Buying Happiness

Explains how and why money that is wisely spent can promote a healthier, happier, more satisfactory life, with guidelines on how to reevaluate one's priorities and reallocate one's wealth to buy more time and peace of mind.

The complete guide to building a life you love &– and the financial tools to get you there.Money doesn' t eliminate life' s challenges, but it does make them easier to face and overcome. This became evident to Kate Campbell, the host of top-ranking Australian Finance Podcast, when an episode on ways to buy happiness became their most popular ever. Suddenly, it made sense to her audience: the reason to monitor spending, start saving and investing, and set money goals is because sound financial decisions can lead to a happier life.In Buying Happiness, Kate dives deeper on this topic to build a roadmap that will improve every aspect of your financial life, while maximizing your happiness along the way. Easy-to-read and jam packed with helpful resources, this optimistic book shares small but meaningful actions that will help you:• Set financial goals you' re excited to achieve• Invest your very first $5 in the stock market• Reach financial freedom and free up 40+ hours every week• Curate a meaningful career through experimentation• Pass on money skills to the next generation.Buying Happiness is the ultimate guide for anyone who is ready to dream, live, travel and thrive.

If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. If you think money can’t buy happiness, you’re not spending it right. Two rising stars in behavioral science explain how money can buy happiness—if you follow five core principles of smarter spending. Happy Money offers a tour of new research on the science of spending. Most people recognize that they need professional advice on how to earn, save, and invest their money. When it comes to spending that money, most people just follow their intuitions. But scientific research shows that those intuitions are often wrong. Happy Money explains why you can get more happiness for your money by following five principles, from choosing experiences over stuff to spending money on others. And the five principles can be used not only by individuals but by companies seeking to create happier employees and provide “happier products” to their customers. Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton show how companies from Google to Pepsi to Crate & Barrel have put these ideas into action. Along the way, the authors describe new research that reveals that luxury cars often provide no more pleasure than economy models, that commercials can actually enhance the enjoyment of watching television, and that residents of many cities frequently miss out on inexpensive pleasures in their hometowns. By the end of this book, readers will ask themselves one simple question whenever they reach for their wallets: Am I getting the biggest happiness bang for my buck?

Once, Tammy Strobel and her husband were living a normal middle-class lifestyle: driving two cars, commuting long distances, and living well beyond their means. Now they are living the voluntary downsizing; or smart-sizing; dream. In this book Strobel combines research on well-being with numerous real-world examples to offer practical inspiration. Her fresh take on our things, our work, and our relationships spells out micro-actions that anyone can take to step into a life that’s more conscious and connected, sustainable and sustaining, heartfelt and happy.

Strobel and her husband are living the voluntary downsizingNor smart-sizingNdream and here she combines research on well-being with numerous real world examples to offer practical inspiration.

The idea of Canada as a consumer society was largely absent before 1890 but familiar by the mid-1960s. This change required more than rising incomes and greater impulses to buy; it involved the creation of new concepts. Buying Happiness explores the ways that key public thinkers represented, conceptualized, and institutionalized new ideas about consumption. Liverant’s fresh approach connects the emergence and diffusion of these ideas with changes in political processes and social policy. As the figure of “the consumer” moved from the margins to the centre of social, cultural, and political analysis, the values and concepts associated with consumerism were woven into the Canadian social imagination.

A smart and funny book by a prominent Harvard psychologist, which uses groundbreaking research and (often hilarious) anecdotes to show us why we’re so lousy at predicting what will make us happy – and what we can do about it. Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had expected. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward. Using cutting-edge research, much of it original, Gilbert shakes, cajoles, persuades, tricks and jokes us into accepting the fact that happiness is not really what or where we thought it was. Among the unexpected questions he poses: Why are conjoined twins no less happy than the general population? When you go out to eat, is it better to order your favourite dish every time, or to try something new? If Ingrid Bergman hadn’t gotten on the plane at the end of Casablanca, would she and Bogey have been better off? Smart, witty, accessible and laugh-out-loud funny, Stumbling on Happiness brilliantly describes all that science has to tell us about the uniquely human ability to envision the future, and how likely we are to enjoy it when we get there.