Frank Chung* reports on a Harvard professor suggesting it’s better to buy happiness today than to save up for a time when we’ll be unhappy.
Credit: Eva-Katalin
By outsourcing “negative” experiences like doing the laundry or mowing the lawn, money really can buy happiness, according to a Harvard professor.
Ashley Whillans, who researches time-money trade-offs, says more people would be happier if they spent more of their money to “buy themselves out of negative experiences”.
Speaking to the Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast podcast, Whillans said her research showed that “timesaving purchases”, such as outsourcing housework or paying more in rent to live closer to work, had a massive impact on happiness and relationships.
“We really like to flip Benjamin Franklin’s adage on its head and say, ‘Well, if time is money, maybe also we can think that money can buy a happier time’,” she said.
“Any way that we spend money in a way that might save us time — such as also buying ourselves into positive experiences — has reliable and positive effects on the happiness that we get from our days, our weeks, our months and our lives.”
Whillans said many people needed “retraining” to feel comfortable having strangers take care of household chores.
“We have this idea that we’re a failure if somehow we can’t have the perfect home life and be the most successful at work,” she said.
“I find in my studies that people feel really guilty about outsourcing even though they’re giving up money to have more time that they’ve earned … People feel guilty about burdening other people with their tasks.”
While a little bit of outsourcing goes a long way, she added that people who outsourced too much “experienced the lowest levels of happiness, in part probably because … they feel like their life must be so out of control if they can’t even do one load of laundry on the weekend”.
Splashing out to get groceries delivered to your door or having landscapers take care of the garden may seem like an extravagance for the well-off.
According to Whillans, however, people on the lowest incomes who “deliberately make time saving purchases … benefit the most from these purchases as compared to people in the middle and top end of the income distribution”.
“What we think is going on there is that people who are materially constrained also tend to be time-poor,” she said.
“They might be working multiple jobs, they might be a single parent. They might have to commute really far away because the only place that they could live is somewhere that’s quite far away from where they work.”
Every time we open our wallet to make a discretionary income purchase, she says, “we need to be thinking, is this money changing the way that I spend my time?”
* Frank Chung is Finance Editor at news.com.au. He can be contacted @franks_chung [email protected]
This article first appeared at www.news.com.au
