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?

Ken Honda—Japan’s #1 bestselling personal development guru—teaches you how to achieve peace of mind when it comes to money with this instant national bestseller. Too often, money is a source of fear, stress, and anger, often breaking apart relationships and even ruining lives. We like to think money is just a number or a piece of paper, but it is so much more than that. Money has the ability to smile, it changes when it is given with a certain feeling, and the energy with which it imbues us impacts not only ourselves, but others as well. Although Ken Honda is often called a “money guru,” his real job over the past decade has been to help others discover the tools they already possess to heal their own lives and relationships with money. Learn how to treat money as a welcome guest, allowing it to come and go with respect and without resentment; understand and improve your money EQ; unpack the myth of scarcity; and embrace the process of giving money, not just receiving it. This book isn’t to fix you, because as Ken Honda says, you’re already okay!

Doing well with money isn’t necessarily about what you know. It’s about how you behave. And behavior is hard to teach, even to really smart people. Money—investing, personal finance, and business decisions—is typically taught as a math-based field, where data and formulas tell us exactly what to do. But in the real world people don’t make financial decisions on a spreadsheet. They make them at the dinner table, or in a meeting room, where personal history, your own unique view of the world, ego, pride, marketing, and odd incentives are scrambled together. In The Psychology of Money, award-winning author Morgan Housel shares 19 short stories exploring the strange ways people think about money and teaches you how to make better sense of one of life’s most important topics.

Look around you - what do you see? You may discover to your surprise that the people who are most at peace with money are the ones who walk nimbly between having too little and having too much. They have found a balance between indulgence and austerity; between success and happiness; between motivation and inspiration; and between any number of other poles we tend to think of as either/or choices, but which in reality are simply posts on either side of a doorway through which we must pass. For many of us the subject of money is unavoidably stressful. Managing our personal finances is complicated, time consuming and often, particularly in the slow countdown to pay day, dispiriting. The good news is that in Japan - where a Zen approach to life is more widely practiced - a pathway to a better relationship with money is being carved, by Ken Honda. This beautifully written book will reinvent the way you see your personal finances. You will come to understand that money flows like water and arrives like a guest. You'll rethink your own attitudes and examine the way they were shaped by beliefs about money you were taught as a child. When we heal the fear and anxiety we have about money, we successfully achieve prosperity and peace. Take the zen path to financial security and happiness.

There is a paradox at the heart of our lives. We all want more money, but as societies become richer, they do not become happier. This is not speculation: It's the story told by countless pieces of scientific research. We now have sophisticated ways of measuring how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people have grown no happier in the last fifty years, even as average incomes have more than doubled. The central question the great economist Richard Layard asks in Happiness is this: If we really wanted to be happier, what would we do differently? First we'd have to see clearly what conditions generate happiness and then bend all our efforts toward producing them. That is what this book is about-the causes of happiness and the means we have to effect it. Until recently there was too little evidence to give a good answer to this essential question, but, Layard shows us, thanks to the integrated insights of psychology, sociology, applied economics, and other fields, we can now reach some firm conclusions, conclusions that will surprise you. Happiness is an illuminating road map, grounded in hard research, to a better, happier life for us all.

The six happiness tools in this guide include: practicing appreciation; making choices; building personal power; leading with your strengths; employing constructive language; and living multidimensionally.

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.