The Cost of Money

The following is an excerpt from The Secret Language of Money: How to Make Smarter Financial Decisions and Live a Richer Life.

Mugger: “Don’t make a move, this is a stickup. Now, come on—your money or your life. [long pause] Look, Bud, I said, your money or your life!”

Jack Benny: “Give me a minute—I’m thinking it over!”

The joke, of course, was that Mr. Benny was such a skinflint, he placed a higher value on his money than on his very life. This routine got one of the biggest laughs of Benny’s long and illustrious career, and became the prototypical Jack Benny gag. Of course, no one in real life would say such a thing. Or would they?

An Expensive Hobby

When I met Denise she had been a collector all her life. One of her earliest memories was of collecting china dolls. The essence of her passion for collecting was the sense it provided her of being in control. In the act of acquiring, arranging, and rearranging her small family of dolls, Denise had absolute command over her little universe.

By her thirties her passion for collecting had grown, and she began purchasing through catalogs so as not to be distracted by having to interact with anyone. By age 40 she had switched to the Internet, spending many hours a day perusing online auctions, trolling for more china dolls. She was building a valuable collection, she told herself.

On many occasions Denise attempted unsuccessfully to curtail her Internet spending. She set a weekly limit of time and money, but promptly defied her own authority, rationalizing that the pursuit helped compensate for feeling lonely, empty, or depressed. Yet despite her belief that her continued collecting would make her feel better, the momentary excitement she would feel when the newest acquisitions actually arrived at her home would quickly fade. She soon reached the point where the only thing that would put a halt to her online activity was either exhaustion or when she would run out of money from her monthly trust allotment.

At 43, by the time I met her, Denise had developed considerable expertise and a collection of significant value to go with it. In addition to the hours she spent every day arranging and cataloging her collections, she was spending $8,000 to $10,000 per month from her trust fund on additions to her collection. Her preoccupation now absorbed most of her days and was draining away her inheritance. In a very real sense, it was draining away her life.

If Jack Benny’s mugger had burst in upon Denise and demanded, “Your doll collection or your life!” what would she have said?

The Cost of Money

I first entered the workforce at the worldly-wise age of eight, as a paid farm hand. On hot summer days I would chop cotton for my dad, earning a whopping ten cents a row. The work was hot, hard, and dirty. That summer, I earned every cent I made.

After work I would meet up with my classmates, many of whom were also experiencing their first forays into the world of autonomous economics. Topped up with change from their paper routes and chores, they would hit the nearest store, where they would trade in their fresh assets for sodas and candy. Naturally, I joined them. My treats were quickly gone, and my hard-won pay with them. I was left standing, tired and dirty, wondering, “Was that candy worth a half a row of work?”

It was one of my earliest lessons in the cost of money. Not its value—I knew exactly how much candy a dime could buy—but the price I had to pay to get it. I learned that you don’t just buy things with money; you have to buy the money with something, too. It wasn’t long before I learned to ask myself, “Will I get enough from this soft drink to justify one row of cotton chopping?” The answer was no.

Yet as simple as this lesson would seem to be, it is one that we hide from ourselves again and again.

Money Quiz

List five things in your life that you value.

1. ____________________________________________________
2. ____________________________________________________
3. ____________________________________________________
4. ____________________________________________________
5. ____________________________________________________

Now: Which of these five things would you willingly trade for money?

Chances are good that if you listed five things that you truly value, your answer was something like, “None of them!” After all, if it’s something you value highly, why would you trade it for mere money?

On the other hand, depending on what you put on your list, you may have thought about answering the question with another question, such as, “Just how much money are we talking about here?”

That is the question David and Diana Murphy wrestle with in the novel and film Indecent Proposal. Desperate for money during an economic reversal that threatens to take away everything they have, they hit Vegas in hopes of winning big. The stakes are raised when David is approached by a wealthy man who offers to give him one million dollars—in exchange for one night with his wife.

Even as children we are fascinated with endless variations of this lurid dilemma. How many of us remember playing the game that goes, “Would you [fill in the blank with a despicable or repellent act] for a million dollars?” As grown-ups, we get to watch the fantasy play itself out—and reality TV shows are only the latest in a long tradition of “Can you believe they did that for money?” spectacles.

Hardly a season goes by without yet another sensational story in the press about a politician, sports star, or high-profile businessperson who gambled his or her entire career playing some version of this game and acting out the answer. We shake our heads with disbelief, because we would never do that.

Would we? Perhaps not, at least not in such a dramatic, high-stakes way as with Denise, or David Murphy, or whomever sits at the eye of the latest media-scandal storm. But are there smaller or more subtle ways in which we do exactly that?

Here are some of the most common compromises we make, often without fully realizing we’re doing it, in our struggles to sort out the most important layers of meaning in our lives.

Trading Time for Money

Of all the precious things we trade for money, by far the most common is time.

Time is the basic unit of exchange for most of the working world. If we want more money, most of us need to spend more time to get it, and the trend has been for us to want more and more of it.

