Ben Felix Proves Why More Money Won't Make You Happier After $137K
Is your money making you less happy? It sounds impossible, but it could actually be true.
Most people operate on the assumption that more money means more happiness. Ben Felix, chief investment officer at PWL Capital, spent time researching what actually makes life good — and the findings challenge one of the most deeply held beliefs in personal finance.
In a recent video, he laid out the research and arrived at a conclusion that's both liberating and, to be quite honest, a little uncomfortable.
It turns out there's a low limit to how happy money can make you -- and a tendency for more money to make you less happy once your needs are met.
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The Number Where Happiness Stops Growing
According to Felix, the research on income and happiness has produced a consistent finding across multiple major studies, even when the studies initially disagreed with each other.
A 2010 study found that experienced happiness — how good you feel day to day — rises with income up to about $75,000 annually and then plateaus. Adjusted to today's dollars, that's roughly $112,000. A 2018 study identified what researchers called points of "income satiation" — levels above which happiness stops increasing meaningfully. For experienced happiness, that point was around $65,000 at the time of the study or approximately $85,000 today. For overall life satisfaction, the satiation point was higher, around $105,000 — or about $137,000 today.
A 2021 study using real-time smartphone data found that happiness continued rising with income without a clear plateau. But the authors of the conflicting 2010 and 2021 studies then did something unusual: They collaborated to reconcile their findings. The conclusion from that combined work was that happier people continue experiencing increased well-being at higher income levels, while less happy people see happiness plateau at around the levels the original research identified.
Felix shared that the studies measure happiness against log-scale income. That means each point represents a doubling of income, not a modest raise. Even with those enormous jumps in income, the correlation between income and happiness is only about 0.09 in the experience sampling data. The difference in median happiness between a household earning $15,000 and one earning $250,000 is about five points on a 100-point scale. These are small differences for what feels like enormous gaps in financial circumstances.
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Why High Earners Sometimes Become Less Happy
One of the counterintuitive findings Felix highlighted is that in some parts of the world, including North America, life satisfaction actually starts to decline at the highest income levels. The explanation isn't that money makes people unhappy directly. It's what tends to come with very high incomes: more demands on time, less leisure, increased materialistic values, more social comparison and lifestyle changes like moving to more expensive neighborhoods that counterintuitively don't improve happiness.
The Research on What Actually Matters
Felix organized the evidence around the PERMA-V model from positive psychology. It's a framework identifying the factors that genuinely contribute to well-being: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment and vitality.
What stands out when you look at this model is how little of it money buys directly. Engagement — getting absorbed in challenging work that matches your skills — doesn't require wealth. Relationships are actively harmed by lifestyles that trade time for money. Meaning: Belonging to something bigger than yourself has essentially no price tag. Accomplishment comes from doing hard things pursued for their own sake.
Money helps with vitality; for example, you can afford good food and a gym membership. It helps somewhat with positive emotion. But it's a relatively minor player in the framework that actually predicts whether people evaluate their lives as good.
How People Make the Wrong Time-Money Trade-Off
Felix pointed to one of the more actionable findings in the research: People who prioritize time over money — who choose to work fewer hours for less money rather than more hours for more — are consistently happier. They have better social connections, better relationships and are more likely to end up in work they enjoy. The research suggests that choosing time is generally the better decision, even though it means less money. That's a direct challenge to the way most career decisions get made.
The commute finding is particularly sharp; people do not adapt to long commutes the way they adapt to most other lifestyle changes. Stress hormones remain elevated even after years of commuting. Someone who moves farther from work to afford a larger house — which they will adapt to quickly — has traded something they won't adapt to for something they will.
The Problem With Chasing Big Future Goals
Felix also addressed what he called the "end of history illusion," aka the human tendency to believe that the person you are today is essentially the finished version of yourself, even while acknowledging that you've changed quite a bit throughout your life. That illusion creates a specific problem for financial planning. Goals set by your current self — early retirement by a specific age, a particular house, a net worth target — may not resonate with the person you'll be when you get there. You make sacrifices to achieve something your future self may not actually want.
His suggested reframe: Instead of optimizing for a perfectly imagined future state, make more frequent small experiential purchases that contribute to the PERMA-V dimensions right now — experiences like dinner with a friend, a hobby expense, a community involvement — rather than deferring everything to afford some future milestone.
The One Goal That Holds Up
Felix didn't argue against saving or building wealth. He argued that financial independence — having enough that you're not dependent on any particular income source — is valuable because it puts you in control of your time and circumstances. Control over your own life is consistently identified as a major driver of happiness. Financial independence is essentially buying control, which is worth pursuing.
But the pursuit of money beyond what provides that control and security, particularly when it comes at the cost of time, relationships and experiences, is likely counterproductive. The research is clear enough: People focused on extrinsic objectives like money, fame and image tend to be less happy and to overestimate the emotional benefit of achieving them. People focused on intrinsic objectives — growth, intimacy, community — tend to do better.
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This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal or tax advice.
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