People who say money doesn't matter aren't naive. They're mostly either trying to make someone feel better about not having any, or trying to get someone to stop placing so much importance on wealth. It's one of those "serious but not literal" statements.

I think in general it's a form of self-justification to allow a person to feel that they are good despite being wealthy in an extremely unequal world.

As someone who just this year started to keep track of the money across the months, I can say that you get some sort of high when you get close to payday and you see the line going up.

There's a reason the English saying is 'Money can't buy happiness', not 'money doesn't matter'.

The point is that it isn't money that makes you happy, it is the life you build. That can be different for different people, and money can help. The point is that money isn't the goal.

Money can't buy happiness, but it does make the sad times easier.

Not really: if one is happy with money then gets sad, money doesn't help it. Poor people think that money fix sadness but that's not true. A meaningful life brings happiness, poor or rich

In real world, money not fix sadness :)

Poor people do not think money fix sadness lol. They just think it fixes a lot of the things that does make you sad, like not being able to pay rent, afford a meal for upper family, buy christmas presents for your kids, pay to get your car fixed. etc.

> Poor people do not think money fix sadness lol.

I've been poor for a long time. Trust me, daydreaming about money fixing all the problems is one of the biggest if not the biggest time killer/entertainment.

What I noticed climbing the ladder is that some people are happy and some people are sad independently of the income. And if much it seems that I met happier people in general when I was poor than now. I was happy in my poorest time and I'm still happy, which helps me see through it without the constraints of money.

I'd rather be rich and sad than poor and sad.

money can't buy happiness, indeed, but it's more comfortable to cry in a leather chair inside a mercedes, than on the bus.

Yes, that's the point I'm trying to make.

>"money doesn't matter"

Understood to mean (in the context of this blog) the difference in living standards and happiness are not affected by a 150k/year income or a 450k/year income. Or another way, "I (author) have encountered the diminishing return on happiness. dH/dm = 0".

Updating it by hand? What kind of a neanderthal do you take us for?

If one didn't have such a spreadsheet and did't know how to start tracking such things as they were a bit financially illiterate, where would you recommend they start?

Export your last 6 - 12 months of transactions from your checking account, savings account, and/or credit card. Just getting the data is a good start.

Then you can bring those sheets together. What I did was combine my expenses across my debit card and credit card, then sort them into categories. Subscriptions, grocery (I shop at 2-4 stores regularly), hobbies, restaurants, etc.

I made a calculator in the sheet to convert my biweekly pay into monthly income. (there's slightly more than 2 pay periods per month, because a pay period is usually 28 days. I don't recall the exact number.) Once you have that, you can normalize all your expenses as well. For example, add up everything you spent on groceries in a 6 month period, divide it by 6. That's your mean monthly grocery bill.

It's a bit of work to get it all down but once you build the calculator it's not as much work to maintain it every month or six. I was able to figure out what it costs to maintain my lifestyle more or less, and then determine an amount I'm comfortable having automatically transferred to my savings account immediately after every paycheck comes through. (For me that also includes an amount that will go toward rent as I pay rent out of my savings account to ensure I never accidentally don't have money available.) Now I don't have to think about my savings often, I know it's going up at a certain rate. This also allowed me to take on some significant extra expenses to support my partner for a period of time without any fear.

Money is like oxygen, it doesn't warrant much attention unless you're not getting enough, and then it matters a whole lot.