So it goes. This tree’s glowing red and the magnolia in the front yard’s showy pink spring blossoms last for just a week or so each year. Whatever else is going on, I know I need to stop and notice them. Savor them for a few days in April and November. This year this savoring has had more poignancy to it as we will be living in our new house for the spring blossoms. There are going to be beautiful ones there. I walked a row of late blooming cherry trees, for instance, and once we start taking care of the place it will blossom. I know there are fiery trees there for autumn, too. But we come to know “our” trees and their rhythms and this year I am saying goodbye to these.

Anyway, it has been a long week, with much interrupted sleep. The toddler has been clingy and unhappy (the interrupted sleep isn’t good for him either, even if he’s causing the problem!). But the kids’ activities are winding down, so this weekend should, theoretically, be more relaxed. I sorted through some kid clothes and found size 12 jeans for the 12-year-old. I also found a pair of *my* jeans tucked in that same pile, which I guess had been missing for a while. Since it’s raining today, the workmen aren’t working on my neighbor’s roof, so I can get ahead on recording. I will take these little wins!

Her main message is that instead of going for a huge house, people might be happier in a well-designed, slightly smaller one, with the extra money going into details that delight. She lamented how much money gets wasted on rarely used formal dining rooms, exercise rooms, formal living rooms, guest bedrooms and other square footage inflators. I noted that this might be true, but that presumably many of the folks hiring a star architect penning best-selling books didn’t have to worry about such things. Susanka agreed, but said that even her clients with unlimited budgets “like their houses better when there is an everyday use for every space.” Indeed, the goal is to “use every square foot every day.”

These words were ringing in my ears as my husband and I then proceeded to purchase our house. Moving from a city apartment to the suburbs, we had no idea how much space was right, and our new house did have some of those rooms that Susanka mentioned as problematic. We did some renovations at the time, and over the last nine years have done some bigger projects. We were expecting our third baby at the time; we’ve gone on to have two more. With the most recent one’s arrival, I’ve been thinking about our house and our use of space as we’ve pondered whether we can stay in this home or need to move or renovate or what. I’ve realized that with our family of seven, and with our lives, we have pretty much hit Susanka’s ideal. We use (almost!) every room every day.

That usual unused space — the home office — gets used 40 hours a week in my case. We put built-in bookcases into what would be the formal living room, and it has become the library. This is where people go to read while others are watching TV in the family room. The piano is there, so it gets used for daily music practice. We have extended family gatherings over meals in the dining room, but in between those times it has become the official homework table (the kids don’t have desks in their rooms), as well as the game and puzzle room. Some kid may also retreat in there with a device while others are in the family room. With five kids, the need for space to retreat — while still being near everyone else — comes up a lot!

The guest bedroom is my husband’s office. My husband and I have also realized that, deeply as we love each other, we don’t always sleep well in the same bed, and so it winds up as sleeping space too with reasonable frequency. The basement is in daily use as a playroom. It also has both a treadmill (which we use) and a gaming computer plus X-Box and whoa…do those ever get used! (Not always just by the children).

This leaves one small side room in the basement that does not get used. Theoretically with a lot of work it could be a bedroom but…not really. At the moment it’s storage.

Anyway, as I’ve been looking at house listings I’ve realized that ours does work pretty well for us. If we stay here the kids will be sharing bedrooms, but I could probably figure out some bedroom designs that will allow for privacy while maximizing shared space. That, at least, would be a lot cheaper than moving or renovating…

Do you use every room, every day? Are there spaces that you have converted to be more useful? I realize this is definitely a suburban issue. When we lived in a NYC apartment we most definitely used every inch every day. Indeed, many of us using the exact same inches is one of the reasons we wound up moving….

*Also known as the book of mine you are least likely to have read….

We also, each year, wind up playing carnival games. The kids beg to do this, but only certain games — the ones where you win a prize every time. It can be a completely crappy prize (we have our share of small stuffed snakes). I explained the way it works; while standing in the shade of one carnival game I overheard the two workers discussing that there were actually no duckies you could pick that would win you the giant prizes. You had to trade up to get one of those. And yet the kids desperately wanted to “win” and have some tangible relic of their day at the fair.

I’ve spent money on worse things in life than making my kids happy, so we ponied up. And it kind of makes me happy to have them happy. In that sense, I suppose, money buys happiness.

I was thinking of that today as I went to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I promised myself a trip there as a reward if I cranked through the multitude of words I had due today (well, end of week. But I no longer work on Fridays). I finished writing by noon. I finished up my calls by about 1:30. So I drove downtown to check out the Impressionists exhibit.

