Suppose you decided ten years ago that three million euros would be a very reassuring sum. You could fulfil a few wishes, cushion yourself against risks and probably make some career decisions without worrying about your next payslip. You now have those three million. But where the number once sounded like freedom, you may now find yourself wondering whether five million would be more sensible.
There may be good reasons for that. Circumstances change, commitments grow and prices rise. Perhaps you now own a business whose future depends on your wealth, or have relatives you are responsible for. Your idea of an ordinary life may have grown, too. Both things can be true at once.
Bank statements do not have a box marked "That will do". Yet people constantly act on some more or less conscious sense of what would be sufficient for them. I am interested in where that sense comes from. Without knowing your own threshold, it is hard to tell whether you are meeting a real need or chasing a number that moves a little further away every time you approach it.
Three million euros can mean very different things
At first, the question of sufficient wealth sounds like arithmetic. Estimate your preferred standard of living, add commitments and reserves, and arrive at a figure. That exercise can be useful. It can only answer the questions you put into it, though.
Consider two people with the same net worth. One holds mostly readily available funds, has modest outgoings and no financial obligations to anyone else. The other has most of their wealth tied up in a business, is responsible for employees and has substantial ongoing commitments. On paper, they may be equally rich. Their freedom to use that money is very different.
The same applies to living standards. Someone living alone may need less to support the life they want than someone helping several generations of a family. Health needs, location and the desire to protect against risk also change the calculation. What looks like abundance to one person may largely be committed capital to another.
It helps to distinguish the terms. Income is money received over a period. Wealth is the stock of economic assets, less debts. Financial security concerns how sustainable a person feels their situation to be. Mix those three together and you can end up with a remarkably precise answer to the wrong question.
In their 2017 account of financial well-being, Elisabeth Brüggen and her colleagues explicitly described a person's perception of being able to maintain their desired standard of living and financial freedom, now and in the future. This is a conceptual framework, not a formula for calculating an ideal level of wealth. It does, however, show why a total alone cannot tell the whole story.
When your own expectations grow
A substantial strand of research looks at how people assess their income. It is useful here, provided we do not pretend that it has automatically examined the wishes of people with very large fortunes.
In a paper published in 2004, economist Alois Stutzer explored the relationship between income aspirations and life satisfaction. Other things being comparable, higher aspirations were associated with lower satisfaction. Aspirations also rose with people's own income and the average income in their local area. What counted as a good income yesterday could become the new normal after an improvement.
Later research supports that connection while adding nuance. Matti Hovi and Jani-Petri Laamanen analysed data from around 30 countries in 2021. Higher income aspirations were again associated with lower subjective well-being. The authors also found evidence that aspirations respond to rising incomes. At the same time, a positive relationship between higher income and life satisfaction remained, even where rising aspirations more strongly dampened other aspects of well-being.
That distinction matters. People get used to better circumstances and adjust their expectations. It does not follow that a pay rise is meaningless. More money can open up very real possibilities. The standard by which we assess those possibilities may simply shift alongside them.
This creates a problem when researching the subject. Many convincing-sounding claims about "never having enough" rest on studies of income and how people judge it. They do not settle the question of how much accumulated wealth an already wealthy individual considers sufficient. Research suggests possible mechanisms. It does not produce a dependable figure to wave in front of every millionaire.
The people around us have a say
People rarely assess their finances in complete isolation. It begins with small things. A home you have long considered exceptionally spacious can suddenly seem modest when different living arrangements are taken for granted in a new social circle. Nobody has to show off. Sometimes all it takes is exposure to another version of normal.
In a 2005 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, economist Erzo Luttmer examined neighbourhood earnings and personal well-being. Holding people's own income comparable, higher earnings around them were associated with lower self-reported happiness. These data cannot diagnose an individual. They are, however, consistent with the idea that comparisons influence how we judge our circumstances.
Someone with substantial wealth may have different reference groups from someone mainly concerned with their monthly salary. Entrepreneurs whose acquaintances sold businesses for much larger sums, or people moving in circles where eight-figure fortunes are commonplace, may see their position differently from someone with the same wealth outside that environment. This is a plausible application of the comparison argument, not a separately established rule about millionaires.
