Insight Editions · No. 272
Good Money
Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose
John Coleman
John Coleman, an investor who grew up in a Florida trailer, argues that money is a tool, not a totem, and lays out six steps for building a financial life around relationships, meaning, character and service.
A study guide to Good Money by John Coleman. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book on One Page
John Coleman, an investor and the author of Passion & Purpose, argues that money is a means to flourishing, never its measure, and that how we earn, spend, give, invest and save decides whether wealth frees us or traps us. Good Money is money put in its proper place: chosen habits, mindsets and values that turn financial stability into a life of purpose, relationships and service. The book is a values blueprint for people who have, or will have, more than they need, not a guide to budgets or tax.
The premise. Scarcity is devastating, but abundance without the right habits ruins lives too. Seligman's PERMA and VanderWeele's five domains both leave money out as an end: financial stability is a baseline, and beyond it the goods that matter are nonfinancial.
Mindsets first. Coleman's first step attacks the lies culture tells about money. Four mindsets put it in its place: money can't buy happiness past a threshold, so hold abundance without attachment; set a financial finish line in advance and freeze lifestyle creep; don't let money distract you from your callings; and never equate worth with net worth.
Money in: earn with purpose. Optimizing a career for pay fails on its own terms. Purpose is crafted, not found, through job crafting, craft, service and relationships; Coleman thinks 90% of jobs can be made meaningful, and offers a weighted grid for career moves.
Money out: consume wisely and give well. Spend less than you earn and never let net worth go negative; buy experiences, time, health and relationships rather than status goods; smash idols through precommitment; consume less. Giving is the foundation of Good Money: the four Ps (percentage, passion, partner, participate) increase it, and TRUST (trusted advisers, research, understanding second-order effects, specified intent, time limits) keeps help from hurting.
Money working: invest for impact and save for freedom. Compounding rewards investing early and never raiding the pot, and since all investing is impact investing, Coleman gives seven principles for aligning a portfolio with values, from an aligned adviser to "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." He then rejects conventional retirement, which research links to worse health and lost purpose, in favor of saving for freedom, agency and autonomy behind a fortress balance sheet.
Passing it on. Families should start with a mission, vision and values, then raise kids as financial apprentices who earn (chores, allowance, jobs), spend, give and invest alongside their parents, with spending aimed at opportunity rather than entitlement. Inheritance needs limits and brakes, because unearned wealth tends to harm: income matching, an inheritance finish line and trusts that can withhold funds.
The close. Coleman's last word is a choice: money as a tool, not a totem, started today at any age.
| Ch | Title | One-line payload |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Building a Financial Life | Money is necessary, but abundance without good habits ruins |
| 1 | Money and the Good Life | PERMA and VanderWeele leave money out; it is a baseline. The six-step framework |
| 2 | Develop Good Money Mindsets | Four mindsets: no happiness from money, finish line, callings, worth is not net worth |
| 3 | Earn with Purpose | Purpose is crafted, not found; four practices, five questions and a weighted career grid |
| 4 | Consume Wisely | No negative net worth, debt rules, experiences over stuff, time and health, smash idols |
| 5 | Give Generously and Well | Generosity is the foundation; the four Ps to give more, TRUST to give well |
| 6 | Invest for Impact | Compound early; all investing is impact investing; seven principles for alignment |
| 7 | Save for Freedom, Not Retirement | Full retirement harms health and purpose; save for autonomy (4% math); fortress rules |
| 8 | Good Money and Kids | Family mission first; apprenticeship in earn, spend, give, invest; inheritance with brakes |
| End | Good Money for the Good Life | A tool, not a totem: start today, at any age |
Building a Financial Life for Flourishing
Coleman opens with a tension: money is a necessity whose absence is devastating, yet abundance without the right habits, mindsets and values can wreck a life. Good Money is money put in its proper place: a means to the good life, never the measure of a person's worth. The book offers a blueprint for that relationship, not a manual of budgeting tactics.
What is Good Money?
Coleman admits the question sounds silly at first. Money pays for shelter, food, clothing and every other necessity; it funds holidays with family and friends, an education, physical safety, good health care, even the family pet. It bought the computer he wrote the book on and is one of the rewards for publishing it. Its absence can be devastating.
He knows that from experience. When he was born, his parents lived in a single-wide mobile home in Florida, and when big storms came they bought movie tickets so the family could wait it out in a sturdier building. He remembers being hungry and wearing clothes that did not fit. His family's prospects later improved, but the fear that financial insecurity brings never left him.
He is careful to add that, as an American, he was well-off by global standards. Whole nations face famine, disaster, violence and disease without the money to fight back, and people still die of hunger, thirst or lack of basic medicine. In those settings any money looks good.
The case that money can be bad
Even so, Coleman says the evidence shows financial abundance without the proper mindsets, habits and values can ruin a life:
- Lottery winners. He claims they often take their own lives at higher rates than people who never had a windfall.
- The very wealthy. They are often unhappier than the poor or, especially, the middle class, and they worry about what wealth will do to their children and intimate relationships.
- Nations. Poor, war-torn countries such as Haiti and Afghanistan show the highest stress and unhappiness in global surveys, but wealthy countries are often no better off, or worse off, than middle-income or peaceful low-income ones on happiness, depression, loneliness and other signs of flourishing.
His resolution: we need money and its absence is wrenching, yet it does not solve our deepest problems, and overreliance on it or a poor approach to using it can damage both people and societies. Money can be both good and bad in a life.
The lottery and "rich are unhappier" claims are stated loosely and without citations here. Large Swedish lottery studies (Lindqvist, Östling and Cesarini, 2020) found windfalls raised long-run life satisfaction, and Killingsworth's 2021 experience-sampling data show well-being keeps rising with income. Treat Coleman's point as a warning about how money is held, not proof that wealth itself harms.
The origins of Good Money
The real question is which habits, mindsets and values turn an unavoidable, necessary thing into a tool for human flourishing. Coleman notes that the major religions and philosophies have wrestled with exactly this, recognising both money's centrality and its danger while offering a path by which it can serve what we care about most:
- Buddhism. Teaches enjoyment without attachment: money is necessary and can do good, but overreliance on it disorders the soul and breeds unhappiness.
- Jewish and Christian scripture. Revered figures such as Abraham and David were immensely wealthy, yet the texts repeatedly warn against making money central to goals or identity; 1 Timothy calls the love of money the root of all kinds of evil.
- Hinduism. Holds that money is good or evil depending on how it is used.
- Karl Marx. Even this anti-materialist thought capitalism and money could free people from desperation and need, while the materialism born of loving money is destructive.
Two vantage points
Coleman lives this tension at work. He is a professional investor whose clients have ranged from high-net-worth individuals to sovereign wealth funds: he takes their money, tries to grow it and is judged by how much more he hands back, often stewarding sums that dwarf his own resources. He also spends time with families anxious about success, who ask him four recurring questions:
- Will money help or hurt my kids?
- Will the wealth I've built make it harder for my family to be happy?
- Do the people around me care about me, or want something from me?
- Do I have any value apart from the money I've made?
His second vantage is his writing on purpose. Passion & Purpose (Harvard Business Review Press) examined meaning in the lives of young leaders; the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose showed how people in demanding careers can flourish rather than falter. Good Money sits at the intersection of investing and purpose.
Popular culture, from TikTok videos pushing overpriced clothes and skin care to reality-TV stars flaunting wealth, says money buys happiness and, worse, that money signals your value as a human being. Coleman calls this a lie: every person has inherent dignity and worth, and money has little to do with what makes us most human. Used properly it is a force for good, but a means to the good life, not an end.
The Good Money mentality
The book aims to share the habits, mindsets and values of people who have mastered money and used it to help themselves and others flourish. It deliberately is not a tactics book (though a few tips appear): budgeting, expense control, getting a mortgage and paying down debt matter, but other books cover them, and Coleman does not think they are the root of our problems. What he offers instead:
- A blueprint for a relationship with money that supports comprehensive flourishing.
- Profiles of people who seem to have made money work for lives of meaning.
- A simple framework for earning, spending, giving and investing well.
- A path to apprentice that framework with one's children.
- In scope. Anyone who has, or hopes to have, more money than they need: people who save and invest, plan college for their kids or retirement, and can think about money beyond basic needs. That spans the college student, the middle-income skilled tradesperson, the middle manager, the third-generation heir and the billionaire weighing a legacy; because the focus is mindset rather than tactics, the lessons transfer across all of them.
- Likely readers. Mostly mid-to-late career people deciding how to steward what they are accumulating.
- Best timing. Younger readers, because adopting good habits before bad ones form is the most prudent and powerful move; a recent graduate is as well placed as a new parent or an empty nester.
- Out of scope. People living paycheck to paycheck in a cycle of poverty and debt. Coleman calls this the most urgent crisis, common even in the US, but says treating scarcity and abundance in one book would be too complex to do responsibly; other books, articles and podcasts serve it better.
He closes with the old adage that money won't make you happy, adding that it does not have to be bad either: viewed and used properly, Good Money can improve your life and the lives of others.
