Money CAN buy happiness.

I know that runs against everything you’ve been told since you were a kid. Your parents said the opposite. A teacher probably did too. Somewhere a preacher said it from a stage: “Money can’t buy happiness.” You’ve heard it so many times it just sounds true.

It is a lie. And the fastest way to test it is to think about a bill you had trouble paying one time.

You know the feeling of an unexpected bill. The car makes a noise it’s never made before. The tooth starts throbbing on a Sunday night. The letter from the county shows up with a number on it you weren’t planning for. And for a lot of people, that moment lands in the gut like a punch, because there’s no room in the account for surprises. The whole month was already spoken for.

When the bill hits and you don’t have the money, you feel it in your body. The anger comes first, then the fear right behind it, and underneath both of them that low hum of dread that follows you around all day. You snap at people you love over nothing. You lie awake at two in the morning doing math that never works out.

Now pretend for a minute that some unexpected money shows up. A payment you forgot was coming. A new client buys your product or service unexpectedly. A check that clears early. Somebody hands you exactly what you needed. Watch what happens inside you. The anger drains out. The fear lets go. That knot in your stomach loosens and you can breathe again. The emotion that you experience is called happiness.

Same bill. Same you. The only thing that changed was the money, and your whole emotional world flipped from dread to relief. You cannot tell me that’s not happiness.

So why do people keep saying money can’t buy happiness? Usually because they’re the ones who don’t have it. It’s what you tell yourself when the account is empty and you need a reason to feel okay about it. Call money unimportant and suddenly being broke isn’t a failure, it’s a choice. Honestly, this is a kind of coping mechanism, and it gets handed down from person to person until everybody just repeats it without checking.

You Already Know This Is True

You’ve felt this yourself, probably more than once, so I’m not going to belabor it. And I’m not talking about buying a yacht. I’m talking about the ordinary stuff that quietly wrecks people who don’t have enough:

Anybody who’s lived through the lean version of those moments knows exactly how much happier the other version is.

This is not a feeling you have to take my word for. You’ve lived some version of it, and you remember it. You don’t need a scientist to prove it to you. You’ve got a memory.

Knowing It and Proving It Are Two Different Things

Now let’s talk about how we can prove it, even though I don’t know that the proof is necessary. If you don’t only want to rely on your anecdotal experience, let’s look at what the science says.

Normally, we decide with our gut, and then we go looking for the logic to back it up. Almost every real decision you’ve ever made worked that way. You felt the answer first, then you assembled the reasons.

So you already feel that money buys happiness. You’ve lived it. But feeling it and being able to defend it are two different things.

Because the next time you talk about money with someone, somebody’s going to hit you with the old line. “Well, money can’t buy happiness.” And in that moment, even though your whole life screams otherwise, you won’t have anything to fire back with except your own story, and stories are easy to wave away.

The science is on your side. It caught up to what your gut already knew.

What the Research Actually Shows

For over a decade, there was one study everybody quoted. In 2010, a Princeton researcher named Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on how people think, published a famous finding. He looked at the data and concluded that money makes you happier, but only up to about $75,000 a year. After that, he said, the happiness flattens out. More money, no more joy.

That $75,000 number became gospel. It got repeated in every article and every TED talk for ten years. People loved it, because it let everybody off the hook. See? Past a certain point, money doesn’t even matter.

Then in 2021, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named Matthew Killingsworth decided to actually test it with better tools. Instead of asking people to remember how they felt, he pinged them on their phones at random moments and asked how they felt right then, in real time. He collected more than one and a half million of these reports from tens of thousands of people.

What he found blew the old number apart. There was no plateau. Happiness kept climbing right along with income, past $75,000, past $100,000, and it kept on going. The more people made, the better they felt, day to day.

