Study: Settle for $75,000 a Year

We’re big fans of AskMen.com’s Happy Hour Hero feature, where they feature one oddball fact each day in order to make you look smarter in front of your friends during the obligatory post-work happy hour drinks. Usually, the facts

kind of gloss over us and we forget them in a few minutes, but yesterday’s kind of blew us away. According to some high-fallutin’ researchers at Princeton University, money can buy you happiness … UNLESS you make more than $75,000 a year.

At that point, you see, money just starts being another object, neither adding or decreasing happiness from your life. Happiness levels just kind of level out:

The researchers concluded: “More money does not necessarily buy more happiness but less money is associated with emotional pain.

“Perhaps $75,000 is a threshold beyond which further increases in income no longer improve a person’s ability to do what matters most to their emotional well-being — such as spending time with the people they like, avoiding pain and disease and enjoying leisure.

So, what does that mean to us folks looking to make bank and walk around with rapper-like bling on a daily basis? The main take-away message is that we don’t necessarily have to set our sights too high, trying to pull in a six-figure income. A little less money will still allow us to live at about the same level of luxury and, more importantly, give us less job responsibility to actually, you know, enjoy life a little.

But, if you’re making less than $75,000 a year, then you better get your ass into gear. You’re obviously living an awful, horrible life.