Money and the Good Life
Coleman grounds the whole book in the science of human flourishing: two research frameworks, Martin Seligman's PERMA and Tyler VanderWeele's five domains, both leave money out as an end in itself. Money is a means: financial stability is a baseline for flourishing, and beyond it the things that make life good are almost entirely nonfinancial. From that premise he builds a six-part Good Money framework covering every way we touch money: mindsets, earning, consuming, giving, investing and saving.
Who is flourishing?
For more than ten years Coleman has given talks on purpose to colleges, corporations, nonprofits, government bodies and groups of friends, and he likes to open with one question: who in your life is flourishing? The stories people tell are warm and specific. Three stand out:
- The widowed grandmother. A retired teacher who lost her husband but stayed an encouragement to everyone around her. She tends a garden every day, growing food she serves to people she loves; she volunteers daily at a youth center; she plays bridge with a close circle of friends who share sorrows and joys; and she spends a great deal of time with her children and grandchildren.
- The consulting mentor. A young man described a mentor in fast-paced management consulting who invested heavily in the juniors on his team, held firm lines on work-life balance, and openly put family ahead of work, urging others to do the same. He was superb at his craft and cared about clients, but in a profession that easily becomes all-consuming he kept his love for his team and family in balance.
- The caring colleague. An older man spoke of a younger coworker sitting near him who looked after him when he was ill, cheerfully picked up his work, and was available to talk during his treatment. He later learned she volunteered often, adored her young children and drew meaning and community from her church.
Eudaemonia, and what nobody mentions
Flourishing is hard to pin down. The ancient Greeks called it eudaemonia: the highest human good, the practice of living well in the way that fits a human being's nature. It is more than happiness, because happiness without purpose tends to be shallow and brief. Coleman's subject, like the Greeks', is the good life, one aligned with our deepest hungers and needs and in service of a higher calling. We may struggle to define it, but we recognise it.
The stories differ, yet they cluster around the same traits: people who love others, live in community, do meaningful work, help those in need, care for their craft and embrace a higher calling. The telling detail for a money book: among the hundreds, perhaps thousands of people Coleman has asked, not one has ever mentioned wealth or possessions. The people described often live humbly, but they live well and fully human.
Coleman's focus is narrower than the good life in general: it is financial flourishing, the habits, mindsets and values that make money a force for good. To build that he first needs a shared vocabulary for human flourishing, so he reviews two evidence-based frameworks from modern social science.
Flourishing in positive psychology
Martin Seligman, called the father of positive psychology, was born in Albany, New York, in 1942. He earned his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania in 1967 and, after a short spell at Cornell, built his career at Penn. Troubled by how psychologists treated depression, he became absorbed by learned helplessness: after an unavoidable bad event, a person or animal starts to feel and act helpless, and keeps behaving that way even once it regains the power to change things.
He founded positive psychology because his field concentrated on what goes wrong in the mind (mental illness) and he wanted to study what goes right: our strengths. He went on to research happiness and learned optimism. Coleman, who has met and talked with Seligman (a husband and father of six), singles out his book Flourish, which sets out five requirements for a good life.
- P: Positive emotions. An enriched kind of happiness that takes in deeper states such as joy and gratitude.
- E: Engagement. Close to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's flow, the state of being so absorbed we lose track of time and place; for Seligman it arises when challenge and skill or strength are perfectly matched.
- R: Positive relationships. Feeling supported, loved and valued by others; we are communal creatures, and relationships sit at the center of well-being.
- M: Meaning. A sense of purpose at work, at home, in the community and in creative pursuits: the conviction that what we do matters.
- A: Accomplishment. Reaching goals, most powerfully intrinsic goals pursued for their own sake rather than as means to something else.
Seligman's own definition of flourishing combines finding fulfillment, accomplishing worthwhile tasks and connecting deeply with others, in short living the good life. The key structural point: none of the five is instrumental. Each is pursued for its own sake, not as a step to some higher state.
Money is notably absent. It is not good in itself. It may come as a result of accomplishment, but it does not create flourishing, and it can even get in the way. Money can help or hurt relationships, strengthen or weaken meaning, and produce positive or negative emotions. Its value therefore lies entirely in whether it is used to support, rather than distract from, the intrinsically good elements of PERMA.
Coleman notes that PERMA fits reasonably well with what religion, philosophy and ancient tradition have said. Because the concept matters so much to using money well, he checks it against a second framework developed independently.
The financial aspect of flourishing
Tyler VanderWeele was born in Chicago but grew up abroad. His father first moved the family overseas as a financial executive, then changed careers to work for Opportunity International, a global faith-based nonprofit serving people in extreme poverty. Living in Austria, Bulgaria, Costa Rica and elsewhere, he met people who made him ask what a good life really is.
He studied at Oxford, Penn and Harvard and worked in epidemiology and public health, which he found rewarding but incomplete. In conversation with Coleman he described the turning point: science had learned a great deal about physical health and income, yet people also care about being happy, having purpose, being a good person and their relationships. Why, he asked, do we know so much more about the causes of cardiovascular disease than about what produces meaning and purpose, something everyone wants?
That question, plus his experiences and faith, led him to found Harvard's Human Flourishing Program, whose mission is to study and promote flourishing and to synthesise knowledge across disciplines. His definition is simple: flourishing is a state in which all aspects of a person's life are good.
- Five measures. Happiness and life satisfaction; physical and mental health; meaning and purpose; character and virtue; close social relationships.
- Four pathways. Family, work, education and religious community: the contexts through which we experience the measures, and like PERMA's elements, ends worth pursuing in themselves.
- One extra measure. Financial and material stability, tracked because without it the others are hard to reach, but explicitly not intrinsically good.
How the two frameworks line up
| Seligman (PERMA) | VanderWeele (2017) | Overlap |
|---|---|---|
| Positive emotions | Happiness and life satisfaction | Positive feelings about life |
| Meaning | Meaning and purpose | Shared in both |
| Relationships | Close social relationships | Central in both |
| Engagement | No exact match | Compatible with character, health |
| Accomplishment | No exact match | Compatible with character, health |
| (none) | Character and virtue; physical and mental health | Ethical living by one's values; may intersect with E and A |
| Money | Financial stability (means only) | Absent as an end in both |
For VanderWeele, as for Seligman and many older philosophical traditions, money is not an end like happiness, health, purpose and character; it is a means by which we are recognised for contributions or get other things done.
The threshold
The stability measure makes intuitive sense. If you cannot afford food or shelter, health and strong relationships are hard to build; if you are hungry or afraid for your physical safety, happiness and purpose slip out of reach. Where people suffer in poverty, flourishing is barely possible because baseline needs are unmet.
But as countries and individuals grow richer, the link between material prosperity and character, close relationships and meaning breaks down. VanderWeele's global data show people in the rich developed world report higher life evaluation, often better health and better financial security. On other measures, though, middle-income countries come out ahead: in meaning and purpose, social connectedness and self-rated character, countries such as Indonesia, the Philippines and Mexico beat the United States, Europe and Japan.
Financial security is a baseline, a means. Below the threshold its absence makes flourishing extremely hard; once basic needs are met, more wealth does not seem to make us happier, and the drivers of a good life become character, love, meaning, happiness, community, family and work. Some evidence even suggests that having or focusing on more money pulls attention away from those goods.
Coleman calls this a liberating premise. A good life is not a wealthy, materially prosperous life; it rests on financial stability, and beyond that is defined by relationships, well-being, health, character, engagement, accomplishment and meaning. Those are ends. Money is a tool for reaching them.
Five questions for any financial decision
From VanderWeele's domains Coleman draws a test to apply to every purchase, gift or investment:
- Will it make me happier and more satisfied?
- Does it enable greater mental or physical health?
- Does it bring more meaning and purpose into my life?
- Does it build character and virtue in me, and does it fit my most deeply held values?
- Does it build or break close social relationships?
The real questions for the rest of the book follow: which habits, mindsets and values let a person use money to flourish, which ones stand in the way of a more deeply human life, and how can money enable rather than obstruct flourishing?
A simple framework for Good Money
We interact with money in four ways: we earn it, spend it, give it and invest it. Earning brings money in; spending and giving send it out; investing sends it out and, if it works, brings more back.
Earning
Most money arrives through work. Lottery wins and inheritances are exceptions; for most people most of the time, earning is the main inflow, and we do it nearly all our lives. Coleman's own record: cutting grass and raking leaves for parents and neighbors at eight or nine, a first formal job as a busboy at Applebee's at sixteen, work all through college in the student cafeteria and the writing center, and full-time work within weeks of graduating. He finds pride and meaning in being paid, because pay signals that your craft, whether lawns, tables or financial models, has value to someone else.
Spending
Once we have money, only three things can be done with it, and the first is the most common. Americans spend about 88% of what they earn each year, and globally few countries have household saving rates above 10%. After earning, spending is our largest interface with money, so learning to spend in ways that truly improve life is one of the most powerful adjustments available.