It was lovely. So much light and color in a few galleries. In that way money was buying me happiness again, though it was a sunk cost (we’re museum members — a strategic choice we’ve made to encourage us to go more often). But there was a more interesting story about money and satisfaction that was part of the exhibit itself.

This massive collection of Impressionist paintings — masterpieces by Monet, Corot, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir, et al — is presented from the perspective of art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel. A widower with five children, he was taken with the new painting techniques stirring in Paris in the mid/late 1800s, and he used his resources to nurture artists’ careers. He’d buy up everything from a painter to corner the market, and then stage strategic exhibitions and curate conversations about the artists to make their work more valuable. He became friends with many of them, and paid them stipends when the art establishment refused to showcase or support their work. His investment has now given the world an untold amount of beauty.

His money has bought happiness.

Of course, it’s easy to spend money and have nothing much come out of it. I’m gathering another bag of stuff to donate to Big Brothers Big Sisters: a leather jacket I spotted and loved in a Norwegian boutique, and then never wore. But pleasure isn’t nothing, and sometimes the pleasure that comes from strategic spending is quite profound.

Photo: Carnival stuffed snake. It came pre-ripped; my 5-year-old demanded it be mended as soon as we walked in the door. Fortunately, I mend pretty well. My 7th grade home ec teacher told me my button sewing was the best she had ever seen. I kid you not.

January is always a big month for self-help titles. Prospective readers want to know that other people found books helpful and enjoyable.

If you enjoyed my books, would you please visit an online retailer (Amazon, BN.com) and write a short review of any of your favorites? Those links take you to lists of my books at both retailers. All you have to say is that you read the book and learned something new. Describe how that tip made a difference in your life, then say that you recommend the book to others. That’s a perfectly succinct formula for a review and answers the questions prospective readers might have.

If you don’t want to write a review, another way you can be helpful — on Amazon and BN.com — is to indicate that an existing positive review was “helpful.” There is a question by every Amazon review asking “Was this review helpful to you?” (or just “Was this review helpful?” on BN); reviews that get the most “yes” votes for helpfulness tend to rise to the top of the list of reviews. So obviously I’d love if some 4- or 5-star reviews got that coveted spot.

Thank you so much. I can see on both sites that some regular readers here have already left reviews, and I really appreciate that.

The biggest expenditure was a Friday night trip to REI. We’d been thinking about buying bikes for a while. We’ve rented bikes and a Burley (2-kid buggy) numerous times near the Lehigh Gorge State Park and at the Valley Forge National Park a few miles from our house. I also love biking. I went on a trip to Israel in college, and biked along the Egyptian border at night through the desert and felt so ecstatic about the sand and wind and moon — the starkness only heightened by the electric fence — that I honestly wondered how life could ever deliver a bigger high.

So there’s that.

And REI was having a sale!

Thus we went. I picked out one of REI’s private label bikes and took it for a test spin around the parking lot. As I zoomed past the dumpsters and the overgrown vines behind the pizza joint — past an evangelical church renting space in the strip mall — that exhilarating sense of freedom was back. This was my bike.

An hour or so later (my husband had to find one and test ride his too) it was.

There’s a saying that money can’t buy happiness, but money bought me that bike. And while stuff tends to make us less happy than experiences, some stuff enables experiences. Bikes have, in years past, zoomed me along the Egyptian border, carried me around the Loire Valley in France (I still have the scar from biking after a two-glasses-of-wine lunch), and zipped my husband and me through little villages in Vietnam where all the children rode bikes too, home from school, laughing and zipping past these two silly looking Americans with their silly looking helmets. This Memorial Day weekend, our bikes carried us (and some of the kids in the Burley; another under his own horsepower) around Valley Forge twice. Sitting in my garage, my bike now enables me to take a 10 minute break to do a quick 1.5 mile loop around a quiet street near my house.

The paperback of my personal finance book, All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Wealth, is out today (Amazon here; B&N here). A year after the original book came out, the most common question I probably get on the topic is what I, personally, am doing differently about money as a result of my research. The basic answer is that I am more mindful of using the money I have to build a more joyful life for myself and the people I care about. I am a naturally frugal — maybe stingy — person, and it has been a long process to learn to stick a bag of brightly colored mini-peppers in my shopping cart, because the 3-year-old along for the ride thinks they look fun. They’re not on sale! I don’t have a coupon! The bigger peppers (at least the green ones) are cheaper on a per ounce basis!  True, but my little boy loved those red, orange, and yellow peppers and devoured them raw. I tip better. I spend more on get-togethers with friends (including the opportunity cost of time in making such get-togethers happen). Last year we took more vacations, and I gave more to a few charities I support than the year before. 

