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I have an uncle who once told me that all you need to be happy in life is enough money to afford a pack of Pall Malls, a case of Pabst, a motel room on 27th Street in Oak Creek, a hooker and of course, her sister. At the time he told me that, it meant that by his calculations, all you needed to be happy was 57 bucks.
Let’s hope he wasn’t part of this study.
According to MarketWatch, psychologists at Purdue University and the University of Virginia recently analyzed the data from 1.7 million people in 164 different countries and came up with the exact salary you need to make for both “life satisfaction” and “emotional well-being.”
Drum roll, please:
The ideal income for individuals is $95,000 a year for life satisfaction and $60,000 to $75,000 a year for emotional well-being. Families with children, of course, will need more.
Other than those specific amounts, the greatest revelation of the study is that happiness apparently has a “tipping point.”
“The more you have, the more you want,” the study’s lead author Andrew Jebb said. “The small decline puts one’s level of well-being closer to individuals who make slightly lower incomes, perhaps due to the costs that come with the highest incomes. These findings speak to a broader issue of money and happiness across cultures. Money is only a part of what really makes us happy, and we’re learning more about the limits of money.”
Exactly how much more you would need for life satisfaction if you have children isn’t known, but our guess is that it would be enough to pay somebody else to take care of your kids.