Giving
Some of what is not spent is given. About 61% of Americans donate to charity; eight countries give at higher rates, led by Indonesia at 84% of the population. Measured by amount, the United States is the most charitable nation, giving roughly $260 billion a year, about 1.4% of GDP. Coleman thinks that figure understates real generosity, because it counts only formal charity and leaves out helping a stranger on the street, buying a friend dinner, lending to a struggling relative or gifts to people in need. Even so, he judges that we give too little given how strongly giving lifts meaning and well-being, and reflecting on it is an easy route to a healthier relationship with money.
Investing, not "saving"
Most people also invest. Coleman dislikes the word "savings", which suggests something passive, cash under a mattress, and is itself a poor financial mindset. Every dollar set aside can earn, whether from a money market account's interest or the stock market, so it should be treated as an active part of financial life.
- Spending. About 88% of annual earnings; few countries save more than 10% of household income.
- Giving. 61% of Americans give; Indonesia leads at 84%; US total about $260 billion, 1.4% of GDP.
- Net worth. Median household nearly $200,000; mean over $1 million, pulled up by the richest and by older people who have had longer to accumulate.
- Housing. About two-thirds of a typical American's net worth, a share that falls as wealth rises.
- Accounts. 96% of Americans have financial accounts; 60% have retirement accounts, the most common saving vehicle.
- Scale. The median American holds twice their annual spending in net worth, so investments are among the biggest pools of money in a life and the only way to use money to earn money.
Coleman acknowledges these figures differ sharply across countries; many people in poorer nations have no meaningful savings or investment options at all.
- Doubling time. By the Rule of 72, money at 10% doubles in about 7.2 years, so "roughly seven" holds. But 10% is a strong nominal, pre-fee, pre-inflation assumption; long-run real US equity returns are nearer 6-7%.
- Giving totals. The $260 billion / 1.4% figure matches an older international comparison; Giving USA puts recent annual US giving well above $450 billion, roughly 2% of GDP. Source and year matter.
- Saving rate. "Spend 88%" implies a 12% saving rate, well above the BEA personal saving rate of roughly 4-5% in recent years. The framing and most examples are American.
The six parts of Good Money
From these touchpoints Coleman builds a rubric for financial lives with impact. He says plainly it is not exhaustive: it does not cover mortgage rates or household budgets. Its aim is an intellectual and emotional framework for each major money touchpoint, so that each becomes a positive force. The rest of the book takes the six parts one at a time.
1. Develop Good Money mindsets
Right habits start with right mindsets. Money is as old as civilization and essential; its absence causes hardship, but its presence does not guarantee a good life. First establish what is intrinsically good (positive relationships, meaningful work, service, strong character, a healthy body and mind), then ask how money can enable those rather than distract. That means putting money in its proper place, recognising that every person, including you, is worth far more than their assets, and accepting that money cannot buy happiness, only help reach more meaningful things. Ironically, the more we focus on money, the harder those things may be to reach. We must also understand hedonic adaptation, which drives an endless, fruitless chase for more wealth and stuff, and answer "How much is enough?" to set a financial finish line.
2. Earn with purpose
Using money well is worth little if we work without purpose or joy. A common error is treating work as a job done only to accumulate wealth, an attitude Coleman calls demoralising and self-defeating. Once the concept of enough is in place, we are free to seek meaning in our profession. In Passion & Purpose, which Coleman coauthored, two of the top three reasons people chose jobs were intellectual challenge and the chance to make an impact. Early in his career he believed he could endure anything, however tedious, to buy financial freedom; he was wrong.
His practical rules:
- Need the money? Take the job. It is naive to ignore financial needs; if you must take a job for pay, do so and work hard to craft meaning in it.
- If you can choose, choose well. Favor great people, a mission worth achieving, autonomy and responsibility, and room to weave purpose into everything; these outweigh the incremental pay given up, and you will likely end up better at a career that brings joy.
- Design your work. Shape it to break bad habits and open new chances to flourish day to day.
- It is never too late. Anyone, from college student to recent retiree, can reshape their work toward purpose, and the best time to start is today.
3. Consume wisely
Consumption is not bad in itself, but overconsumption or consuming the wrong things leaves us worse off spiritually, mentally, emotionally and sometimes materially. Our culture prizes status and showy wealth, which do not make us happier. The prescription has four parts: spend less than you make; focus on experiences, time, wellness and relationships; confront problem areas head-on; and adopt minimalism.
- Experiences over comparison goods. Possessions are linked to lower well-being when they drive comparison (a nicer watch or car than the neighbor's); experiences such as trips and outings are linked to higher well-being, especially new ones shared with others. Swap the pricier car for a trip with friends somewhere new, or the expensive jewelry for a service trip with your partner or family.
- Experiences as investment. Spending on experiences can deepen relationships, educate, care for those close to us and train enjoyment without attachment, guarding against insecurity, jealousy and greed, which Coleman calls among the most toxic mindsets for rich and poor alike.
- Buy time, health and relationships. Studies show that shorter commutes, outsourcing unpleasant chores and buying more time with loved ones can buy happiness; when choosing between possessions and better use of time, time wins every time. Spending on spiritual, mental and physical wellness and on deeper relationships improves lives.
- Spend less and force out obsessions. Do not spend to accumulate status; when a material thing becomes an obsession, actively remove it from your life.
4. Give generously and well
Whatever your income, Coleman says giving and serving others is the most fulfilling use of wealth. In 2013 nine psychologists published a landmark paper using data from 136 countries: people everywhere gain emotional benefits from spending on others, and prosocial spending is linked to greater happiness in poor and rich countries alike. Later papers confirm generosity's well-being benefits beyond its obvious social good. Since nothing affects flourishing like the depth and breadth of relationships, and few things build them like helping, openhandedness counters the greed, avarice and jealousy that often come with wealth. Habits of charity, volunteering and casual generosity free us from toxic attachments. The caveat: we must give well, making sure recipients actually benefit and our intent is preserved, because helping can hurt when done badly.
5. Invest for impact
Investing early, consistently and well is one of the best routes to stability. A dollar earning 10% doubles roughly every seven years, and careful investing over thirty or forty years can make even moderate earners financially secure through compounding. Beyond personal prosperity, investment dollars extend our values and can do great good or harm. Aligning resources with values is an old idea: the Torah, the Christian Bible, the Quran and Hindu scriptures all address stewardship of wealth. Interest is broad: 86% of millennials are interested in impact investing and 72% of Gen Zers hope investing can improve sustainability.
The tools are many: positive and negative screening, proxy voting, corporate engagement and conventional impact investing, with thousands of options and often little or no cost to returns. Step one is to stop thinking of "savings" and treat every dollar as a tool for investment in our lives, our families, the market and the people around us. Later chapters give a detailed process for investing for return and impact in parallel.
6. Save for freedom, not retirement
For decades retirement has been a central Western goal, but Coleman calls conventional retirement the wrong goal. There is limited evidence it improves life and growing evidence that the wrong kind brings higher mortality and cognitive decline. We need purpose and meaning, much of which come from work and community. As we age we may need savings for failing health or to scale back hours, but for most people full retirement is not the right choice. Save instead for freedom to work the way you want, until the age you want, without financial constraint. You may still fund retirement plans, but to buy freedom and purpose, not just leisure; and a windfall in your thirties or forties becomes a license to lean harder into meaningful work, not a ticket to the golf course or the beach.
Worksheet: Good Money values and strategy (Table 1-1)
Coleman's simplest tool for the journey is a worksheet that helps you see how you currently think about each element and what to change. For each of the six steps, fill in two columns, and keep notes as you read:
| Step | What 3-5 values drive my "why" here? | What 3-5 steps can I take this year to align my life with them? |
|---|---|---|
| Develop Good Money mindsets | ||
| Earn with purpose | ||
| Consume wisely | ||
| Give generously and well | ||
| Invest for impact | ||
| Save for freedom, not retirement |
The extra chapter: kids and money
Most readers will eventually want to pass these lessons to their children, and few subjects are as fraught. Parents want their children's lives to be better than their own, and in pursuing that they sometimes build habits that hinder the child's ability to flourish. The problems grow with wealth: most of us know families fractured and children ruined by unearned wealth paired with ill-considered values. Enough of Coleman's clients have asked about this that he adds a final chapter applying the framework to children.
Leaning in to Good Money
Coleman's summary of a financial life for flourishing: put money in its proper place, build a life of meaningful work, give generously, enjoy life-changing experiences with friends and family, and steward wealth to improve the world, sharing the perspective and living in community. The aim is to earn, spend, give and invest in line with your deepest values, for your own flourishing and other people's.
Not all money is good, but you can make the right changes now to ensure that yours is.
Develop Good Money Mindsets
Beliefs shape behavior, and most of the beliefs we absorb about money are destructive lies: that wealth equals worth, that the rich are better people, that more money is the road to happiness. Coleman's remedy is to relegate money to its proper place, a means and never an end, through four mindsets: money can't buy happiness; set a financial finish line; don't let money distract you from your callings; stop equating worth with net worth. Decide how much is enough before you have it, because without a financial finish line you will always want a little more.
