Does Making More Money Equal Less Stress? Not Like You Would Think.

Now few people are against making more money, so I am not going to suggest that making more is a bad thing.  At almost any wage level, people generally lift their gaze to the next level up and begin to think what life would be like if only they were there.  Fortunately, many people do move up the salary scale over the course of their careers and often hit peak earning years in their 50s.

However, one common misconception about earning more money is that money alone will result in less stress and financial worry.  Some new research out from the Salary Finance suggests that this is just not the case.  Salary Finance interviewed over 10,000 employees recently on a variety of Financial Fitness measures.  The report is voluminous, and it isn’t possible to cover all the topics mentioned, but the idea that earning more relieves stress is so ingrained in our DNA, that I thought I would use some of the research here to debunk it.

We should start by saying that there is a level of earning below which extreme stress is omnipresent.  If a person is earning below subsistence level, stress will be experienced.  So let’s for argument sake not consider that low of a level of income.  For Salary Finance, they interviewed people at all levels and found that 58% of individuals earning between $25-40k have financial worries.  That probably doesn’t surprise any of us.

What was interesting is that 40% of the people earning between $160-200k also have financial worries.  Wouldn’t you think the percentage should be much less for this higher income earning group?  I bet if you asked someone making $30k if they would have financial stress if they were making $180k, for example, they would say Heck No!  But yet, the stress is present to a surprising extent.

So if money alone does not reduce financial stress and worry, what does?  It appears that the number one difference is that people with less stress are Planners, using the language of Salary Finance.  What is a Planner?  Well, it’s someone who lives within their means, has emergency savings on hand, and focuses on long-term financial goals.  In short…a Planner!

If you are an employer who would like to help your employees move from Coping to Planning, and thereby maybe not think that you paying them more alone is going to solve their problems, give me a call.  I would love to have a discussion about how we can improve the financial lives of your employees.

Pete Welsh a/k/a 401kGuy