I hear the phrase "money doesn't make you happy" and I agree and disagree with it constantly. Personally I think there is a certain threshold you should achieve to live comfortably and happily (e.g. being able to pay bills, send your kids to college, go on vacation 3 times a year) and then after that threshold (which I assume is around $100K/family/year in the US) your marginal utility from extra money diminishes at an extremely fast rate. This threshold will obviously have to be adjusted for different cities and different families (e.g. higher for NYC than Utah, higher and lower depending on family size) but I think it is a good approximation as an average. This is by no means saying that poorer and richer families are not as happy, but I am merely theorizing that money makes you happy... to an extent.

Anyways, while we're on this subject, I think that this article from the NYTimes is extremely fascinating. It talks about Yale's money manager and how he is motivated not by money, but by what it can do for Yale, which is providing an opportunity to a great education to everyone who is admitted without the hinderence of costs.

Link to article

“People think working for something other than the most money you could get is an odd concept, but it seems a perfectly natural concept to me,” says Mr. Swensen, a slender, soft-spoken man who looks and dresses like a high school teacher. “When I see colleagues of mine leave universities to do essentially the same thing they were doing but to get paid more, I am disappointed because there is a sense of mission,” in endowment work.

“In the finance world it is very easy to measure winning and losing in dollars and cents,” he says. “That has always seemed to be an inadequate measure. The quality of life is a better way to measure winning and losing. Money is only one element of that.”

“I love the idea that undergraduates have this opportunity to study whatever they want,” he says. “Students will say to me, ‘What do I need to take to be attractive to an investment bank?’ I say: ‘Don’t do that. Take great classes that you like.’ “