Why mindsets matter
Mindsets are our beliefs about the world, formed by experience, innate tendencies and what we learn from others. Research increasingly confirms what intuition suggests: beliefs about ourselves and the world change how we act, feel and process new information. Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, a pioneer of mindset research, makes the point with David Yeager: as people learn their environment they inevitably form beliefs about how it works, and those beliefs must affect what they do and how.
The evidence for positive beliefs
- Positive thinking. Can reduce stress and improve health.
- Learned optimism. Martin Seligman showed that optimism is a learnable skill that improves physical and mental health and achievement.
- Growth mindset. Dweck's field rests on the belief that intelligence, abilities and talents can be developed through dedication, effort and willingness to learn; it brings adaptability, resilience and success.
- School. The right mindsets improve learning and subjective well-being in academic settings.
- Health. The right attitudes help people reach a healthy weight, stay active and even improve metabolism.
Positive habits of mind create a virtuous cycle that spills into health, professional and academic success, and relationships.
The cost of negative beliefs
Negative beliefs work in reverse and often fulfil themselves. Believe you can't get healthy and you are less likely to; believe you can't learn and you avoid learning; believe others mean you harm and your guardedness alienates them. One memorable 2012 study found that high stress raised the chance of death only among people who believed stress was harmful; those who did not see it that way were no more likely to die.
Bad money mindsets
Many money mindsets are harmful, and they appear at both ends of the income scale:
- Scarcity mindset. The belief that resources are finite and hard to get focuses people so intensely on the scarce resource that anxiety rises and decision-making declines. Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan has studied how people trapped in, or raised in, poverty struggle with longer-term financial decisions, one reason disadvantaged people enter damaging deals such as payday loans.
- Wealth mindset. The rich can come to think they are gifted in every way because they are rich, so they treat others badly or decide poorly where they are confident but not competent. Coleman's image: the powerful CEO who thinks he is funny because people laugh at his jokes, when they laugh because he is powerful.
The cultural messages
Some mindsets are innate, but many come from personal history and culture. Coleman describes a social media video by a prominent influencer known for destructive behavior: a table of expensive watches, a pan around a beautiful home, a multimillion-dollar line of cars in the driveway, and an explicit claim that this display made him a more attractive and better man, with scorn for those lacking it. Similar videos show influencers waving cash, driving impractical sports cars and wearing tailored but ill-fitting clothes; movies and TV, even when criticising the rich, still display the power and luxury money buys.
The messages, explicit and implicit, are four: self-worth tracks money; the rich are better people; money is the true path to happiness; accumulating it is the goal of a successful career. And the mirror image: if you are poor you will stay poor, because you are a failure, and you will never find happiness or meaning.
Coleman calls these messages lies. We build money mindsets from family lessons, media, coworkers, schooling and much else, and they often produce poor values and destructive practices, yet we rarely reflect on them deliberately. Unpacking them and building healthier ones is the cornerstone of making money good, which is why the framework starts here.
Relegate money to its proper place
Scrooge, the cautionary model
In Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is a rich businessman, a covetous "old sinner" who seems to live without pleasure, only to accumulate money. He cheats his clerk Bob Cratchit, father of the sick Tiny Tim, and hounds his debtors. On Christmas Eve three spirits visit: the Ghost of Christmas Past shows his hard childhood and Belle, the love of his life, leaving him once she sees he loves money more; the Ghost of Christmas Present shows the pain his greed causes now, including the Cratchits' inability to care for Tim on his wages; the Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge dying alone and unmourned and Tiny Tim dead. He wakes on Christmas morning transformed, committed to generosity, kindness and love.
Scrooge did everything wrong. Seligman or VanderWeele could have told him the most valuable things are those good in themselves (virtue, love, community, engagement); instead he fixed on something that could never give joy or meaning, and so lost his humanity and hurt those around him.
Nobody leaves the theater wanting to be Scrooge, yet many of us live like him daily: we put accumulating wealth ahead of accumulating friendship, decline to be generous, think the next dollar will bring happiness, and never ask why we chase wealth at all.
The first step to financial flourishing is placing money as a means, not an end. Money is neither inherently good nor bad; how we think about and treat it makes it so. When it takes too large a role, as with Scrooge, it is dangerous and misleading; viewed and valued properly, it is an essential route to the truly meaningful things in life.
- Realize that money can't buy happiness. Past a threshold it adds little; practice abundance without attachment.
- Set a financial finish line. Fix a net worth or spending target in advance, then freeze lifestyle creep.
- Don't let money distract you from your callings. Purchases and possessions can eat the time meant for family, work and service.
- Stop equating your worth with your net worth. Human dignity is intrinsic; wealth measures nothing about a person's value.
Mindset 1: Realize that money can't buy happiness
David Robinson and Sweet Unity Farms
David Robinson, born 1952, saw the civil rights movement as the son of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947 became the first Black player in Major League Baseball and endured horrific racism while integrating US sports. Jackie's success gave the family financial security, but from the start he taught David that money was no path to meaning or happiness. David has said he learned early that too much attention goes to wealth and things, when meaning lies in serving others. Unlike many children of the rich and powerful, he worked in self-help housing and community development in the US in the 1970s, moved to Tanzania in 1983, and founded the coffee company Sweet Unity Farms in 1989, with a mission to improve the economic position and quality of life of rural coffee farmers and their communities. He lives and works among the farmers, describing his father's legacy as uplifting others and building communities.
The research on money and well-being
Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman are among the most respected economists ever. Kahneman (died 2024), who was Jewish, fled the Nazis in Paris in 1940 and lived on the run for the whole war; he reached Israel, studied in Jerusalem, and moved to the US in the 1960s. A cognitive psychologist drawn to behavioral economics, happiness and life satisfaction, he won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 without ever taking an economics course. Deaton, born in Scotland in 1945, took a Cambridge PhD in economics and won the 2015 Nobel for work on consumption, poverty and welfare.
- The 2010 paper. Drawing on more than 450,000 people, Coleman reports, they found their well-being proxy, "life evaluation," rose from poverty to about $75,000 a year (roughly $105,000 in 2024 terms) and then effectively stopped. Money mattered for basic needs and escaping instability, much like VanderWeele's stability measure, but beyond that showed no correlation with further well-being.
- The challenge. The result shocked academics and the public, though it echoed old religious and philosophical teaching. Penn's Matthew Killingsworth disputed it; even so, Coleman says, the latest research shows money can keep raising happiness for some past the threshold, but with smaller marginal benefit: each extra dollar adds less.
- Kahneman 2003. A separate paper found that, while extra wealth helps up to a point, seeking money or caring about it too much actually reduces happiness and life satisfaction.
- VanderWeele's view. Nearly everyone accepts diminishing marginal returns; happiness may rise slightly with more income and wealth, but the contribution keeps shrinking and beyond a threshold adds little.
In 2016, while at Y Combinator, Sam Altman (also a cofounder of OpenAI) championed a large test of universal basic income, the idea that instead of a complex safety net, societies give citizens a base income regardless of work. With OpenResearch the study began in 2019 and followed 3,000 participants for three years in ten counties in Illinois and Texas, with average household income of about $30,000. One-third received an extra $1,000 a month, about a 40% income boost; the two-thirds in the control group got $50 a month. The result was very little: no long-term gains in mental, physical or financial health; a perceived mental-health lift that faded after one year; entrepreneurial dreams but no new businesses; unchanged net worth; and earned income that fell by $1,500 a year relative to controls. The payments bought more leisure, which did not translate into personal growth or happiness.
- Global Flourishing Study. A collaboration of Harvard, Baylor, Gallup and the Center for Open Science finds an inverse relationship between GDP per capita and composite flourishing: the richer the country, on average, the lower its flourishing score. Developed countries score high on self-rated financial well-being, access to education and life evaluation; poorer ones on positive emotions, meaning and purpose, character and virtue, and social connection. The study does not claim causation, but at minimum national prosperity does not deliver national flourishing.
- The balance. Some evidence shows money, especially earned money, aids happiness by providing stability; but money without the right mindsets rarely lifts well-being for long, and caring or focusing too much on it makes flourishing harder.
- Mislabeled plateau. In Deaton and Kahneman's paper it was emotional well-being that leveled off near $75,000; life evaluation kept rising with log income. Coleman attributes the plateau to life evaluation.
- Newer consensus. The 2023 adversarial collaboration of Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers found happiness keeps rising with income for most people; a plateau appears only for the unhappiest ~20%.
- UBI nuance. OpenResearch payments ran from late 2020 and also showed more spending on basics and on helping others; it tested a lower-income group for three years, which says little about wealth and happiness generally. Calling Altman "OpenAI founder" is shorthand: he cofounded it.
| Evidence | Who, when | What Coleman takes from it |
|---|---|---|
| Income and well-being | Deaton and Kahneman, 2010; 450,000+ people | Gains flatten near $75,000 ($105,000 today) |
| Diminishing returns | Killingsworth; VanderWeele | Money may keep helping, but each dollar adds less |
| Caring about money | Kahneman, 2003 | Chasing money lowers satisfaction |
| Basic income | OpenResearch, 3,000 people, 3 years | $1,000/month: brief lift, then nothing; income -$1,500/yr |
| Nations | Global Flourishing Study | Richer countries score lower on composite flourishing |
| What you value | VanderWeele | Valuing relationships lifts many domains; valuing money lifts only finances |
Henry Kaestner and "abundance without attachment"
The right stance, Coleman says, is what Arthur Brooks calls "abundance without attachment": money is not bad and can provide the stability to pursue better things, but it is a means, never an end, and confusing its role leads somewhere darker.
