Happiness is related to money . It’s that simple, but with nuances. Some authors are quick to assert that money isn’t everything, or that it doesn’t buy happiness. The first one we could accept, the second one needs explanation. Having established the connection between salary and personal well-being, experts suggest that there are levels and ranges of income to measure the extent to which this is true.

On the other hand, if money is happiness, how much does income affect it? Is there an income limit that cannot increase this happiness? A work published in the magazine Nature reveals some curiosities. However, some psychologists like the American Charles Whitehead, remain skeptical about this issue and deny the conclusions of the study that we will discuss below.

Doesn’t money buy happiness?

Socially it is more than accepted that money does not bring happiness. In fact, in 2010 a study was published by the University of Victoria (New Zealand) that states, indeed, that money was equal to well-being but that it was by no means capable of "buying" a dose of happiness. The study involved almost 500,000 interviews from some 70 countries around the globe. The conclusions were that freedom and free time are above cumulative wealth when it comes to providing well-being.

Some believe that this was a deliberate study to calm the masses in times of economic crisis and a decline in the purchasing power of citizens worldwide. In a way, this study was an emotional relief for those groups who were convinced that the Bill Gates and Amancios Ortega were living happier lives.

Well, they weren’t that wrong. Another joint study between Harvard University and Columbia (USA) contradicts the research of their oceanic colleagues. It is more a question of semantics. Money does not buy happiness, true, but it does help to be able to invest in it in free time . What unequivocally distinguishes happy people from unhappy ones is the time variable. If we have a good income and we know how to manage our leisure time with our working life, we can have a much better chance of being happy, while the population with less money has to accept precarious jobs of many hours or multiple jobs in order to survive.

The problem is that the reverse is not true. If we have little money but a lot of free time we cannot invest in our well-being , we do not have enough resources to be able to take advantage of the free time. The logic is as follows: time without obligations minimizes the effects of stress and anxiety, which increases happiness.

The limits between the money versus happiness relationship

To determine the correlation between happiness and money, the American sociologists and human behavior research experts Andrew T. Jebb, Louis Tay, Ed Diener and Shigehiro Oishi, conducted their study using the Gallup method. The Gallup Organization is specifically in charge of measuring, analyzing and studying the behavior of individuals to solve the issues that concern society in general.

Having chosen the Gallup World Poll, the authors relied on a panel of 2 million people from around the world, controlling for demographic factors that determine income by area of data collection, at random to minimize any bias. At the end of the study, an enlightening result was obtained: there is a threshold above which earning more money does not bring more happiness. This threshold ranges from $60,000 to $90,000 per year. Figures above that amount are incapable of generating more happiness or emotional stability.

Free time, unknown factor

Since this is an extremely complex subject in order to draw exact conclusions, each author involved in this type of study or research tries to collect different variables and statements to support a more realistic thesis. To this end, both Elizabeth Dunn, a research collaborator at Columbia University, and Louis Tay agree that the time factor is the mother of all unknowns

A parallel study was carried out in order to be able to make this thesis concrete. With a smaller number of participants, a little over a thousand of them (and only in the United States), well-to-do people, billionaires and people from the middle or lower middle class were grouped together, and more than half of the respondents said that they were not aware of the advantage of investing in the reduction of stress by relieving other responsibilities that would mean having more time for them.