Then something happened that makes this even more important. Instead of the two researchers spending the next decade sniping at each other, Kahneman and Killingsworth sat down together in 2023 and worked out what was really going on. For most people, happiness keeps rising with income, no ceiling in sight. The only exception was a smaller group of people who were already deeply unhappy, and for them money helped up to a point and then stopped moving the needle.

That lines up with something you already sensed. Money buys happiness for almost everybody. Where it runs out of power is on the misery that was never about money to begin with. Your gut knew that. Now two Nobel-level researchers who started out disagreeing ended up proving it.

Why the Lie Feels So Good to Repeat

If your own life proves it and the research proves it, why does “money can’t buy happiness” refuse to die?

Because it feels noble to say. It makes the person saying it sound wise. Above it all. Too spiritually evolved to care about something as grubby as money. It’s a way of claiming the high ground without having to climb anything.

And it’s the perfect excuse. It is so much easier to call money unimportant than to admit you haven’t made any. If money doesn’t buy happiness, then being broke isn’t a problem you have to fix. It starts to feel almost like a virtue.

That’s the golden cage. The gold is that the lie makes you feel good about yourself. It lets you feel rich in spirit while your bank account stays empty. The cage is that you’ll keep telling yourself this comfortable story for years while the actual thing that would relieve your stress, give you options, and let you sleep at night sits there unbuilt, because you talked yourself out of wanting it.

The gold is the lie. And this one’s especially sneaky, because it dresses up staying broke as a kind of wisdom.

Money Isn’t a Cure for Everything

Now, I’m not going to stand here and tell you money fixes everything. It doesn’t.

Money buys happiness by taking away the specific, grinding misery of not having what you want, not having what you need, and not having enough. It pays the bill. It buys the breathing room. It hands you choices you didn’t have before, the ability to say yes to what matters and no to what doesn’t. That’s real, and it’s most of the ballgame.

What money can’t do is fix a misery that was never about money in the first place. If you’re carrying grief, or a marriage that’s falling apart, or something broken inside that no amount of cash will touch, a bigger bank account won’t reach it. Money is a powerful tool, but it was never meant to be a cure for everything.

But “money can’t fix everything” and “money can’t buy happiness” are two different statements. The first one is true and the second one isn’t, and people love to quote the true one as a way to make the false one sound reasonable. Don’t fall for it.

What to Do About It

Stop repeating the lie. Stop nodding along when somebody else says it. And whatever you do, stop using it as a bandage over a bank account that needs real work.

If money would relieve the pressure you’re under, then say so honestly, and go earn some. There’s no shame in it. I’ve written before about why financial freedom is really about buying back your time and choices, not just stacking cash for its own sake.

Words of Wisdom

“The blessing of the Lord makes rich, and he adds no sorrow with it.” – Proverbs 10:22

Riches that come as a blessing don’t drag sorrow in behind them. That’s interesting. The idea that money and misery are a package deal isn’t ancient wisdom. It’s something people added on their own, long after the fact, and it was never true.

Proverbs never treats money as evil. It treats it as a tool and a responsibility, something to steward well and put to good use. There was never any shame in wanting money. The shame shows up when you lie to yourself about it while your family carries the weight of that lie.

You didn’t start your business to have a better job. You started it to have a better life. That life costs money. Go build it.

What to Do Next

A lot of hardworking entrepreneurs still feel financial pressure they can’t explain. They’re putting in the hours, the revenue looks fine, and somehow the money never quite frees them up the way they thought it would. Usually that’s because the business is built in a way that quietly caps what it can pay them. I learned this the hard way when I had a million dollars in profit and a business worth nothing. If that’s you, the first step is seeing exactly where the money is leaking out before you ever try to grow.

That’s what I walk through in my free webinar, What to Fix Before You Exit. It shows you the specific things that keep a business from being worth what it should be, and worth what it should pay you. You can join the upcoming live webinar at whattofixbeforeyouexit.com.

Or if you’d just rather talk through your specific situation, you can book a call with me directly at therealjasonduncan.com/talk.

– The Real Jason Duncan