All this has to be paid for, of course, and I’ve been doing what I can on that front. But what I’ve realized that the happiest people know about wealth is that money is there to be used. We need to be responsible, and save for the future, have the proper insurance, and all that. But then what?

Money comes in and out of our lives a lot. The cost of our bikes — while not nothing — could have been eaten up by other cost-of-living expenses. Once you find yourself past a certain threshold — say, people who might have the disposable income to buy books — many things start becoming choices, just as it is with time. I look forward to many hours on my bike, a choice I’m happy to have made. What are you happiest to do with your money?

In other news: I have a column in today’s (Tuesday’s) USA Today called Can wealth really buy happiness?

We will return to the #SuccessAtWork challenge tomorrow.

My first book with Portfolio, 168 Hours, turned 3 years old on Monday, May 27. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe it’s only been three years…

There would seem to be some evidence pointing to women’s money troubles. Women are rapidly becoming more educated than men, and yet women build up far less wealth. Clearly that calls for some financial education, right?

Except the problem with much literature aimed at women in this regard is that it takes a scolding tone that women are blowing their cash on frivolous things or, to use the title of one book, Shoo, Jimmy Choo!. According to Helaine Olen’s new book, Pound Foolish: Exposing the Dark Side of the Personal Finance Industry, Gallup found that men spent $11 more per day than women in 2011. “They are also easier online marks, quicker to click the ‘buy it now’ button and less likely to comparison shop or return items. Men are more likely to buy Groupon and other online coupon deals for fun, while women use the services to purchase needed goods at a discount.” Men are more likely to spend big on cars — a category that can get you into trouble far faster than the sale rack at Macy’s — and yet, as Olen notes “there are, needless to say, no male equivalents of this stuff. No books with titles like Let Go of the Lamborghini! or Bench the Bulgari.”

Compounding this issue are some studies finding that women may, on the margins, be better at investing. They’re less likely to pursue hot stocks. Writes Olen, “A Vanguard study found men significantly more likely to panic and sell at the market lows, locking in their losses instead of their gains.” So if women don’t spend more frivolously than men, and they don’t invest any worse, what’s the problem?

In a nutshell, the reason women build less wealth is that they earn less money. While plenty of personal finance books promise riches from stashing away small bits of cash — thanks to the miracle of compound interest — the interest rates that make it look like $3000 a year will buy you a mint at retirement hover in the 10-12% range. Actual, inflation-adjusted rates of 6-7% are more likely over the long term. To build up lots of wealth, you need to be investing lots of money. It’s a lot easier to invest lots of money if you have lots of money coming in. One Federal Reserve study found that while fewer than 60% of families in the 40th-60th income percentile save, just about 85% of those in the top tenth do.

There are lots of reasons women earn less money. Discrimination is one. Women are less likely to negotiate starting salaries (though there’s some research claiming that they hurt their hiring chances when they do). They work fewer hours, even when they work full-time, and women are more likely than men to work part-time, with all the income trade-offs that entails. There’s sorting within fields, with men perhaps putting a higher value on income than other factors like flexibility. All this can be limiting to men too — society tends to judge men more based on income than it does women — but the financial results are obvious.

So what’s to be done? With any big issue like this, you can keep an eye on someday goals (ending pay discrimination) while also asking what individuals can do Monday morning. These are not either/or choices. It is not denying the reality of larger social forces to look at both. Of the list of causes above, the one most within individual control would be the number of hours worked. When we get busy, it’s easy not to put in the extra hours on the margin — the planning, networking, skill-building hours. Perhaps we might call these the “lean in” hours, to use the language Sheryl Sandberg is proposing. These are the hours when, as a freelancer, you’re seeking out new clients, or the hours in a conventional job when you’re angling for the next promotion or to move to a higher level in a different organization. But these are the ones that lead to more money down the road. There are, of course, other things to life than money. But in general, whether you’re male or female, having more enables more choices than having less.

(I’m writing, a few days this week, on topics proposed by Women’s Money Week. Today’s topic is income. You can read other bloggers’ posts on that topic by clicking on that link).

