My Guest
Today I am thrilled to welcome Carl Richards to the podcast. Carl has spent decades as a Certified Financial Planner, is the creator of the Sketch Guy column (which appeared weekly for a decade in The New York Times), is a best selling author (most notably of The Behavior Gap: Simple Ways to Stop Doing Dumb Things with Money), is a podcaster (most recently, the host of 50 Fires: A Podcast About Money and Meaning), and is a frequent contributor to countless financial and other publications, including Morningstar Advisor, Marketplace Money, Oprah.com, and Forbes.com, among others
In our conversation today, we cover: How in some instances money can indeed buy happiness; Why money is like alcohol; Why you should aim to “die with zero”; How to run small experiments to see what types of spending are likely to produce happiness for you; Why you may want to think about money as you would gathering firewood in a remote cabin in the wilderness; And much, much more.
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The Link Between Money, Meaning, and Happiness – In The Trenches
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Questions Asked
The Link Between Money and Meaning
- What are some recurring themes that you’ve been able to tease out from entrepreneurs who have recently sold their businesses? What should listeners be prepared for when they find themselves in a similar situation?
- Money is kind of like alcohol: The more of it you have, the more it reveals who you’ve truly been all along. Agree or disagree?
- Talk to us about the idea of “making it”. What myths or misconceptions or misunderstandings might we hold about that idea?
- If I were to ask you to argue that money does indeed buy happiness and that the sale of a company will indeed be the best thing that ever happened to you, what arguments might you make?
- How do we avoid fooling ourselves in justifying frivolous purchases?
- How have you seen money used create the most “good” in people’s lives? What specific uses of money have created the most fulfillment for those who have used it particularly wisely?
- There’s a widely-cited study claiming that any incremental dollar over ~$75K/year doesn’t increase happiness. Do you agree with this prevailing wisdom?
- What types of problems does more money create?
- Do we tend to make our lives more complex than they need to be as we accumulate more money?
Spending
- Author Bill Perkins suggests that we all “die with zero”, and spend, donate, or gift our money while we’re still alive as opposed to building an estate. Agree or disagree?
- How do you think about the use of debt in a personal finance context?
- You’ve previously suggested that we should think about money as we would gathering firewood while living in a remote cabin in the woods. Tell us more about that idea
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Thanks to our Sponsors
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