The Art of Spending Money

Most financial books will try to tell you how to accumulate money. Whether the focus is on investing, saving, tax strategy, or business growth, the universal assumption is that getting richer will make you happier.

But that is clearly not the case. I know plenty of miserable rich people.

That’s where Morgan Housel’s newest book, The Art of Spending Money, comes in. Instead of teaching you how to get rich, it teaches you how to use money in a way that can actually make you happier.

From the book description:

Most of us don’t know how to spend money. We chase things that impress others but leave us cold. Or we save endlessly, afraid to spend on what would actually make life better. We confuse admiration with envy, comfort with excess, and utility with status.

The Art of Spending Money doesn’t provide budgets, hacks, or one-size-fits-all solutions. It gives you understanding of how your relationship with money shapes your decisions—and how to reshape it so money works for you.

It is a great book, the writing is beautiful, and I highly recommend it. If anyone wants a copy, let me know and I’ll have Amazon send you one.

For those who want the highlights, below are a few of my favorite quotes:

• You think you want nice stuff, but what you really want is respect, admiration, and attention.

• The best measure of wealth is what you have minus what you want.

• An interesting thing about money—acquiring it, having it, spending it—is that when you imagine having more of it, you focus almost exclusively on the parts of your life that might become better. What’s easy to ignore are all the hidden parts that probably won’t.

• It’s hard to get really depressed until your dreams come true. Once your dreams come true and you realize you feel the same way you did before, then you get a feeling of hopelessness.

• A good life is everything you need and some of what you want. If you have everything you want, you appreciate none of what you have.

• When you realize how powerful expectations are, you put as much effort into keeping them low as you do into improving your circumstances.

• Refusing to recognize that you’ve met your goal can be as bad as never meeting the goal to begin with.

• Wanting more money than you need to be independent and happy is an accounting hobby. Money should always be a tool to leverage who you are, not a goal in itself.

• There is no amount of success that can’t be destroyed by the temptation to grab too much of it.

Everyone’s takeaways from this book will be different. Personally, I love saving and financial planning. But I now realize I probably allocate too many resources to my accounting hobby and not enough to more important near-term areas like date nights and charitable giving.

It is all a very personal balancing act, but the idea that there is an art to spending money is an important one.

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Personal note:

Here is a picture from this week’s Veterans Day program. If you like Where’s Waldo-type searches, J is the tiny guy in the red shirt standing at the podium.

And if you like decorating early for Christmas, my daughter strongly supports you.