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Happy Money: The Science of Happier Spending

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton

Last accessed on Friday May 4, 2018

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“Things that were hard to bear are sweet to remember.”23 Seneca had a point. There is some evidence that even rather unpleasant experiences can become rosier in the kaleidoscope of memory.24 In a classic study, researchers tagged along with a group of students on a three-week bicycle trip through California.25 The trip did not go smoothly. There were mosquitoes. It rained a lot. During the trip, 61 percent of the students reported feeling disappointed with it. Yet after the trip, only 11 percent reported disappointment. As one cyclist put it, “All of the complaining that I did seems so silly to me now, because all I can remember is making a lot of great friends.”

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Mark Twain: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do.”

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one of the major barriers to increasing human well-being. We are happy with things, until we find out there are better things available.

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you’re likely to get the biggest bang for your buck if: • The experience brings you together with other people, fostering a sense of social connection. • The experience makes a memorable story that you’ll enjoy retelling for years to come. • The experience is tightly linked to your sense of who you are or want to be. • The experience provides a unique opportunity, eluding easy comparison with other available options.

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Flight of the Conchords was on to something when he sang in “Business Time” that “when it’s with me you only need two minutes.” Why? “Because I’m so intense.”

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satisfaction with experiential purchases tends to increase with the passage of time, while satisfaction with material purchases tends to decrease.

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Chuck E. Cheese. At this play emporium, kids are given a cup full of tokens and set loose in a microcosmic economy where they can choose to buy experiences, like straddling a motorcycle for a race through Paris or shooting aliens with a giant gun. Alternatively, they can drop their tokens into games of chance—basically, slot machines with training wheels. These games are over in an instant and don’t provide the thrill of a good, clean alien shoot-out, but they do provide something strangely addictive that the experiential games don’t: tickets. Toss a token in, and a moment later, a long string of tickets comes shooting out, which can then be traded for a variety of material goods, from erasers to rubber animals. According to Steve Stroessner, father of two children, ages eight and thirteen, “The tickets are like crack.” Kids will often forgo the pleasure of more experiential games to harvest them. Cami Johnson, another Chuck E. Cheese veteran, explains, “The rubber frog will fall on the floor of the car on the way home and get covered in dog hair and crumbs, and the eraser will be lost in the bottom of the backpack. While you have a permanent token of your time and labor, that permanent token is actually pretty worthless.”

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“If you want to enjoy these things—things like weed—you have to make it a treat.”

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the more we’re exposed to something, the more its impact diminishes.

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Novelty attracts the spotlight of attention, focusing our minds and exciting our emotions. But once we get used to something—even something as nice as a midnight blue Z4—the spotlight moves on.

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driving a more expensive car doesn’t usually provide more joy than driving an economy model.

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If abundance is the enemy of appreciation, scarcity may be our best ally.

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This idea also helps to explain an enduring puzzle of forgone pleasure: Why don’t people get around to visiting famous landmarks in their own hometown? After living in London for a whole year, residents typically report that they’ve visited fewer landmarks—from Big Ben to Kensington Palace—than visitors who have only been there for two weeks.23 Although London attracts more international visitors than any other city in the world,24 most London residents report having visited more landmarks in cities other than their own. Only when they themselves are about to move away, or when out-of-town guests come to visit, do they seek out the sights of their own city. When people get around to visiting their hometown landmarks, they report enjoying the experience. The trouble is that when a pleasurable activity is always available, we may never get around to doing it, thereby missing out on a relatively inexpensive source of happiness.

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Zipcars are for “outings.” Higher-end companies, like the Classic Car Club, founded in London in 1995, take this approach to its logical extreme. For a hefty membership fee, the Classic Car Club gives members access to a “staggeringly stylish fleet of cars,” including Ferraris and Maseratis.36 In Manhattan, club members pay almost $11,000 for thirteen days of driving the club’s “high-end supercars.” This doesn’t sound like a bargain. But the cost of actually owning one of these cars is mind-boggling. And we’re willing to bet that members’ attention stays focused on the “supercars” during those magical thirteen days, making each of those eleven thousand dollars count.

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research suggests that taking breaks between episodes can increase your enjoyment. Perhaps most amazingly, commercials can improve the experience of watching television.39

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The more countries people have visited, the more they self-identify as “world travelers.” This in turn undermines their motivation to savor trips to enjoyable-but-unextraordinary destinations.

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People derived significantly more joy from interacting with their romantic partners when they treated the loves of their lives as though they were complete strangers.

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boredom turns out to be a surprisingly potent force that can chip away at even the strongest relationships. Current levels of boredom predict a married couple’s overall satisfaction with the relationship almost a decade later.49 Maybe money can’t buy love, but it can buy novel, exciting activities. And given the central importance of romantic relationships for human happiness, anything we can do to make time with our partners a treat is money well spent.

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Next time you go to the movies, eat your popcorn with your nondominant hand

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people often sacrifice their time to save small amounts of money, a human foible captured best by a headline in our favorite fake newspaper, the Onion: ANAHEIM, CA—Thirty-one-year-old Edward Brawley’s plan to get himself an umbrella from a random lost and found took two hours, but it saved him $2.99.1

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most people would benefit from using their money to change the amount of time they spend on three key activities: commuting, watching television, and hanging out with friends and family.

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Taking a job that requires an hour-long commute each way has a negative effect on happiness similar in magnitude to not having a job at all.

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In addition to spending two weeks per year commuting, the average American spends the equivalent of two months per year watching television.

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Working long hours to earn more money to provide your children with fancier homes and shinier toys may represent a bad happiness trade-off—especially when doing so comes at the cost of actually spending time playing with them.

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By consistently asking yourself how a purchase will affect your time, your dominant mind-set should shift, pushing you toward happier choices.

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In a 2010 poll conducted by the Consumer Electronics Association, peace and happiness ranked at the top of Christmas wish lists. But by 2011, both had been edged out by the iPad.2

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French use the verb se réjouir to capture the experience of deriving pleasure in the present from anticipating the future.

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If you plan to “reward” your friends for helping you move with nothing more than cheap beer and pizza, they’re more likely to be satisfied with Bud Light and Domino’s if you have them over the day after the move rather than the day before.

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when is delaying consumption most beneficial in getting the biggest happiness bang for your buck? • When the delay provides an opportunity to seek out enticing details that will promote positive expectations about the consumption experience, as well as excitement in the interim. Think TripAdvisor and Birchbox. • When anticipating the purchase makes you drool, increasing the pleasure of eventual consumption. Think Hershey’s Hugs. In contrast, we do not recommend delaying neutral necessities like oil changes or unenviable expenses like root canals, which produce a more unwelcome form of drool. • When the consumption experience itself will be fairly fleeting. Think spaceflights. In these cases, delay provides a valuable opportunity to draw out the pleasure beyond the experience itself.

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A large U.S. study found that debit card users had almost 400 percent less unsecured debt than people who didn’t use debit cards, even after taking into account personal characteristics such as income and credit history.51

Note:bAD statistic

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the proclivity to derive joy from investing in others might just be a fundamental component of human nature.

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Providing employees with bonuses used for prosocial actions toward charities and coworkers offers a novel and potentially profitable alternative.

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Cause marketing efforts can “crowd out” direct charitable giving, making people feel as though they’ve already done their part by purchasing, even when a tiny fraction of the purchase price goes to charity. What’s worse, because cause-related marketing can focus people on their own desires (what iPod do I want?) rather than on the impact of their donations (how will someone benefit from this money?), it can reduce the happiness people get from giving.

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