Coleman's business partner Henry Kaestner, cofounder of Sovereign's Capital, is wealthy enough for private jets and fine hotels. When Coleman was weighing whether to replace him as co-CEO, Kaestner flew in from California in economy, slept in Coleman's basement, jumped on the trampoline with his kids and ate takeout with his wife. A serial entrepreneur, his big break came when his company Bandwidth went public on Nasdaq and he could suddenly buy anything he had dreamed of. He was disillusioned almost at once: the new things gave him maybe 5% of the happiness he had expected. Coleman's lesson: we need some stability to flourish, but money is a false love.
VanderWeele adds a finding about what people value. In one study, people who valued relationships or meaning improved over time in those areas and also in the other domains: valuing relationships brought gains in happiness and health. People who valued money gained financial security, but effects elsewhere were smaller and less clear. Orient life around money, he says, and you will get money and a little satisfaction and health, but typically not meaning, relationships or character. The challenge is valuing the right things.
Applying mindset 1
Seek material stability for yourself and your family; if you ever have more than you need, practise abundance without attachment, and never rank money above the intrinsic goods. Coleman's self-test:
- Honest assessment. Are you living as if a little more wealth will make you happy and your life more meaningful?
- Center or outcome. Is money at the center of your goals, or merely the outcome of purposeful pursuits?
Once needs are met, money is only as good as our ability to use it for the things that matter more.
Mindset 2: Set a financial finish line
Once money is seen as a means, better habits follow, and one is choosing a financial finish line. Without one, Coleman says, you will always want a little more.
Tolstoy's Pahom
In 1886 Leo Tolstoy wrote "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" The peasant Pahom dreams of owning enough land to be happy, and the Devil overhears. His fortunes rise: he moves among communes, grows and sells more crops, buys and sells more land. Then the Bashkirs make an irresistible offer: for a fee he may keep all the land he can walk around between sunrise and sunset, provided he is back before the sun sets. Greedy in the extreme, he drives himself all day, realises how far he has strayed, races back and crosses the line at the last moment, then drops dead of exhaustion. With a little less land he would have kept his life.
John D. Rockefeller, by some estimates the richest man in history, controlled at his peak business interests equal to 1.5% of US GDP. Asked by a reporter (perhaps apocryphally) how much money is enough, he reputedly answered "Just a little more." Coleman says most of us think the same way.
- Rich is relative. Americans define "rich" as one or two income bands above their own, whether they earn $30,000 or $300,000.
- Millionaires. Only 8% of American investors with $1 million feel wealthy; 31% of millionaires call themselves middle class.
- Reality check. Only about 9% of Americans are millionaires; median middle-class net worth is just over $100,000.
- Globally. Only 1% of people are millionaires; world GDP per capita is just under $12,000.
- Debt at the top. 38% of high earners (over $100,000) carry credit-card debt, and they are more likely than middle and lower earners to hold it five years or more.
- Billionaire optimism. 44% of Americans think they have the tools to become billionaires.
Empower, the financial services company, asked people what annual salary they would need to feel happy or less stressed. The answer is just out of reach at every income, and the gap widens as income rises: the poorest need only a little more, the richest the most.
The comparison trap
Greed is rarely as blatant as Scrooge's; more often it is the slow creep of lifestyle and comparison. Coleman saw it at a former firm where watches were the status symbol. As a boy he dreamed of a watch costing about $300; when he finally bought it at work, he noticed others' were far nicer. As people rose, TAG Heuers became Omegas, Omegas became Rolexes, Rolexes became Patek Philippes, and at each rung the person who had just upgraded, often to a watch worth tens of thousands of dollars, grew self-conscious about the nicer watches around them and what they said about professional success. Coleman eventually swore off expensive watches altogether to stay off that treadmill.
He is not attacking watches: genuine love of their history, engineering and beauty can have purpose. But like designer bags, cars and clothes or the latest iPhone, they are more often status symbols that raise anxiety and obsession.
Psychologists call this the comparison trap: we judge our well-being not objectively but against others, an instinct social media has hugely amplified ("comparison is the death of joy"). Michael Kraus (Yale) and Jacinth Tan (Singapore Management University) find that improving on your own past (higher wages or education than your parents or than ten years ago) does little for happiness unless you are doing at least as well as others now.
The exit is to step off the treadmill: define in advance how much is enough and build your lifestyle around it. The best time to set that level is before wealth arrives, when the baseline needed for security is easiest to see.
Casey Crawford's finish line
Casey Crawford grew up in a small Maryland neighborhood outside Washington, DC; his father ran a hardware store in Southeast DC, and the family had little but much love. At six foot six and over 250 pounds he excelled at football and baseball: drafted by the Atlanta Braves out of high school, then tight end at the University of Virginia, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers (where he won a Super Bowl) and the Carolina Panthers. As an NFL rookie he earned more than his family ever had and sought counsel from an adviser at Ronald Blue Trust on managing wealth in line with his faith (he bought the firm in 2021 and renamed it Blue Trust). After football he founded Movement Mortgage in 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, aiming for a more redemptive financial system than the one collapsing around him. As money poured in faster than in football, he feared his competitive nature would treat wealth as a scoreboard. So he set a net-worth cap beyond which he would keep nothing more for himself, a modest goal for a rich man, reached within a few years. He now invests in his employees and directs all further wealth to charity, chiefly the public charter schools of Movement Schools; his vision is that everything beyond Movement's capital requirements is reinvested in communities. He pre-answered "How much is enough?" and held to it as his wealth outgrew his dreams.
Coleman admits a modest finish line looks odd in a world where a tech mogul built a yacht too big for Europe's canals and the rich buy islands and sports teams. Why would someone good at making money set a limit, and how?
How to set your finish line
- Choose the form. Either a total net-worth goal or an annual living-expenses and lifestyle goal.
- Use benchmarks. Cody and Kealan Hobelman's Finish Line Pledge asks people to commit to an annual expense target, with calculators showing median, bottom-quartile or top-quartile spending for a household like yours; the Hobelmans themselves aim for the median.
- Size a net-worth target. One that sustains that standard permanently, perhaps with a little extra for dream purchases (a second home, a boat, private school).
- Consider the FIRE spectrum. The FIRE community (financial independence, retire early) on Reddit and elsewhere favors very modest lifestyles and high saving so people can leave work early; Fat FIRE allows richer lifestyles, yet even its goals are reachable in a country where 44% think they can become billionaires.
- List real costs. Bills, car payments, mortgage, children's schools or college, a reserve for medical and other emergencies, a reasonable vacation standard, and anything else needed for a comfortable family life.
- Price it and size the pot. Work out the yearly cost including savings, then set a finish line that sustains it from investment returns of about 4% a year.
- Get help. Coleman prefers doing this with a financial adviser who understands long-term costs and will hold you to your limits.
The number itself matters less than the commitment: the finish line varies with family, needs and aspirations. Its purpose is to pick the point at which you freeze your lifestyle, step off the accumulation and comparison treadmill, and turn to the intrinsic goods.
Then freeze your lifestyle
With the goal set, establish a lifestyle above which you won't creep. As people earn more they spend more: a Movado becomes a Rolex, a Miata becomes a "need" for a Porsche, the house grows, the vacations improve, and we match or beat our neighbors and peers. Many end up on the treadmill and damaging their financial stability as well: Coleman has seen a shocking number of seemingly wealthy people leasing exotic sports cars and carrying mortgages they cannot afford. The wiser path: know what you can afford, spend less than you make, and avoid the creep that tempts you to reset the finish line.
A 4% draw implies a finish line of about 25× annual spending. It comes from US historical market data (Bengen, 1994), assumes a long retirement-style horizon, and is debated: lower expected returns, higher fees or non-US markets argue for a more conservative rate. Treat it as the author's starting point, to be tested with a professional.
A finish line ends accumulation for yourself, not earning. Crawford kept building businesses and has given millions to schools, hope centers and other causes. Coleman invites readers to imagine turning from personal accumulation to earning to improve others' lives, and the character, engagement and relationships that could follow.
Mindset 3: Don't let money distract you from your callings
Frank Hanna's lake cottage
Frank Hanna, a successful Atlanta businessman and author of What Your Money Means: And How to Use It Well, decided with his wife to build a cottage on a nearby lake as a modest place to rest with family. A perfectionist, he was soon swallowed by the thousands of decisions a house involves, and realised this nice but unnecessary project was eating time he would otherwise give to his business, his community, friends and family, and the causes he supports. Nothing was wrong with the cottage itself; building it had become so consuming it pulled him from what made life meaningful.
