MONEY CAN BUY A LITTLE HAPPINESS, BUT NOT TOO MUCH: Summarizing a recent paper by the Brookings Institution, the Financial Times has a fascinating article on the relationship between money and happiness.
To start, folks’ self-reported satisfaction rises with income at all levels in all countries:
But the satisfaction scale does not quite get at folks’ emotional well-being. The study got at it like this:
Emotional Well Being: Asks people about how they felt the day before. Authors collapsed responses into 3 categories: a) positive affect (average of happiness, enjoyment, and frequent smiling and laughter; b) blue affect (average of worry and sadness); and c) stress.
And here are the results in graphical form:
So what does this mean? The “positive affect” and “not blue” (i.e. not depressed) lines start to even out around $75,000 in annual income, while the “stress free” line inflects around $40,000 per year. It seems as though once your basic needs are met, more income doesn’t do much to improve your well-being, although it does improve your self-image. Or looked at another way, you could say that being poor is no fun, while being rich isn’t much more fun that being middle class. So maybe Mr. Money Moustache and Early Retirement Extreme are on to something?
A MILEAGE RUN DIARY: Mileage running is the art of flying around the country and sometimes even the world with the sole goal of padding one’s frequent flyer account. It is occasionally practiced by the frequent flyer elite to bump themselves up to a particular elite level with an airline, or even because it makes sense financially. Rene at Delta Points put together a nice diary of a recent mileage run wherein he flew 15,000 miles in three days, plus he laid out the math for us amateurs:
- My REAL cost for the trip was $635 for air so 4.2 CPM
- My haul of 32,181 is worth at least $322 so net 2.1 CPM (my math)
- I paid $24 parking, $15 tolls, and $68 in gas so $107 all-in.
So if you are keeping track, this year so far after my IST and SBN-LAX mileage runs I have spent a total of $1,293 of my own money to get 32,252 MQM’s [ed: Medallion Qualifying Miles, aka butt-in-seat miles, which determine elite status and generally can’t be earned from credit card spending] and well over 65,000 Skymiles. I also, as I crossed my Platinum Medallion threshold, could have picked 20,000 Skymiles but will use that to gift Silver Medallion to a reader for the SWAG Saturday gift in July. When I cross Diamond I get to pick 2 more Choice Benefits and will gift my wife GOLD and will pick 25,000 miles as my other gift to myself. Bottom line, even giving up 20,000 Skymiles, 90,000 total worth $900 brings my out of pocket cost down to just $393. I am just ONE BUMP away from break even for the YEAR! How sweet is that.
And that’s why people do mileage runs. It’s not for us, but if you love flying and have the time and a little bit of cash to do so, it’s not a bad hobby to have.
HOW TO HACK YOUR HOTEL THERMOSTAT: A very cool trick from Points, Miles, and Martinis:
A Few Simple Steps To Get VIP Treatment And Cooler Room
- While holding down “display”
- Press “off”
- Then Press “Up” arrow
- Release “display” button
After following these instructions, you should see the code below (VIP) on your INNCOM thermostat.
Using the VIP trick above allows guests to override the INNCOM thermostat settings and into VIP mode. This will allow you to set the thermostat as low as 60 degrees. Normally hotels limit the thermostat to 65 degrees.
We personally think 65 degrees is plenty cool, but we just get a kick out of knowing how to do stuff like this.
SCARED STRAIGHT: The Daily Show is trying to scare kids away from going to college and racking up $170,000 in debt.
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