“Money Should Support Happiness, Not Compete With It”

Money is just a tool. The key is learning to use it intentionally. Melissa Leong’s “joy audit” is one way to make sure your spending reflects what really matters.

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 A line I saw you give once happiness should, money should support happiness, not compete. And that was such a great line because it is so, so true. And just expand on that a little bit for people.

Well, money is just it, it doesn’t have any meaning, right? It’s a tool and we have to decide how we use that tool to so-called buy happiness. But I

think what, what I think is happening is, is people are not spending enough time thinking actively about what it is that makes them happy. And I, I can tell you the research, I, uh, I wrote a book about what, how to buy happiness.

I can tell you the research about what you can spend your money on in order to optimize joy in your life. But, uh, personal finance is personal and a lot of that needs to be done with starting with you. And so one of the things that I do at the beginning of the year is I do an audit. I will sit down with my family.

I actually just did it. Uh, and and I will ask them, you know what? Let’s look over the calendar of 2025 going into 2026, and let’s figure out what is, what were the things that gave us the most joy in 2025? And everyone will say something. And we’ll make a list of the things that brought us the most joy, because we’re not gonna remember every time we brushed our teeth, our brains will not remember the routine.

But we’ll remember the novelty. We’ll remember the time we spent with our families, and we make that list, and then we plan our savings and spending around that list.

So smart.

I know that next year, guess what, we are planning a big trip to Japan. The Leons are gonna go to Tokyo. I’m very excited and uh, that meant that this holiday season I had, I could talk to my boys about either or language, which more of us need to do in our everyday lives.

They said, Hey mom, I really want this. I really want this. And I said, we’ll, take a picture of it and add it to my camera roll. But remember, we are saving for Japan. So you wanted to go and buy and buy Pokemon cards in Japan? Well, you need money for that. So no, we’re not buying this thing in December. We’re gonna save it for the future.

I love all this. I mean, you’re, you’re teaching the kids. In my mind by far the biggest, most important message, money is finite, and every choice you make has repercussions. If you do this, you can’t necessarily do that. These are the biggest, most important things for kids to learn. Then they start understanding it’s about trade-offs.

And you have to start training yourself to think that way. There’s another point that you’ve made that I like. You don’t shame people to the same extent that some financial educators do.

In fact, I’ve seen you talk about how if you’re overspending in one area, you may be getting comm joy there. And so it, it’s fine as long as you’re making the adjustments in other areas. And this is something I’ve said for years when I used to sit down and see the spending summaries of, uh, well-to-do people, people who were saving, well, I had assumed ahead of time they were gonna be quite sting in all areas of their life.

It’s not like that at all. They also way overspend in certain areas, but they make to require cutbacks in others. And this goes back to your, what gives us joy. Actually thinking that through auditing, to use your word, that’s very, very sharp way to do it.