Coleman confesses the same pattern on trivial and important purchases:
- T-shirts. He sometimes spends far too long online balancing cost and performance among thousands of options.
- Zillow. House-hunting, he became a Zillow obsessive, spending evenings in bed browsing homes, building purchase models, and researching neighborhoods and construction materials, until his wife declared a "Zillow Sabbath" to get him off the app.
Being thoughtful is fine: a durable shirt beats a flimsy one, and a safe home suited to the family was the biggest purchase decision they had made. The problem comes when money's uses become obsessions that take time from family, meaningful work or community. Like social media, which delivers brief dopamine hits while draining capacity for better things, thinking too much about money and its uses crowds out life's worthwhile pursuits.
Coleman concedes this is oversimplified. When his family lived in a single-wide trailer, more money for health care, food, education and transport really would have helped (and eventually did), and constant insecurity carried its own mental toll. But people who come into too much money often spend so long defending or spending it that they lose time for their real callings. Like Hanna, they get so caught up in using money perfectly that they neglect the work that created it; Coleman has seen this distract some of the most talented people he knows from their positive impact.
- Lost time. Are you missing family and friends, failing to work purposefully or to serve, because you are fretting over a house, car or other purchase?
- Displaced priorities. Are you deprioritising something important because you are thinking about or researching something you want to buy?
- Possessions as drains. Is a nice but unnecessary good (a second home, a car) eating time you wish went to something more purposeful?
- Response. If so, reevaluate the thing bought or wanted, talk it over with a spouse, partner or trusted friend, and judge objectively whether the obsession is causing needless anxiety and pulling you from relationships or the work you feel called to.
Mindset 4: Stop equating your worth with your net worth
Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu was born on 26 August 1910 in what is now North Macedonia, then under Ottoman rule, to poor, deeply religious ethnic Albanian parents. At twelve she felt called to be a missionary, and at eighteen she joined an Irish order, the Sisters of Loreto. The young woman from Skopje was sent almost at once to a Loreto school in Kolkata, where she taught high school for seventeen years in one of the poorest cities on earth. Taking her religious name in honor of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, she became Mother Teresa. In 1948, with her order's support, she left the convent walls for the most desperate slums in India; two years later (1950) she founded the Missionaries of Charity. By her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize it had more than 1,800 nuns, 120,000 lay workers, 80 centers in India and a presence in 100 other countries, running schools, orphanages, homes for people with Hansen's disease (leprosy) and hospices. She retired only in 1997, the year she died at 87, still in Kolkata.
The scale of need she faced, around 1948:
- Population. 358 million, up from 280 million twenty years earlier; the US had 146 million.
- Economy. Well over 10% of the world's people but only 3% of global GDP.
- Health and schooling. Childhood mortality above 25%; literacy around 12%.
- Kolkata. Nearly 4.5 million people, more than all of Ireland, where her order began; devastated in World War II, racked by hunger, disease and poor sanitation.
Mother Teresa went into the slums because her faith and intuition told her every human being is born equal in worth and dignity: a sick baby in a slum deserves love as much as the richest person alive. Whatever our usual yardsticks (success, wealth, fame, power), a person's real worth lies in their simple humanity. Her own life bore it out: a tiny, poor Albanian immigrant became one of the most admired women in history, with honorary degrees, global prizes and eventual beatification, not for wealth but for purposeful living and deep love with little regard for herself. She sought none of the accolades.
Few are called to her life, but the lesson holds: wealth does not determine worth. One reason so many faiths and traditions, including Stoicism and Buddhism, warn about wealth is that money, being quantifiable and able to buy luxury and power, easily becomes an obsession and a measure of our value, a quicksand that consumes us.
Money is still a wonderful tool. The Missionaries of Charity depended on people in other professions who funded the work; Mother Teresa and her sisters must have been grateful to the bankers and bakers who gave part of their pay. The mission needed both servants on the ground and supporters.
The danger is using money as a measuring stick for ourselves or others. Coleman has seen people grow insecure when their circles widen to include richer people, and others who are dismissive of those less wealthy; he admits slipping into both habits himself. Yet none of the richest people he has met will leave a legacy to match hers, and few will find her peace unless they learn to see others with the same dignity and respect.
Worth as net worth. Drives bad decisions, deep insecurity, and judging or disregarding others; dehumanises believers and too often justifies abusing those without means. And money can be taken away.
Worth as dignity. Every person's worth is intrinsic and inviolable, echoing the claim that all are created equal with unalienable rights; knowing this about yourself and others is liberating and encouraging.
Money can be taken away; human dignity cannot, and our worth is not our net worth, nor is anyone else's. Coleman closes by calling this a simple lesson championed by almost every serious belief system, yet a constant struggle to remember, and the heart of Good Money: a mindset that relegates material wealth to its proper place.
Earn with Purpose
Of the four things we do with money, earning takes by far the most time, so work is where purpose is most often won or lost. Coleman argues that optimizing a career for money fails on its own terms, that purpose is crafted rather than found, and that most jobs can become meaningful through craft, service and relationships; where they cannot, a weighted grid and a financial finish line make a well-judged move possible. There is no true success without significance, and significance can be built into almost any job, not only nonprofit work.
A model employer: the lineman school
If we never think about work as a way to benefit others and flourish ourselves, Coleman says, we miss the central chance to live with purpose and joy. His opening example is the Southeast Lineman Training Center (SLTC) in Trenton, Georgia, founded by George Nelson in 1999 to train people for line work. Line workers mostly maintain and repair overhead electrical lines, often in dangerous conditions; when a hurricane or blizzard knocks out power, they head into the storm. Every year brings images of parking lots packed with line trucks, as before Hurricane Milton in 2024, ready to keep everything from hospitals to homes running.
SLTC is now one of the most successful apprentice line-worker programs in the United States, co-led by David Powell and his brother-in-law P. J. Nardy. It is exemplary because it has turned training into a purpose-filled pursuit and so lets thousands earn a living with purpose.
The offer
- Who. Each class of aspiring line workers includes GED holders and military veterans.
- What. Fifteen weeks of field and classroom training, then placement with electric utilities and similar employers worldwide.
- Cost and payoff. Tuition is $22,995 (sometimes paid by a future employer); nearly all graduates get jobs averaging $94,000, against a US average salary of $63,795, at a time when many question the value of a four-year degree.
With a value proposition that strong the program could be bare-bones. Instead Nardy and Powell care about students' life success, wanting graduates both technically proficient and balanced and flourishing.
How SLTC builds purpose
- Heroic language. Mottos such as "Put it all on the line" and "Toward the storm" stress the profession's importance and acknowledge its risks.
- The theater. A campus movie theater shows professional-grade short films portraying line workers as the action heroes they are; a company store sells gear and swag carrying the mottos.
- Television. SLTC filmed a series, Woodwalkers, released on Amazon Prime, tracing the students' hero's journey.
- The draw. Powell says recruits want to make a difference: society runs on electricity, and electricity works because of people in the electrical trade.
Caring for the whole person
- Money skills. The curriculum includes life skills and financial management, because many students will soon out-earn everyone in their family at a very young age, and SLTC wants them to steward it well.
- Community. Students are paired with local host families for housing and belonging while in town.
- Faith. There is a chaplain on campus.
Coleman's favorite feature is the "graduation and rodeo" at the end of each class, far more fun than a college commencement. Graduates bring friends and family, so hundreds or thousands attend a giant outdoor party with food, country music and classic rock, and contests in which graduates climb poles with eggs in their mouths to test finesse or perform simulated rescues of heavy human dummies. One mother said she had never seen anything like it.
Nardy and Powell draw purpose from helping others gain financial freedom and belonging. Graduate Sean O'Connor calls SLTC one of the best decisions of his life: you get out what you put in, and he put in everything. Instructor Justin Marro, who drifted through school unsure of himself, says becoming a lineman brought joy and paid back many times over; the lineman world is small and family-like despite long hours, and he ends each day grateful to come home knowing he provides a good life. He would do it all again.
Most people lack a workplace like that and resign themselves to never finding one. They work for the money, and whether middle manager or millionaire owner, find money does not make them happy without purpose. Coleman calls this an existential problem, which is why a book on financial flourishing must address earning.
Our crisis of purpose
The world is richer, safer and healthier than ever, yet people are not happier or flourishing more, and much of that traces to the lack of purpose many feel at work.
The evidence
Gallup, which runs perhaps the most comprehensive global surveys of emotion, reported in its 2024 Global Emotions report that its composite negative-experience index stayed near all-time highs despite a small improvement in 2023. Prosperity has grown; happiness and life satisfaction have not.
The countries leading in negative emotion are the expected ones, such as Afghanistan and Sierra Leone, suffering violent conflict or extreme poverty. But the positive-emotion leaders are not rich nations: they are Indonesia, Mexico, Paraguay and the Philippines. The pattern matches Chapter 1: without enough money, health or safety, life is truly worse; past a threshold, what you do with money and how you shape your life matter most.