Yet we also insist that it’s time we want, and not the money itself. A survey by the Pew Social & Demographic Trends Project found that 67 percent of respondents ranked free time as their most important priority, compared with only 13 percent who valued wealth the most.

At least, that’s what we say. How we act tells a different story altogether. Collectively, American workers give a whopping 1.6 million years’ worth of unused vacation time back to their employers every year. That’s leisure time which we choose to trade for more money, more accolades, or the hope of climbing one rung higher on the ladder.

The irony of our time-money exchange is that we keep trading time for money in order to buy back more time. And time is running out.

Trading Freedom for Money

Lamar founded a thriving personal service business. His company and its growth were his creation, an expression of the creativity he had not experienced working for others, or earlier working for his father in a similar business. Although he had given much of his personal time and energy to the long hours in the dozen years to grow his company, he enjoyed being his own boss.

Lamar used money to represent the freedom that he had created—to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. He felt good about his accomplishment, and the money he had amassed.

Then he decided to cash in on his hard work, and sell his company to a large, multinational corporation. The deal promised a massive profit, a windfall Lamar simply couldn’t pass up. He stayed on as a consultant, but his narrow role in the new system felt confining to him. He was now wealthier by an order of magnitude, but no longer CEO of his own company. Lamar finally realized that he had paid the currency of freedom to acquire its symbol, the wealth of money.

Trading Health for Money

In 1969, a young worker at a large Japanese newspaper corporation died of a stroke. His death would become the first official case of karoshi, or “death by overwork,” a phenomenon that The Economist would later call the corporate equivalent of hari-kari. By the 1980s, karoshi was legally recognized as a cause of death in Japan, with court judgments for the families of victims rising as high as a million dollars.

While karoshi remains an extreme example of the impact of the time-money exchange, overwork is taking its toll on our health in other ways. The American Institute of Health estimates that stress has a $300 billion cost, exacted in the form of turnover, compensation, insurance, medical expenses, and reduced productivity. Increased incidences of mental health conditions, particularly anxiety and depression, are being linked to work and money-related stress.

We’re suffering mentally and physically, and the problem seems to be worsening.

Trading Family and Relationships for Money

If there ever was a time when the stereotypical image of the father and son playing catch on the weekends was true, it’s behind us. Americans spend about 40 minutes each week playing with their kids. That’s less time than we spend shopping and watching television by a very wide margin.

It’s not only our children who feel our inability to understand the language of money. Money is the most common relationship conflict for couples. A survey by the Financial Planning Association found that 40 percent of financial advisors cited money as a “key factor” in a couple’s decision to split up. And while many of these relationship issues really are about money, many use money as a language to express relationship conflict or the dynamics of power. Who controls finances? Who makes big money decisions? How are money disagreements resolved?

The same money equation that uses money as a currency for power can destroy the very relationships that might provide love and happiness.

Trading Happiness for Money

In their book Being: The Foundations of Hedonic Psychology, a group of scholars examined the connection between money and happiness and found that money correlates weakly with happiness (about equally with good looks and intelligence).

And the strongest correlation with happiness? Marriage. The very thing that too often suffers most in the quest for financial gain turns out to be the single most likely predictor of happiness. After marriage, the next strongest happiness predictors were other relationships, including family and friends, and immersion in life, exercise, and spirituality—all things that we frequently sacrifice in the pursuit of wealth.

Our pursuit of happiness through wealth would seem to push joy only farther away and replace it with fear, envy, greed, and shame.

Trading Wealth for Money

Is it possible we’re sacrificing wealth in the pursuit of money? As paradoxical as that sounds, there is compelling evidence that we are doing exactly that.

In April, 2005, the United States officially became a nation of spenders. That month, we spent more than our after-tax incomes, creating a negative savings rate. The trend continued into the following year, and 2006 marked the first full year since the Great Depression that we spent more than we earned. A look at the balance sheet of the average American citizen in 2006 and 2007 would reveal that they were worse than broke.

The middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, however, was anything but the Great Depression. Incomes had been increasing for decades—there had never been a better time to save a few extra pennies—but climbing along with our income (and eventually surpassing it) was our spending. And that spending was driven by our money story.

Comments

[Financial Samurai]

Great post. Money is really a trade off, and I would trade all the money I make over $150,000 to be happy and with the wife :)

[Beth]

Oddly enough, one of the things on my list is something I regularly trade for money -- my talents :) I'm thankful for the gifts that I have that let me be creative and fulfilled, and also keep me employed!

Mind you, I also give them away (volunteering and hobbies).

[MC]

I agree with you about the "cost" of money vs other things.

But I didn't understand your point of describing over-the-top example of the woman with the ridiculous and expensive hobby. Initially, I thought we were all supposed to shake our heads and go "tsk tsk, what a irresponsible waste of money". But at the end you imply that she has a huge trust fund to support her spending. So apparently her spending is not sending her to the poorhouse, nor does she apparently need to accumulate wealth for any practical reason. So why shouldn't she indulge in her obsession?

