When the pursuit of wealth does not bring happiness

IN almost three decades of managing money, all our clients had targets to grow their wealth by multiples. Clients with $2 million targeted about hitting $10 million and retiring. The ones with $10 million had ambitions of retiring with $200 million. The ones with $200 million wanted to become multi-billionaires.

The constant quest for more wealth is seen as the raison d'etre for wealth managers. Any achieved goal would always be exponentially moved further up. Retirement, or any of the activities they envisioned doing on reaching the original goal post, were invariably postponed as a higher financial target was set.

And yet, as we dealt with more clients over the years, a far more surprising correlation became clear. The more wealth they had, the more stressed they were. And as a result, they became more unhappy.