Legendary Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert outlines 8 money principles that will bring you the most happiness for your dollar

Money buys happiness, if you know how to spend it well.

Spend well, and you’ll quite likely make yourself happier. Photo: Getty Images

By Drake Baer

Money can’t buy happiness.

“This sentiment is lovely, popular, and almost certainly wrong,” says Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert in a paper he coauthored.

Money provides an “opportunity for happiness,” the authors say, since moneyed people can live longer and healthier lives, enjoy financial security, have leisure time, and control what they do every day.

What’s puzzling, Gilbert and his colleagues Elizabeth Dunn of the University of British Columbia and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia say, is that money doesn’t buy more happiness.

Psych research suggests that after certain thresholds — some say $50,000 a year, others say $75,000 — the correlation between income and well-being slopes off.

Money “is an opportunity that people routinely squander because the things they think will make them happy often don’t,” the authors say.

Thus the title of their paper: “If money doesn’t make you happy then you probably aren’t spending it right.”