Wisdom of Rich Dad

Researchers have discovered how to be happier, and it’s not what you think.

“Choose to be happy” isn’t just a cliche; its a scientific conclusion.

People with the freedom to change careers, start a business or live their dreams are happier than people who feel stuck, researchers discovered.

Money relates to happiness only as far as it influences a person’s freedom to make choices, the researchers found.

In other words, money is indirectly tied to happiness through the lens of your ‘freedom to choose.’

“While wealth can provide you with more choices, it’s really having the ability to realize your dreams that leads to greater happiness,” study coauthor Ronald Fischer told AARP Magazine.

Fischer belonged to a team of researchers at the University of Wellington in New Zealand that surveyed 420,000 people across 63 countries about money, freedom, and choices.

Here’s the kicker: the people with freedom to choose report higher levels of happiness, even if they never act on that freedom.

The actual act of changing careers, starting a large family, moving to a new city, launching a business or traveling the world is irrelevant. What matters is having the freedom to do so. (I call this the freedom to ‘afford anything’ you choose.)

Money can provide you with more choices, but only if you keep your bills low.

It’s not the balance in a person’s bank account that makes them happy; it’s the ‘spread’ between their bank balance and their bills. If there’s a wide spread, people have more flexibility, more options. If there’s a narrow spread, people perceive themselves as stuck, and their happiness levels plummet.

If you get a raise but you embrace a bigger mortgage or a new car payment, your ‘spread’ never changes and you aren’t any happier.

If you get a raise but your spending habits stay the same, your ‘spread’ increases and – with it – so does your freedom and happiness.

The bottom line? Happiness relates to your ability to self-govern your own life, even if your day-to-day actions stay the same.

Maybe you’ve been too busy to notice, but the year’s almost over. So in between shopping trips, holiday preparations, and the rest of the daily grind, it’s time to take a breather and focus on some small things now that might make a big difference after year-end.

Maybe you’ve been putting off these tasks, or maybe they haven’t occurred to you. But with 30 days left in the year, you can take out this whole list doing just one thing every couple of days. And most of these jobs won’t take an hour.

Review your credit history. Time required: less than one hour. At AnnualCreditReport.comyou can get a free copy of your credit history – everything the three major reporting agencies have in your file. Your credit history doesn’t include your credit score, but this is the information used to tabulate your score, so you really need to check it for accuracy. Take 10 minutes to download it, then a half-hour looking it over to make sure all’s well.

Check out your tax situation. Time required: one to two hours. The window for some tax advantages closes at the end of the year, so now’s the time to look into possible credits and deductions – especially if you’re close to another tax bracket. Start by pulling out last year’s return, scoping out last year’s deductions, and seeing if there are actions you can take now to swell this year’s. Can you add more to your retirement plan at work? Can you take a deductible loss on an investment? Make a charitable donation?

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A $25 restaurant gift certificate for $2. An hour-long Swedish massage at half-off. Some deals are just too good to pass up. After all, when it comes to daily deals and coupon sites like Groupon, the more you spend, the more you save.

But would you have gone out to eat at that fancy restaurant if you didn’t have a gift certificate? Would you have suffered greatly if you didn’t receive the discounted massage? Not likely. In fact, if you never knew these deals existed, you probably wouldn’t have spent the money in the first place.

A New Breed of Frugality

The recession has inspired a newfound frugal mentality among Americans that’s only increasing. Everyone from the usual suspects (stay-at-home moms and starving students) to less likely digital coupon-clippers (single men and retirees) is jumping all over daily deal sites like Groupon, Living Social, and Restaurant.com.

So how much are the users of these websites actually saving? The real question is: How much more are they spending?

According to analysis by BIA/Kelsey, annual U.S. consumer spending on daily deal offers is expected to increase from an estimated $873 million in 2010 to $3.9 billion by 2015. That’s a compound annual growth rate of 35.1 percent.

At the same time, however, 64 percent of Americans don’t even have $1,000 in emergency savings, a relatively small amount of money for a financial safety net.

It’s becoming apparent that consumers think they’re saving money, yet are failing to do so.

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Women need to get smarter about their money says Nicole Pederson Mckinnon editor of Smart Investor Magazine.

Should couple share financial responsibility?

I’ll get right to the point…protests like Occupy Wall Street are a complete joke and the perfect example of why“They are the 99%”and will continue to lose at life. I believe in total financial self-reliance. This “entitlement” mentality creates weak and financially needy people and is quite possibly the primary reason for the disparity.

If these lazy individuals (Sorry but that’s what they are) spent half the time they’re wasting on these protests creating businesses the world would be a better place and  they probably wouldn’t be crying about capitalism but instead building a house in Aspen.

Jokers like this are precisely the type of people I couldn’t stand in public education and one of the primary reasons I left my teaching career to pursue business.

In education everyone gets paid the same salary despite a clear difference in teaching abilities and work ethic. Unions protect the weak teachers and as a result students suffer. The public education system is almost the perfect example of the “entitlement” mentality.

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Oil has hit $100 a barrel again. A host of factors play into the price of a West Texas Intermediate crude — demand, global market conditions, the activity of speculators. Evan Smith, co-manager of the Global Resources Fund at U.S. Global Investors believes the recent run-up can be ascribed in part to activity (or the lack of activity) surrounding pipelines.

It’s hard to get excited about the tubes that facilitate the movement of crude oil around the country. But pipelines have been in the news in recent weeks. First, the U.S. government decided November 10 to postpone a decision about the proposed Keystone line, which would allow the movement of a large quantity of oil from Canada to the southern U.S. On Wedesday, Canadian company Enbridge said it would buy a 50% interest in a pipeline that runs from the huge oil terminal in Cushing, Oklahoma, to the Gulf Coast.  Both moves have helped push the price of WTI up.

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