Comparison is not inherently bad. Other people show us what is possible, offer ideas and sometimes provide useful benchmarks. Trouble starts when we adopt somebody else's standard of living without considering whether we share the wishes that go with it.
The difference between actual wealth and feeling rich is explored in Why you can feel rich, or not, even with millions. For now, one observation is enough: a financial target that depends on other people's circumstances is difficult to reach for good. Other people do not stand still.
How much would people choose if the choice were theirs?
One study tackles the question of enough unusually directly, suggesting that our wishes need not be limitless. For a study published in 2022, Paul Bain and Renata Bongiorno asked 7,860 people across 42 samples in 33 countries to imagine their absolutely ideal life and say how much money they would want for it. Participants chose between different prizes in a hypothetical lottery.
In 86 per cent of the countries studied, a majority chose no more than ten million US dollars. Every country also had a minority who chose the largest possible amount. Depending on the country, that minority ranged from eight to 39 per cent.
What surprises me is less the size of the sums than the fact that so many people set a limit at all. Turning down the chance of a much larger prize in a thought experiment suggests that money does not have endlessly increasing value in its own right for everyone.
We should not turn this into a universal formula. A hypothetical lottery choice is not an observation of actual decisions about wealth. Nor do the respondents automatically represent the small group who already own many millions. Above all, choosing ten million does not establish that this exact amount would make someone happy. The study asked for a desired sum to support an imagined ideal life. It did not subsequently measure well-being.
Still, the finding challenges the easy claim that everybody inevitably wants more. People can apparently imagine an upper limit. It simply varies a great deal between individuals.
More money can still help
One objection to asking about enough is that additional money remains useful even at high levels of wealth. That is a fair objection. Larger reserves can reduce uncertainty, create more freedom or help someone take on responsibilities. Some wishes really do cost more than others.
Research on well-being does not support a simple conclusion that money stops mattering above a particular threshold. Across several datasets, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers found no clear income point in their 2013 analysis above which the relationship between income and subjective well-being disappeared completely. Their research concerns income, not the stock of wealth a particular person needs to live on.
A 2018 study by Grant Donnelly and colleagues offers a look at people who are genuinely wealthy. Two samples comprising more than 4,000 millionaires showed a weak positive relationship between still higher wealth and happiness, visible only at particularly high wealth levels. The authors described the differences as moderate. Again, they did not identify a personal point of enough. They compared well-being across groups with different amounts of wealth.
For me, this is the important point: the fact that more money can still be useful does not oblige anyone to make it their next goal in life. An additional sum may expand your options without being necessary for a good life. You need neither deny its usefulness nor automatically give it top priority.
What am I trying to provide for?
Perhaps the question becomes more useful if we briefly stop looking for a number and ask what we expect it to do.
For some people, security comes first. They want to live independently of short-term fluctuations and avoid being thrown into difficulty by an unexpected expense. Others mainly want time: the freedom to choose when and how much they work. Others think about relatives or options they would like to keep open for later in life. Some enjoy building businesses and see available capital as a way to pursue more ideas.
These are all understandable purposes. They call for different answers, though. Someone building a business may reasonably see a greater need for capital than someone whose greatest wish is a quiet, self-directed daily life. Anyone hoping to fund certain expenses indefinitely first needs to know which expenses they mean.
The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau describes financial well-being in terms of control over day-to-day finances, the capacity to absorb setbacks, progress towards goals and the freedom to make choices that support the life you want. This is neither wealth advice nor a measure designed specifically for the super-rich. I like the way it assesses money through concrete functions rather than size alone.
A personal sense of enough might therefore be a statement you can examine, rather than a magic number: in my present circumstances, I can afford the standard of living I actually want. I have accounted for possible commitments. I have enough room to make decisions without financial fear being the sole driver. And I know which further possibilities greater wealth would genuinely create.
That statement can change. New responsibilities may unsettle it; health events or economic changes may require a fresh calculation. A sound benchmark is allowed to change. It need not automatically grow every time you look at someone else's wealth.
