The Art of Spending Money: How to Get Rich and STAY Rich | Morgan Housel
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Dopamine doesn't care how much you have. All it wants is more, more, more. What what would feel better? Your net worth is a $100,000 during a bull market, or your net worth is a million dollars, but it's gonna be a million dollars for the next decade. Yeah. What what feels better? It's so the the bull market feels so much better. The growth is what feels is what feels good. And so because of that, no matter what your net worth is, the right amount that you think is gonna satiate you is always two x.
A lot of people think getting rich is the key to solving their problems. Are they right?
I think they can be right. They can be right. So the answer is not no, but it's not a resounding yes either. I think it is very easy for everybody to assume that if you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, I'm not satisfied with my life. I have this hole that needs to be filled. It's very easy to assume that that hole needs to be filled with more money.
Why? Why is that the assumption?
I think one of the big reasons why that is so easy to make that assumption is this. Money is so quantifiable. And so you can measure your progress and I can measure myself relative to you very easily, very, very easily. I give the example of this. If I said I wanted to be a better husband, I'd like to be a 10% better husband. Great goal. Very noble goal. I would love to be a 10% better. Yeah. What the hell does that even mean? How do I measure that? How do I track my progress? There's no husband points. If I if I were to say, like, who who is a better father? Me or you or somebody? Who knows?
Got it. So you're saying, basically, money should not be the default. I want wanna get into the case that you're making. So the the book is called the art of spending money, and this is after, Morgan, you've you've written books on investing, basically, the psychology of money, same as ever. These were books on how to earn, how to save, how to invest, particularly how to work your your mental and your brain software to be oriented towards those things. You call spending money an art, so it's not a science. Right? There's no universal formula is is what you're saying. It's just like investing f
I think it's a very good point. It's a fair point. I thought about that a lot with the book when I was writing the book of, is this only a topic for people who have tons of excess money lying around and they don't know what to do with it? I think the answer, it could have been written in that way. But I actually think for some of people who have lower incomes, average incomes or lower incomes, this can impact you just as much. Those tend to be a lot of the people who are really struggling with things like if only, like the if only questions. If only I had a bigger house, if only I had a nicer
Before you could afford any of these things.
Before I could afford any of it whatsoever. And it's not that I don't like those things anymore. But when I, I didn't know this at the time, but when I try to like pick apart my life now, I think a lot of why I wanted those things so badly is because when I was 19 or 20 years old, I had nothing else to offer the world. I had no intelligence, I had no humor, I didn't know how to be a good spouse or a good I had nothing to offer. And so by default, I think in my little teenage brain, was like, Oh, if only I had a Ferrari, then people would value me. Because there was nothing else that they could
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