Photo courtesy flickr user SarahSphar

The well-measured life has many virtues, but I’d say the biggest one is accountability. On the food front, I was sort of feeling like I was doing everything right, so why was I not able to lose these pounds? But “everything right” is a fuzzy concept. I made macaroons about a week ago and I realized, as I kept stopping myself from grabbing them because I didn’t want to write them down, that without the log I would have eaten one every single time I walked into the kitchen. I could have eaten 8 or more in a day without giving it much thought. Frankly, I’m lucky I don’t weigh more than I do. We don’t always have macaroons in the house, but we usually have something. The week before it was dark chocolate almond bark from Costco. I am powerless in front of the dark chocolate almond bark. It is entirely possible that I ate the 2-pound package, by myself, over two weeks.

What I learned from keeping a food journal is that I like to have treats. So I just need to figure out some sort of treat that I can enjoy in moderation. I’m open to suggestions.

As for the running log, it showed (as I know) that I run a fair amount. When I run outside, I don’t pay attention to my pace. That’s great for those kinds of runs — it’s more about enjoying the fresh air and clearing my head than anything else. But when I’m at the gym, I’d like to work more on speed, if for no other reason than to make my ‘mill time go faster. Logging my pace is helping me push on that front. If I ever want to run a sub 2-hour half marathon, I need to run 9:09 miles. On a treadmill, that means locking it in at 6.6 mph (9:05). I’ve been pushing to do some bit of length (like 1.5 miles out of a 3 mile run) at that pace, and some sprints faster than that, in order to make 9:05 feel comfortable over the long haul. Because I am logging it, each gym trip I can make a decision to do a bit more.

I’m fascinated by the quantified self movement, and the concept of using data to improve your life. Logging my time, my food, and my runs is a start, but all of this involves manual entry on my part, and I know the technology exists to make this more automated (my shoes, for instance, should be able to tell my phone my miles and pace). I know there are time tracker apps, but I haven’t found a passive one for one’s work and personal life. In theory this should be doable — if you keep your phone on you, the phone should be able to see if you’re standing in front of the sink (likely doing dishes), in bed (likely sleeping, though if you’re up on an angle, you might be reading), driving, in your home office, parked in front of the TV and not moving, etc. The app could import this data to a spreadsheet, and you could fill in the details later.

Some passive mood tracking software seems to already exist, so this offers intriguing possibilities, too. You may suspect that you are a happier camper on days you work out and get enough sleep, but a mood tracker could show you this for sure. It was by more actively tracking mood that Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer found that progress was so important at work. Imagine what we might discover if all this data could be even more detailed. Better data, better you, right?

In other news: I spent some of my time this past weekend reading page proofs of All the Money in the World, which will be out in paperback this spring. If you haven’t picked up a copy, would you consider doing so? According to Kirkus reviews, my money book is “Quirky, insightful and enjoyable—a welcome corrective to the typical advice from economists and financial managers steeped in the ‘dismal science.’” I promise it is very different from any other personal finance book you’ve read, unless your personal finance reading usually involves foragers, mega-families, minimalists, and preachers with a money-back guarantee on tithing.

There is some actual research finding that, after an initial bit of glee, lottery winners revert to their old levels of happiness in a few years. The human brain seems wired towards a set point on happiness. Getting married makes you happy for a bit, then ceases to do so. While this sounds like a bummer, the good news is that this works in reverse, too: getting divorced makes you unhappy for a bit, but then you crawl back up to your previous happiness levels. Getting injured in a serious accident also bums you out for a bit, then you start focusing on all the things you can still enjoy. On the whole, this tendency is not necessarily a bad thing.

There is also some research (usually cited in these stories) finding that day-to-day happiness levels out at an income of about $75,000 per year. Add it all up, and it sounds like winning $500 million is for suckers.

But yet almost all of us would take it and I don’t think we’re all idiots. What these stories seldom note is that the median US household income is under $75,000 a year, which means that for most Americans, bringing in more money would in fact make them happier on a day-to-day basis. And while some research finds that having more money means you find it more difficult to enjoy small pleasures, there are also some ways that using that $500 million (or heck, a windfall of $500,000) could make your life happier, even if your household income is north of $75,000. After you consult a very good financial planner, get your head around the idea that financial freedom means mostly living off interest, and set up your investments so that your winnings will support you while still growing, here are some ideas:

1. Spend to buy experiences. Our first inclination when we get money is to buy stuff. Stuff is easy to get. You walk into a car dealership and walk out with a car! It is less easy to get an amazing week in Paris. You have to figure out what you’d like to do, or talk with a high end travel agent who will arrange this, and clear your schedule to go. Even if you have all the money in the world, you still need to arrange for someone to take your kids for that time or you need to make sure their passports are all updated to come with you, or you need to find and pay someone to feed your dog, etc. Even if you wind up hiring employees to help with your personal life, all this involves time and logistics. But in the long run, we tend to draw more happiness from memories than from stuff. So ignore the transaction costs, or figure out how to minimize them, and aim to make memories.