Real-world data reinforce the surveys: an unprecedented rise in mental illness and deaths of despair (suicide, alcohol and drug abuse). A recent global mental-health study documented soaring anxiety, substance abuse and depression, worsened by Covid-19 spikes, on top of decades of rising loneliness and isolation. Most troubling, most people lack meaning in the place they spend most of their time: work.
- Trade-off. Nine in ten people would trade money for more meaningful work.
- Engagement. Only about 15% of employees worldwide feel engaged: three in any group of twenty. More Americans still carry a checkbook.
- US ranking. Asked about sources of meaning, Americans ranked jobs and careers below caring for pets and reading.
- Pew, 17 advanced economies (spring 2021). In no country does a majority cite work as a significant source of meaning; the overall median is 25%, the US 17%, and South Korea just 6%.
As a leader, Coleman calls these results catastrophic. Leaders should build cultures where people leave more joyful and motivated than they arrived; instead most leave disengaged and demotivated. Many forces make people less happy, more stressed and lonelier than twenty years ago, but lack of purpose at work looks central.
A self-check
Coleman asks readers: Do you feel disengaged or unable to find meaning in your work? Are you lonely, isolated, stressed or demotivated? Does work bring satisfaction, or do you resent it as a necessary evil for financial goals? If so, you may be earning without purpose, holding a job without building meaning into it.
Most of us badly want the one-third of life spent at work to matter to others and help us flourish, and leaders should want that for everyone they are responsible for. The good news: the problem is very solvable for individuals and companies. The fix starts with accepting that optimizing a career for money does not work; however much we make, money as the goal falls short of joy. Then we can sow purpose into our work, as Nardy and Powell do, and make choices that lead to a meaningful life, not just a financially successful one.
Don't take a job just for the paycheck
Coleman's false start
After college Coleman was fixated on financial security. Like many who knew insecurity as children, he was paranoid about having too little, convinced he could do almost anything if the reward was right, and that belief plus perfectionism nearly derailed him. He interviewed at the "right" places (investment banks, consulting firms, investment funds) despite a typical liberal-arts degree and a taste for old books, and took a job at a quantitative energy trading firm: working out how to trade transmission rights and building the algorithms and programs to do it. He had never programmed and was above average at math but no savant. The pay was right and the offer in hand.
He was wrong. He stresses it was no fault of the firm: some colleagues loved the work and excelled. For months he put in 12-plus-hour days, read programming books and math textbooks, struggled with basic tasks his colleagues found easy, and found the culture more introverted than he was, with no formal training. He hated every minute, found learning to program so joyless he could not focus, and constantly failed, hopelessly behind the computer-science and physics majors around him. He resigned, one of the hardest, scariest and most demoralising moments of his life. The firm graciously let him work in its consulting arm until he joined McKinsey & Company, a much better match for his passions and talents.
His lesson, which he says he must relearn every year: even when the money is right, without passion and purpose you will never excel or truly flourish. Those months grinding for a paycheck were among the most miserable of his life, at work and away from it.
Why chasing pay damages us
We cannot do just anything for money, even work we are technically good at, as burned-out lawyers and bankers attest; trying damages the soul. The Harvard Grant Study, the oldest longitudinal study of its kind, has followed male Harvard graduates for decades; in Triumphs of Experience some of the saddest cases are men who chased far more wealth than they needed and broke their families, friendships and spirits. Coleman sees the same in dozens of companies and among friends: from those just getting by to those piling up wealth that becomes central to their identity, many feel resigned to cashing a paycheck without living with purpose, the habit that feeds the wider crisis.
Worse, the earning treadmill never stops, especially for the wealthy. Money becomes an easy scoreboard, and a vicious cycle starts: someone who sacrifices health, relationships, experiences and love for money struggles to face those failures and leans ever harder on the one quantifiable thing that says they have made it, net worth. It is never enough, and people who treat money as an end grow self-conscious and make bad decisions chasing goals that stay just out of reach.
Coleman's saddest example involves a former head of his old firm, as told in the press and courts. Born in Kolkata, Rajat Gupta was orphaned before eighteen when his mother and his journalist father died early. He won a place at the fiercely competitive Indian Institute of Technology, then Harvard Business School, and joined McKinsey's New York office in 1973. In 1994 he was elected managing director (CEO), the first non-American in the post, and was reelected in 1997 and 2000, serving the maximum three terms. McKinsey then had almost mythic stature and Gupta had access to more CEOs than perhaps anyone alive; he was paid, by some estimates, $5-10 million a year, was among the first Indians to lead a major multinational, and advised India's prime minister, the UN secretary-general and members of the World Economic Forum. After McKinsey he joined the boards of Procter & Gamble and Goldman Sachs. Then, per the book, in March 2009 the SEC filed an administrative civil insider-trading complaint against Gupta, hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam and another McKinsey partner, Anil Kumar; it was later dropped, but US attorney Preet Bharara charged and arrested Gupta. He allegedly passed board information that let Rajaratnam make more than $20 million in extra returns. A jury convicted him of securities fraud and he was sentenced to two years in prison. He maintains his innocence and says he did not profit.
Assuming the verdict is right, why would a man of such wealth and power risk everything? Coleman does not claim to know Gupta's mind, but he has seen similar, legal, behavior many times: money and status are never enough. A millionaire beside a centimillionaire, or a centimillionaire beside a billionaire, feels inadequate; seeing a scoreboard that says they are losing, they try to catch up or impress whoever is ahead, whether hedge-fund manager, CEO or small-business owner. Treat money as an end and its pursuit becomes endless and can destroy what matters.
- Gupta timeline. The book dates the SEC complaint to March 2009 and the criminal charge to 2010. The public record has the SEC administrative action in March 2011, the indictment in October 2011, conviction in June 2012 and sentencing in October 2012. (Rajaratnam's own arrest was in 2009.)
- Engagement figure. The 15% comes from Gallup's older State of the Global Workplace data; later editions put global engagement at roughly 20-23%, still low, so the point survives but the number has moved.
The opposite choice
Some people's sense of flourishing lets them turn away from large sums for meaningful work; Nardy and Powell regularly give up a little short-term shareholder value to invest in meaning for their students. Coleman has invested alongside Kelly Merryman Hoogstraten, a leading voice in media. She was VP of content acquisition at Netflix and VP of content partnerships at YouTube, roles at the top of her field that brought real financial success, after earlier work at Sony Pictures. She had worked through three transformations: Sony in the first days of digital home entertainment, Netflix's shift from DVDs to streaming, and YouTube's global expansion that needed partnership terms fair to both rights holders and platform.
Yet something was missing. Uneasy with values glorified in much entertainment and wanting content she could share with her young children, she took a major pay cut to join Wonder Project, a startup founded by filmmaker Jon Erwin. Its mission, which she helped write, is to entertain the world with courageous stories that inspire hope and restore faith in things worth believing in, with family-friendly, cross-generational stories of love, hope, joy and optimism. The venture has upside but real risk she did not need to take if optimizing for money. Her own summary: after building so much and managing hundreds of people, her "achievement cup was full," her purpose cup less so; building a mission-driven company from scratch has been the most fulfilling work of her career.
Aim for success with significance
If not money, what should a career optimize for? In 1995 Bob Buford's bestseller Halftime popularised moving "from success to significance" in life's second half. Buford saw businesspeople reach material success and find happiness and purpose lacking, and he rightly urged them to seek meaning and impact later in life.
Coleman thinks the framing, though well meant, is now misused. It was meant to help people who had piled up money, power, status and achievement redeploy their time and talent to serve others; but some read it as saying professional success and a meaningful life are mutually exclusive, or must come in sequence. In reality, there is no success without significance.
The evidence converges: Bronnie Ware's The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, the Harvard Grant Study, Kahneman and Deaton on happiness and income, and almost every ancient religion and philosophy all show that few people at life's end care about money, fame or power as much as they expected, and nearly all regret too few meaningful relationships or too little meaning in work and life. From a decade of writing on purpose and investing in, advising or leading hundreds of companies, Coleman defines significance as purpose, service and meaningful relationships; success without it is not success at all, and it is never too early or too late to build it.
Few of us examine the mainstream idea of success before chasing it. We default to the world's material and financial trappings; we may choose a career by strengths or role models, but the job can swallow other meaningful parts of life, or we lose sight of why it mattered. Too often we chase raises, bonuses and promotions without asking why. Seligman's framing helps: flourishing includes accomplishment, but also meaning, positive emotions, engagement and relationships, a fuller definition that points away from the path popular culture champions.
Crafting your purpose
In the HBR Guide to Crafting Your Purpose Coleman argues a flourishing life draws purpose from many sources: meaningful love, avocations, beauty, a worthy occupation, religious or philosophical beliefs, and service to others.
- When to reflect. Often best at a life transition: graduation, marriage, having children, divorce, weighing a new job, or at or before retirement; also to rejuvenate a stale career.
- Who should reflect. Not just the young; do it throughout a career and life.
- What it requires. Not necessarily a new job: often you can identify the latent sources of meaning in your current work, emphasise them and adapt the role.
- What is the core purpose of my work, how does it make the world better, and how can I lean into that purpose day to day?
