- "Being rich" is an empty goal, according to the personal-finance website The Financial Diet.
- Money shouldn't be seen as a material to be hoarded but as a way to live a good life, said Chelsea fa*gan, the site's cofounder.
- If society views wealth accumulation as an achievement, it will continue to repeat a cycle of wealth-hoarding that produces wealth inequality and lacks meaning, fa*gan said.
- Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.
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What it takes to "be rich" is subjective — but for many people looking to grow their wealth, establishing a target number and saving and investing until they hit it is one way of getting there.
But that practice defeats the purpose of building wealth, the personal-finance site The Financial Diet said in a tweet earlier this week.
"'Being rich' is among the most empty goals a person can have," the tweet said. "Accumulating money for the sake of a number misses the point entirely — life should be treated as a story you are writing, and money should be the ink that helps you write, not the story itself."
—The Financial Diet (@TFDiet) April 15, 2019
In short, building wealth shouldn't be about having a certain amount in the bank, but living a life you love.
"Essentially, I think in this country we put an enormous premium on the accumulation of wealth as an isolated achievement — the lists ranking the X wealthiest people, the constant focus on celebrities' net worth, the obsession with displaying personal wealth on social media — and this creates a perception that the number itself is in some way a goal," Chelsea fa*gan, a cofounder of The Financial Diet, told Business Insider.
She added: "The money becomes a competition or a statement of personal value, and as we accumulate more of it, we are increasingly in social circles of similar wealth which only reinforce this feedback loop of net-worth-as-achievement."
Read more: A self-made millionaire who retired early at 37 says there's a difference between 'living rich' and 'being rich'
Money, according to fa*gan, should be viewed as a way to facilitate a good life that provides things like security, comfort, freedom, options, and, occasionally, risks — not as a material to be hoarded.
"This is not only because doing the latter does not make us any happier or improve our lives in any way, but also because a societal focus on wealth-hoarding inherently creates a society which is more imbalanced and precarious, with wealth increasingly collecting and stagnating at the very top," she said.
She continued: "But so long as we continue to view the accumulation of massive wealth as any kind of achievement (and not the reflection of a meaningfully broken economic system), this system will continue to reproduce itself, with deep systemic inequalities on the societal level and profound lack of meaning at the personal level."
Economics Correspondent, Millennial Wealth
Hillary focuses on the intersection of youth culture and wealth, reporting on the lifestyles and economics of millennials and Gen Z. She covers trends in how these generations are living and spending and examines how the economy is shaping them and their financial behaviors. She also reports on consumer spending and New York City's economy, and previously wrote about the ultrarich and personal finance at Insider before joining its economy team. Basically, she's written about money from every angle you can imagine. Inside the epicenter of America's Great Resignation: Kentuckians lay out the 4 forces driving the state's labor shortage — and explain why it's here to stay Millennial New Yorkers are ditching basem*nts and roommates for luxury apartments at $1,000-plus discounts The world's youngest self-made billionaire hopes to power every future self-driving car with a technology that Elon Musk says is 'doomed' Tiffany and the Trumps: Insiders describe how the president's younger daughter has charted what they say is a distant relationship with her father and come to terms with having America's most divisive last name Inside the French Riviera's pandemic party problem Yachting insiders detail the rampant sexual harassment aboard million-dollar ships, where crew members are promised a glamorous lifestyle and can instead find themselves trapped at sea with no one to turn to Millennials came limping out of the Great Recession with massive student debt and crippled finances. Here's what the generation is up against if the coronavirus triggers another recession.