When a useful resource becomes a measure of your worth
Money can be practical, reassuring and a source of enjoyment. It can also become the main criterion by which someone judges their success. At that point, the question changes. The amount no longer has only to fund a particular life. It may also be expected to prove that you are successful enough, independent enough or sufficiently far ahead of other people.
A 2014 meta-analysis by Helga Dittmar and colleagues examined 259 independent samples. Overall, a stronger materialistic orientation was associated with lower personal well-being, with the strength of the relationship varying according to the measures used. The findings do not establish that possessions make people unhappy, or that wealthy people automatically hold materialistic values. They primarily concern relationships between values and well-being, not a verdict on bank balances.
That is precisely why I find the distinction helpful. Having wealth and making wealth a measure of your own worth are different things. People can want to earn or build more out of enjoyment, curiosity or responsibility. The interesting question is whether the goal still reflects a personal wish, or remains important simply because the next number is larger.
The next million: when more becomes an end in itself explores that continuing pursuit. For the question of enough, the immediate issue is whether we can distinguish personal purposes from straightforward comparisons of size.
A limit you take seriously yourself
Having enough does not mean you must stop earning, running a business or enjoying your wealth. You may keep working because you enjoy it. You may want to bring another idea to life. Years later, you may discover new reasons to need more money. A personal threshold is not an obligation to stand still.
You can also recognise that you have more than you need for your own purposes and keep it anyway. That creates no automatic moral duty to give anything to anyone. What you do with your wealth is a separate decision. The idea behind Tired of Wealth plays with one such possibility while taking it seriously. It does not decide on other people's behalf when their wealth is sufficient.
"How much is enough?" therefore has two parts. The arithmetic can be approached through assumptions, expenses, commitments and security needs. The harder part requires some idea of the life you actually want. Without that, almost any sum can be justified if you spend long enough looking for fresh reasons.
Perhaps enough is the point where more money can still be welcome without deciding whether your life itself feels sufficient. There is no universal number of millions for that point, no scientifically calibrated bank balance. There is, however, a surprisingly concrete question: what would the next million actually improve in my life?
If there is no useful answer left, your wealth does not necessarily need to shrink. Perhaps the importance of the next million does.
Sources
Brüggen, Elisabeth C., Jens Hogreve, Maria Holmlund, Sertan Kabadayi and Martin Löfgren (2017). “Financial well-being: A conceptualization and research agenda”. Journal of Business Research, 79, pp. 228 to 237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2017.03.013
Stutzer, Alois (2004). “The role of income aspirations in individual happiness”. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 54(1), pp. 89 to 109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2003.04.003
Hovi, Matti, and Jani-Petri Laamanen (2021). “Income, aspirations and subjective well-being: International evidence”. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 185, pp. 287 to 302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2021.02.030
Luttmer, Erzo F. P. (2005). “Neighbors as Negatives: Relative Earnings and Well-Being”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 120(3), pp. 963 to 1002. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/120.3.963
Bain, Paul G., and Renata Bongiorno (2022). “Evidence from 33 countries challenges the assumption of unlimited wants”. Nature Sustainability, 5, pp. 669 to 673. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-022-00902-y
Stevenson, Betsey, and Justin Wolfers (2013). “Subjective Well-Being and Income: Is There Any Evidence of Satiation?”. American Economic Review, 103(3), pp. 598 to 604. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.3.598
Donnelly, Grant E., Tianyi Zheng, Emily Haisley and Michael I. Norton (2018). “The Amount and Source of Millionaires’ Wealth (Moderately) Predict Their Happiness”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(5), pp. 684 to 699. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167217744766
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (n.d.). “Why financial well-being?”. Information and a description of the Financial Well-Being Scale, accessed 7 November 2026. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/consumer-tools/financial-well-being/about/
Dittmar, Helga, Rod Bond, Megan Hurst and Tim Kasser (2014). “The relationship between materialism and personal well-being: A meta-analysis”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107(5), pp. 879 to 924. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037409