then whenever it wears off, fly first, and after that, perhaps you can get excited about flying private. Wait, you say. There are some, at least two fundamental problems with that. The first is that very few people suddenly get a windfall and can go directly from economists of flying private. The other thing you notice is if you should metaphorically fly private in the first place, hence whether increasing your consumption is a game you can't win and therefore shouldn't play in the first place. Lifestyle creep is difficult to resist. It doesn't look like a big decision. It looks like a series of small upgrades that feel harmless. But if you're going to let your lifestyle cost increase, I encourage you to do it slowly and intentionally. Small graduate changes tend to give you the most satisfaction per dollar because you're not numbing yourself with too much too fast. But the problem, of course, and the benefits of nice things is that they are, well, nice. …