Living Well With Wealth, Not Just For Millionaires

What happens when you get more money?

Peace, happiness, contentment...

Not always. Can you say decision overload syndrome. While we would all love to believe that having more money solves all problems, more often than not it does not. Believe it or not, having more money can mean more work.

As we have access to more money we have more decisions to make. Remember the good old days in college when you only had $100 in your bank account. What did you do for dinner? Probably the cheapest pizza you could find.

There are different ways in which people's wealth increases and depending on the path it can have a big impact on how they relate to wealth.

Here are four broad pathways that people enter into wealth
1. They earn it - in earning it this may happen over a life time of slow and steady saving, professional advancement, or successful business.

2. They marry into it - this does not mean they married for money, but perhaps they married someone one socio economic level up.

3. They inherit it - a family member leaves behind an unexpected lump sum of money.

4. They are born into it- the parents create wealth while raising their family and the children grow accustomed to a certain life style.

Along each pathway there are many different intersections, unique characteristics that come along with the wealth that an individual lives with. Yet each of the these paths is not equal in helping someone live well with wealth.

There is a real challenge to living well with wealth. The more money that you have, the more decisions that you are responsible for either directly or indirectly. By indirect decisions I mean that you hire other people to help you make financial decisions. Which is a big challenge. If you have ever had to hire someone for anything, then you can appreciate the difficulty in trying to hire the right person to help you with your wealth.

For those people who create wealth for themselves over a longer period of time they have a chance to learn many important lessons about managing and maintain financial resources. Compared to the person that comes into wealth, where they have had no chance to develop the necessary skills to manage wealth well.

Living well with wealth is a skill and one that is refined over time. Imagine being dropped in a new country that you have no knowledge of and you are told to live well there. What would you do? Which rules would you play by, chances are you do not know the rules. Is it going to take you some time to learn the rules of the land? Absolutely. This too is true of living with wealth.

As we think about the path to living well with wealth, it is one that takes time, maturity and relationships to master. Living well in life can not be done alone. Remaining open and willing to learn about what it means to live well with your level of wealth will depend on your perspective. Take time to slow down and think about where you need to grow in order to live well with your wealth.