This snippet is from one of our previous episodes: Darius Boyd: How This NRL Star Found Financial and Mental Peace.

There’s a story Morgan Housel tells in The Psychology of Money that Bryce keeps coming back to.

Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are at a party thrown by a billionaire. Vonnegut points out that their host had made more money in a single day than Heller ever earned from Catch-22.

Heller’s reply: “Yes, but I have something he will never have. Enough.”

Enough.

It’s a small word doing an enormous amount of work — and most of us have never actually defined it.

The game you can’t win

Housel follows it with a second story that makes the point sting a bit more.

A rookie sits on a Major League Baseball bench earning a salary that, in anyone’s language, is a fortune. But he’s not looking at the fortune. He’s looking at the player at the front of the bench, who earns several times more.

And that player? He’s measuring himself against a top investor. Who’s measuring himself against Warren Buffett.

Everyone in that chain has an extraordinary amount of money. Yet everyone can still find someone who has more.

That’s the trap.

The comparison game is a game you will never win because there is always another rung… and the rung you’re standing on can suddenly stop feeling like enough the moment you look upwards.

The only way out is to stop measuring yourself against someone else’s number and start working out your own.

The problem with “enough”

Here’s the catch: nobody hands you that number.

There’s no watermark showing you what enough looks like. No bank, algorithm or headline is going to tell you when you’ve arrived. And in the absence of that clarity, how do you know whether you’re actually on track?

Which is why the solution doesn’t have to stay philosophical. It can be arithmetic.

The four numbers to know

The framework is refreshingly unglamorous. There are four categories of cost you need to understand:

  1. Your bills — what it costs to keep the lights on
  2. Your lifestyle — what it costs to actually live the way you live
  3. Your investment costs — what your portfolio costs to hold
  4. Your loan repayments — what your debt costs to service

Know those four and you can start putting a real number around “enough”.

Here’s why it works.

By the time you reach retirement, the goal for many people will be to have significantly reduced or eliminated investment-related debt and loan repayments.

That leaves the costs of actually living your life: your bills and your lifestyle. And if you know what those cost you today, you’ve got a starting point for understanding what your future lifestyle may need to fund.

Want a little more room for travel, experiences or the finer things? Add some extra pepper on top.

Suddenly you’re not guessing anymore.

You have a number… and from there, you can work backwards to understand what assets and income you may need to support it.

Why this matters more than the number itself

Ben’s take on it is worth holding onto: this has never been a get-rich-quick message, and it’s not about building mega wealth. It’s about designing a lifestyle… and being honest enough with yourself to know what that lifestyle actually requires.

Some of the best money people spend goes towards experiences rather than assets, because those experiences become memories.

That isn’t necessarily a failure of financial discipline. In many cases, it’s part of the reason you’re putting all this effort into managing your money in the first place.

The goal isn’t simply to accumulate more and more. It’s to understand what matters to you, build towards it and know when you have enough.

So… do you know your number?

A great place to start is by understanding where your money goes today.

Our MyFINANCIALS tool in Moorr can help you get clear on your household cash flow, spending and lifestyle costs so you can start putting real numbers around the future you want.

And if you’d like help taking that a step further, you can also speak with one of our Qualified Property Investment Advisers.

They can help you explore what your own version of “enough” might look like and what steps could help you work towards it through a longer-term property and wealth strategy.

Your initial consultation is free, so you can simply sit down, talk through where you’re at and see whether one of our plans could be useful for you.

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