For more than a decade, one number got repeated so often that it became a kind of cultural shorthand: $75,000. In 2010, Princeton researchers Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton published a widely cited study suggesting that day-to-day happiness rose with income only up to that point, after which additional earnings stopped making a measurable difference. The figure flattered everyone who had crossed it and reassured everyone who had not. It also became one of the most repeated, and most misunderstood, statistics in modern personal finance writing.
In 2021, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Matthew Killingsworth, tested the claim again with a larger and more detailed dataset, and found something different. For most people, happiness kept climbing well beyond $75,000, with no ceiling in sight. To their credit, the two researchers did not argue past one another in public. They teamed up, brought in a third colleague as an impartial referee, and went looking for exactly where their data disagreed.
What they found, published in 2023, is more useful than either original headline. For the majority of people, happiness does, in fact, continue to rise as income rises, across the entire range studied, and for the happiest segment of the population, the rate of increase actually accelerates at higher incomes. The flattening pattern Kahneman and Deaton originally observed turned out to apply mainly to one specific group: people who were already unhappy for reasons that had little to do with money. For them, more income helped, up to roughly $100,000 a year, and then stopped helping, because the true source of their unhappiness was never financial in the first place.
This distinction matters more than any of the dollar figures themselves. It suggests that the marginal utility of wealth, the amount of additional well-being each additional dollar provides, depends less on the size of the number and more on what that wealth is actively doing. Money that is solving a real, specific problem keeps paying dividends in well-being. Money that has already solved every problem it can solve, and is simply accumulating, stops paying those dividends, regardless of how large the balance grows.
For families who have built significant wealth, this reframes a question that tends to circle quietly in the background: what is enough? It is rarely a precise number. More often, it is a moving target, pulled along by lifestyle inflation, the next acquisition, or the next opportunity that arrives dressed as urgency. The research suggests a more useful question is not how much is enough, but enough for what.
Questions Worth Returning To
Consider three questions, not to answer all at once, but to revisit over time.
- Where, specifically, is our wealth currently working? Naming the actual jobs your money is doing, supporting a business, funding a child’s independence, building toward a cause that matters to your family, is different from a general sense that things are going well.
- Could we tell the difference between wealth that is working for us and wealth that is simply accumulating? Growth alone is not the same as progress toward something.
- If our net worth doubled tomorrow, what would meaningfully change about how we live, give, or spend our time? For many families at a certain level of wealth, the honest answer is very little, and that is itself useful information.
The answers rarely arrive in a single sitting. They tend to surface gradually, across conversations and across years, as life and businesses change. What matters most is the habit of returning to these questions, not the precision of any single answer.
These questions tend to reveal something the marginal utility research only hints at: wealth provides perspective, not happiness directly. It provides options, time, and the ability to act on values without the constraints that limit most people. The well-being it generates comes from how deliberately those options get used, not from the balance itself.
Why This Gets Harder, Not Easier, With More Wealth
It would be reasonable to assume that families with significant resources have an easier time answering the enough question. In practice, the opposite is often true. Complexity compounds quietly. Multiple entities, properties, and family members are involved. There are more advisors offering more opinions, more opportunities competing for attention, and more decisions where one good option crowds out another good option. When everything competes for your attention, it becomes harder to hear what actually matters.
Without a deliberate framework, wealth tends to drift toward the loudest available option rather than the most meaningful one. Families end up managing pieces in isolation, optimizing one account or one decision at a time, without a clear view of how those pieces serve the whole picture. The marginal utility research is, in this sense, a useful corrective. It confirms that the dollar figure was never the right thing to optimize for in the first place.
Toward a Definition That Holds
A workable definition of enough is not a number on a statement. It is a state in which wealth is doing identifiable work toward family, purpose, and legacy, with little left over that is simply sitting, unaligned, waiting for a decision that never quite gets made. That definition will look different for every family, and it will change as families grow, businesses transition, and priorities shift across generations.
Reaching that kind of perspective on one’s own financial life is rarely a one-time exercise. It tends to come from an ongoing partnership with someone who can see the whole picture and ask the right questions at the right moments, well before those questions become urgent. If this reflection raises more questions than it answers, that is a reasonable place to be. We would welcome the conversation.
Sources
- Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489–16493.
- Killingsworth, M. A. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4), e2016976118.
- Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10), e2208661120.