[StL Menno]

MC,
because addictions can often while serving us in the moment control us in the long run. She expresses unhappiness with her use of time. The point is, she has traded things she loves (relationships, fulfillment) for collections, in the same way that in our modern society we sometimes trade things we value for status and money, even when we say our values are different.

[Joseph]

What an interesting post! The psychology of money is quite intriguing. I'll be adding this book to my Amazon wish list :)

[Old Limey]

1) My wife and my very happy 53 year marriage.
2) Our health.
3) The memories of all the incredible vacations we have had and the art & antiques that we collected on our journeys.
4) The fun times, camping, backpacking, skiing, fishing & attending sporting events with our kids. I never missed a practice or game and assisted the coaches in every possible way.
5) A wonderful and very satisfying career with creative work, great colleagues, and great bosses.

I can't think of any of my life experiences that I would have ever traded for money. Money is like the gasoline you put in your car, it enables you to have very enjoyable experiences, whereas a stockpile of unused gasoline however wouldn't do much for me unless gasoline was suddenly unavailable. You only really get enjoyment and pleasure from the money you spend, a stockpile of it just sitting around only adds extra security.

My money goals were never lofty, I was just in the right place at the right time on a few occasions. My working life in the USA from 1958 until 1992 turned out to be a great period, and my retirement years from 1992 to the present have been even better. Unfortunately I am not very hopeful that we will ever return to those prosperous years again - far too many great jobs throughout the USA have been lost forever.

[JeffinwesternWa]

I traded time: worked VERY HARD, LONG HOURS from early 90's to middle of this decade, result was being able to retire, healthy and wealthy at age 47, it IS worth it IMHO. Sure I missed a lot working holidays, birthdays, weekends, evenings,etc., can't tell you who recorded what hits or played in the super bowl. I took care of my clients (as a financial planner) and the $$ rolled in - at least for me, from over $200K in early 94 to $500K a year in '03. I lived on about $50K~, paid taxes, rented modest but nice homes (no time for maintenance/improvements you see) invested and saved the rest (to about $2.85M), today I am work free forever, the home is paid off and I have about $2.35M to live off in addition to a military pension (and health care as a disabled/retired vet) of $32K~ annually. First million took till 41, it comes faster after that but, I stopped just before $3M

[LotharBot]

Work is good for you. I've been unemployed, and sitting around all day doing nothing of consequence SUCKS. Being productive for somewhere between about 25 and 50 hours a week seems to me about the right amount. More than that is stressful (though possibly worth it), and less than that is boring. Now, being "productive" can take a lot of forms -- paid work, volunteering, raising a child, and so on. I've made the choice to trade paid work for raising a child (but I'm only able to do it because my wife does extremely valuable work.)

When it comes to spending money, I routinely make the same calculation as the kid buying the soda: how many minutes/hours/days of (my or my wife's) work does the thing I'm buying cost? Is this the best use of those minutes/etc of work? And when I do something to earn more money, I often make a similar calculation: how much time/health/freedom/enjoyment am I giving up now, and how much time/health/freedom/enjoyment can I buy with what I earn from this?

I find that thinking of money in this way makes me more prone to certain types of spending (quality furniture, good tools or utensils, etc.) and less prone to other types (fast food, movies, etc.) And thinking of work this way makes me willing to occasionally turn down an offer to work a few extra hours; while I was writing this post I got a call asking if I could work Thursday morning, and I declined because I want to spend that time getting the apartment clean and set up for game night Thursday night.

[Beth]

@ JeffinwesternWa -- Just out of curiosity, do your family and friends agree? Your experience is so contrary to my own that I'm curious to know more.

Right now I feel like I'm choosing between two kinds of investments -- trying to earn more money and get ahead at work versus building my social network and finding a spouse. I can't help but think it's easy for married people to rake in the cash when they have someone else to pick up the slack.

[JeffinWesternWA]

yes, they do, I told them it wasn't "forever, I laid out my plans and worked the plan. Now, I'm planning 3 weeks w/ them in Florida afteer a nice 2 week fall visit to Maine, today, I slept to 10am after years 6 days of 0600 alarms, workouts and work...I even often worked 2-6 hourts 1-2 Sunday evening s aweek back then..today, I am FREE! My girlfriend enjoys my schedule too,I simply work around here's and convinced her to be self-emplyed after she was laid off last year...I often hear the "excuse" "I want family time" etc., it's a ruse to NOT work hard cuz a middle mgt salary and 2 weeks vacation and a few holidays a year for 20-40 yers is NOT quality time! Work SMARTER, HARDER and if you can find the NICHE, for YOURSELF!

[reiner]

jeffinwesternwa, that's so great of you!

in this article, what does immersion in life means actually?

[Mike Hunt]

Jeffinwesternwa,

Thanks for sharing. I'm right behind you, I guess. Followed the same principle, hit my first million at 34/35, currently working on the 2nd one which should come in by next yr hopefully.

My question for you is what do you do to fill your days and keep your mind active & challenged?

Money for me is secondary- life experiences and continued learning is my primary goal.

-Mike