2. Spend on your social network. The real one, not the Facebook kind. It is true, that if you are suddenly and visibly worth $500 million, you may find new friends all over the place, and some of your existing friendships may take an undesired turn. But once you’ve figured out the people that are really important in your life (perhaps a project to undertake before coming forward as the winner), you can then spend in ways that nurture these relationships. You can throw big family parties, travel to visit friends and family more often (or pay for their tickets), rent a large beach house for a reunion of friends from college, etc. Giving falls under this category too. Take a bit of time before claiming your prize to figure out what causes are important to you — which parts of the universe you see as your larger network — and then give generously there. You can certainly entertain other ideas as they come to you (and people will bring them to you) but it helps to be clear on your own ideas first.

3. Spend to buy yourself time. We all have 168 hours per week, and all the money in the world cannot buy any of us a second more. Money can, however, buy back time from things you don’t want to do so you can devote that time to things you do want to do. So what do you want to do with your life? What did you want to be when you grew up? After you’ve spent two years traveling or doing other things on your bucket list, what would you actually want to do on Monday morning? Use your money to set up your life so you can spend lots of time doing that.

Do you know anyone who’s experienced a windfall of any sort? How did that person handle it — well, or did you see room for improvement?

Photo courtesy flickr user Tax Credits. Link to their website: TaxCredits.net

I’ve been pondering that little mental connection. It seems entirely natural to think that rich people living in expensive houses hand out big candy bars. And yet the size of one’s Halloween offerings have absolutely nothing to do with one’s net worth. You can get bulk orders of candy bars for less than a dollar per bar. No one gets that many trick or treaters around here. Giving every child a real candy bar would cost less than what many people — who live in all sizes of houses — spend on decorative pumpkins for their front stoops.

Yet it seems Halloween candy bars fall into the category of visible displays of wealth. It is human nature to compare ourselves to others. It probably has something to do with how we evolved, living in tribes. We find it crucial to know where we land in the social heap. People overspend on items that are easily compared, which seems silly, except it works. In All the Money in the World, I wrote about an experiment by several Dutch researchers that found that people were more likely to stop and answer survey questions from a woman wearing designer labels in a mall than if she wore something more generic. The logos convey money and power. Clearly, she’s worth talking to. If that example seems contrived, know that they also tried the same approach with job applicants. Those wearing visible designer labels got higher ratings than those who weren’t.

So what are we to do with this? If we actually got any trick or treaters (which we don’t; see the semi-busy street problem, above) I think I’d hand out whole candy bars next year just to see how people reacted. The good news is that if you choose your visible displays of wealth wisely, you can do a lot more of them. You can afford a lot of full-size candy bars if you drive your high-end car one year longer. You can purchase quite a few designer handbags for the difference in buying a home at the top of the market, or at the bottom.

What sort of Halloween candy do you dish out?

Snickers photo courtesy flickr user sudeep1106

Of course, the gale had other effects. I flew to Richmond in a small plane with propellers. This is one of the downsides of moving from New York to Philadelphia. There are fewer direct flights in large planes. Add a prop plane to a storm system and you get some major chop. A few weeks ago, I found myself musing about why airlines still offer airsick bags, tucked in with the inflight mag in the seat back pouch. Was it some holdover from when people were nervous about aviation? No. They are for flights like mine from Philly to Richmond. The poor woman sitting next to me actually threw up, and filled the second bag I gave her from my seat too.

Here’s something that doesn’t make me nauseous anymore, though: public speaking. I used to think some people were good at public speaking and some weren’t. I’m naturally kind of introverted, but I’ve learned that public speaking is a skill you can get better at, like any other. Even if you know how to play the piano, you probably couldn’t get up on stage and perform an intricate etude without having practiced the piece. It’s the same with speaking. I aim to hone my material so I know where people will laugh, where they will go “hmm” and I’m learning to watch to see if they’re drifting. If so, I’m figuring out techniques to pull people back. I was giving my money speech last night, but one thing I like about my time speech is that, usually, I’ve had a few people keep time logs for me before the event. I’ve chatted with them by phone about the logs. So I have at least 2-3 friends in the crowd by the time I give my speech. Friendly faces deliver their own energy.

How do you feel about getting up in front of crowds?