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All The Money In The World: What The Happiest People Know About Getting And Spending

March 26, 2012 by · Comments Off on All The Money In The World: What The Happiest People Know About Getting And Spending 

All The Money In The World: What The Happiest People Know About Getting And Spending, They say money can’t buy happiness, but Laura Vanderkam, author of All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending, begs to differ. In her new book, she explains how rethinking your budget and your attitude toward money can create a fuller, more enjoyable life. Excerpts from Vanderkam’s interview with U.S. News:

What inspired you to write All the Money in the World? It came out of my last book, 168 Hours, which is about how people spend their time. Time and money are two closely related variables that tend to move in opposite directions. Optimizing both of them is a tricky undertaking. Time is more absolutely limited, whereas money is a lot more variable.

People have been thinking about money and the economy a lot in the last few years. We’re clawing out of a pretty deep recession, and I think there’s a desire to be a little bit more mindful of our money. Even as we crawl back out of that, how can we take the lessons we learned from that time and keep them even during better times?

One of the concepts that you mentioned in the book and on your blog is the idea of the “joy budget.” Can you tell us more about that?

Budgeting is a pretty dreary idea if you think about it. One of the reasons thinking about money is so dreary is because people don’t budget for joy. They don’t think about what they’d like to spend their money on, and they also assume that we have to spend certain percentages on various necessities.

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