Buying experiences means you use your wealth to do something instead of owning something.

Today we’re looking at an important ingredient for a better, brighter, and happier life — a mindset that helps you turn money into happiness. And we’ll help you to understand two key pillars of this mindset, mixing in both practical information and a solid dose of inspiration.

So, let’s discover the mindset that helps you turn money into happiness.

If you’re looking for more financial wealth in your life, that’s probably because you believe it will in some way increase your happiness. Maybe it’ll increase your financial security, allow you to buy things you want, make you feel successful, or help you to gain status or the respect of others.

In any of these cases, the ultimate goal is more happiness, and other goals we mentioned our immediate goals toward reaching that happiness.

Now, here’s the tricky part: With money, it’s important to not only how much you have, but how you use it. In fact, research in this area suggests that money in certain ways is likely to vastly improve your long-term happiness while using it in other ways — it gives you only fleeting joy.

Read also: 7 simple ways to be happier with your life (must read)

Based on this research, we want to help you cultivate two key mindsets that will help you make better use of your financial wealth and gain more frequent, more intense, and longer-lasting positive emotions in your life.

1. Buy Experiences Rather Than Buying Stuff

The first mindset is to buy experiences rather than buying stuff, and we often spend our money on stuff.

When we managed to make more money, we tend to buy a more expensive car, a bigger house, new clothes, a huge TV set, and so on hoping that these items will bring us joy. And to be real, yes they do, but only for a while.

The problem is that the pleasure these items give us quickly wears off. You get a new, expensive car and it’s pure joy to drive around for a couple of months, but after those first months, your mind gets used to it and it no longer feels special.

You could be driving a Ferrari or a Lamborghini, and then habituation sets in, and after a while, it no longer brings you that same joy, if any at all.

At that point, you might be thinking — “Well, I’ll just buy another car and get the thrill of driving again”, but that would be a poor use of your money and it’ll keep you stuck in a perpetual hamster wheel of buying stuff. Often very costly stuff only for it to get used and need more stuff to feel positive emotions again.

So, a much better option here is to buy experiences with your money. This means that you use your wealth to do something instead of owning something.

Travel to various places, try different hobbies, go out with friends, organize parties, and so on. These are examples of experiences that can bring you lots of joy, and you never run out of them.

Experiences bring us more happiness than stuff because they’re more varied and complex than stuff is, so habituation is far less likely to set in.

If you travel to a place and you eventually get bored of it, you could always try another place or try some other activity instead of just traveling, plus experiences especially if they’re varied in somewhat attends provide a life with a sense of psychological richness.

And, as many psychologists will say —

“This richness is a fundamental factor in making life feel meaningful and fulfilling.”

Now, of course, differentiating stuff from experiences can be tricky sometimes. For example, if you buy a book to read, is that an object or an experience? The answer fully depends on what you do with the object you buy.

If you buy a book and you act, read it, and then give it away, that’s mostly an experience, but if you buy a book just to fill your bookshelf and you never even open it, that’s mostly stuff. This tells us that stuff can be a way to ward experiences.

For example, if you like to drive, buying an expensive car might be a way to get that pleasurable experience. Nevertheless, though, since you’ll likely get bored of the car, you’re probably better off renting expensive cars and switching them up from time to time. That way you get to do lots of driving and cool cars without the sense of boredom setting in.

Read also: A new career path that will make you millions ( must read)

2. Pay Now and Enjoy Later

The other important mindset for turning money into happiness is to pay now and enjoy later. This mindset goes against what almost everything we’re taught about money in our culture today.

Conventionally, we’re told and taught not to delay gratification.

If we want something and it costs money, a car, motorcycle, a vacation, a gaming console, and we should take out a loan and get that thing because we’re told we deserve it even if we don’t actually have the liquid money to buy it.

This is one of the reasons why so many people are in debt. The problem with this way of thinking has multiple aspects.

On one hand, the interest you accumulate through alone will often be huge.
On the other hand, the stress of knowing you have a loan to pay off, especially when stretching over several years, is quite high, much higher than people usually expect.
And let’s not forget that any loan creates some form of financial obligation which can significantly limit your freedom, especially if your situation changes.

For example, you just can’t quit your job one day because you decided it’s not for you when you have no savings and a huge mortgage to pay for your home.

So, we’d like to suggest an alternative that involves the very opposite of the conventional view. Instead of enjoying something now and paying for it later with interest, you pay it now and enjoy it later.

First of all, this eliminates the problems associated with living on loans, but it does a lot more than that. It also leverages the power of anticipation and anticipation, and anticipation of a positive event is often half the fun.

Let’s say that you wanna go on vacation to Hawaii. One of the best things you can do is to book the hotel and flights months in advance and actually pay for them in advance too. Now, not only we get a better price booking ahead of time, but once you know the vacation is all set and paid for, you now have months to think about it — imagine it and how much fun you’re going to have. This creates anticipation, the positive feeling that comes with expecting something good to happen in the near future.

And in this situation, you have months of anticipation to enjoy, plus the actual vacation. It’s like the carrot dangling in front of you always reminding you of the reward waiting ahead.

So, instead of having a good experience followed by the stress and limits provided by debt, you get to have two positive experiences:

The one coming from the anticipation of the event.
The one coming from the actual event itself.
Is that great or what?

Now, these two mindsets are not very common. Friends, relatives, and advertising in the media may often try to push you toward buying more stuff than experiences and to get them now instead of delaying gratification.

You will need to put in some conscious effort into fighting this pressure, and instead, go with the much wiser choices that we discussed today. It’ll be more than worth that. Trust us.

CONTRIBUTED BY Entrepreneuria

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