- Where are purpose and meaning lacking in my work today, and how might I correct that?
- Who are my key relationships, inside and outside work, and how can I deepen and enrich them?
- Whom am I serving, at work and beyond, and what more can I do at work, at home and in my community?
- How am I getting better each day, and how can I pursue meaningful craft personally or professionally?
People who wait until life's second half to ask these questions often find decades on an emptier course have reduced what they can achieve, but it is never too late. The change might be seeing work differently, investing in better relationships, deepening service, taking up worthwhile avocations, or a bigger shift of profession, location or lifestyle. Whatever it is, it starts with stopping now to take stock of whether your path leads where you want to go, whether you are fifteen, twenty-five or fifty-five.
Make your job more meaningful
The question Coleman could not answer
In 2011 Coleman wrote a leadership book with Oliver Segovia and Daniel Gulati while all three were in business school. Their generation had just watched a run of leadership failures: the dot-com bubble, Enron and related scandals, terrorism, two major wars and the global financial crisis. The book covered globalization, diversity and other trends, but its red thread was the generation's hunger for meaning and purpose at work, having seen where optimizing for wealth and power at all costs led. They called it Passion & Purpose because nearly every leader they interviewed wanted both.
At his very first talk on the book, a young woman asked the most obvious question: "How do I find my purpose?" Despite three years of graduate school including leadership classes, hundreds of lectures by successful leaders, consulting work for nearly a dozen companies, and a book with purpose in its title, he was totally unprepared. He cannot recall his answer (he jokes he has repressed it) but knows it satisfied no one. Over the next five years of talks, work with hundreds of leaders and articles for HBR, he concluded the question itself was flawed, because it rests on three assumptions.
The myths. Purpose is found: a pot of gold at the rainbow's end, the hero's journey in which we wander until we stumble on the one thing, with the fear we will never be lucky enough. Purpose is a single thing: one big calling that moves us from emptiness to fulfillment. Purpose is stable: that one thing will fulfil us for fifty years or more.
Coleman's view. Purpose is largely made or crafted, not found. We have multiple sources of purpose at any time, and building a web of purpose is what lets us flourish. Purpose changes over time: it looks different for a college student, a new entrant, a middle manager, someone at their career peak, and someone transitioning gracefully to lighter work.
In hindsight these ideas look intuitive, and they match how most people actually live; but failing to recognise them consciously breeds anxiety and drift. Two questions follow even in a money book: if money cannot be the main goal of purposeful work, what can? And if meaningful work can be crafted, how?
Four practices for meaningful work
Coleman names at least four practices, each of which makes you happier at work and more likely to succeed financially too.
- Craft your work. Job crafting means tweaking a role to make it more engaging, fulfilling or fun: taking the raw material of the job, spending more time on what you find most rewarding while making the whole job more useful to others; "taking the job you have and making it the job you want." The secret: it often brings greater engagement and better financial outcomes.
- Make work a craft. Take pride in excellence and become expert at whatever you do, whether sales, spreadsheet models, product design or architecture; people who perfect a craft are usually rewarded personally and financially.
- Connect your work to service. Research shows we are happiest serving others, and everyone serves someone: client-facing staff serve clients, technologists serve colleagues, managers serve those under their authority, and all of us work for someone (family, parents, friends, causes). Mining each day for chances to serve creates more value and brings fulfilment and success.
- Invest in positive relationships. Few things matter to happiness and meaning as much; study after study finds people embedded in positive relationships more fulfilled. Work relationships differ from personal ones but are essential to fulfilment at work, relationships outside work buttress everything, and a web of good relationships with clients, colleagues and vendors advances financial goals. Good relationships are both right and good business.
The craftsman example is James Wessel, who leads a fire-truck company in Coleman's portfolio. He eats, sleeps and breathes fire trucks and firefighters: he has worked as a mechanic on hundreds of trucks, seems to know every small-town fire department in the US, and has memorised every model. At a conference in Washington, DC, he began texting Coleman at 3:00 a.m. because a fire had broken out nearby and he had run out of his hotel to watch the crews and their equipment. He aims to be the best at everything he does and is, Coleman says, the best in the world at his job.
Coleman's core proposition: dispelling the myths and practising these four habits lets you earn with purpose while potentially earning more; most jobs can be meaningful if we make them so, and you do not necessarily need to leave yours.
Elise, the executive assistant who rebuilt her job
Elise joined Coleman's firm straight from college as executive assistant to him and his partner, a demanding, sometimes tedious role: hard calendars, people who are not always kind, and bosses with bad days. She has both excelled in the role and transformed it, using all four practices.
- Treating the job as a craft. She perfected the core duties: learned the neighborhoods they lived in and their preferred lunch spots, studied the people they dealt with most and their priorities and preferences, researched and implemented better technology, and approached every task with detail and excellence.
- Crafting the job. In a small firm there is opportunity for anyone who takes it. Gifted at hospitality and events, she volunteered to run the firm's major summit for its most important clients, a sensitive job, with Coleman sponsoring. She was meticulously prepared and, on the day, a "field general" with maturity beyond her tenure, escorting CEOs, major investors and a former US vice president. Many attendees called it one of the best events they had attended. She describes always looking for ways to be creative and proactive, asking what would be most helpful and what is coming around the corner to get ahead of.
- Service. She frames scheduling and event work as service: focusing on the people she helps gives purpose to long hours and monotonous tasks. She loves lifting administrative burdens so leaders can work hard and still make family dinner.
- Relationships. She invests in every teammate and key client, becoming a friend and treasured colleague, carries a joy that spreads, owns mistakes and stays calm under pressure, and serves even people she does not work for directly.
Not every assistant could or would do this, but Elise has made the role one of the most impactful in the firm. Coleman's conclusion: jobs should be about more than money, every job can be purposeful with the right mindset, and we should never waste the chance to craft meaning into our work.
Explore meaningful change (if needed)
Almost any job can be meaningful if crafted, since every job offers craft, service and relationships. Sometimes, though, we have exhausted the meaning in a profession and need a better-suited environment. A change may bring financial trade-offs (starting over in a new field, launching a company, moving to nonprofit or government work), but past a certain earnings or wealth threshold those should take a back seat to intrinsic motivations, and the leap can pay large dividends in purpose.
Anand Kesavan and the Equitable Facilities Fund
Coleman met Anand Kesavan at the Harvard Kennedy School; both were building finance careers and shared a passion for public education. Kesavan was a successful investment banker at UBS on government and nonprofit deals, then helped lead public-finance banking for K-12 schools at another firm. He had already crafted purpose into grueling, money-focused work; but feeling he was not as committed to the cause as he could be, he reshaped his whole life around it.
- Step 1. Left banking to become CFO of the charter network KIPP Texas-Austin, working directly with schools.
- Step 2. Joined the respected Charter School Growth Fund to lead its structured finance capability, pushing further into purpose regardless of personal financial cost.
- Step 3. Became a social entrepreneur to tackle charter schools' hardest problem: facilities funding.
The problem: charter schools are public schools, often serving more diverse and disadvantaged students than nearby district schools, but their funding formulas differ by state and typically give only partial federal, state and local funding per student. In almost no state do they receive full facilities funding, yet buildings can cost $15 million or more. Founders must raise outside money or pinch pennies elsewhere to cover leases and purchases with no student-based revenue for it. A charter-school bond market emerged to provide cheaper debt, but it rarely funded a building's full cost or at affordable rates.
Kesavan's solution, the Equitable Facilities Fund (EFF):
- First-loss philanthropy. He raised philanthropic capital from groups such as the Walton Family Foundation to absorb first losses, letting schools obtain better rates and more funding in bond markets.
- Diversified pools. He raised enough to pool many school facilities into single bond issues; markets prefer a pool of twenty high-quality schools to one, because diversification lowers the risk of loss.
- Result. EFF has raised more than $1 billion, cutting facilities costs for charter schools nationwide so more money goes to teachers and instruction and kids get better classrooms.
Fit differs by person
You need not go into education or quit a lucrative career to create change. The diversity of people mirrors the diversity of work: Coleman has met miserable investment bankers and bankers who loved their clients, teachers who found their calling and teachers who realised it was not for them. He once worked with a smart, hardworking man who loved stocking shelves at a major grocer; offered a promotion, he declined, because he loved the craft (finding efficiencies, learning every SKU, helping customers) and knew the added responsibilities would destroy that joy.
Some jobs suit you better than others. Coleman acknowledges that changing careers can be a luxury: many cannot leave because of the financial hardship, and crafting is their only option. If you do have options and security (even with some belt-tightening), think it through carefully. A more meaningful job may be within the same company and may involve no financial trade-off; sometimes the change is dramatic, as Kesavan's was. Mentors and friends can expose you to options, internships or classes let you test them, but choosing well rests on brutally honest self-understanding.
The weighted career grid (Table 3-1)
In 2020, while writing a book on purpose, Coleman felt increasingly disenchanted and out of place at a very large company and decided on a dramatic change. To guide it he built a grid: job traits in one column, a weight for each beside it, and scores for each opportunity (the published version alters some categories and weights).
| Characteristic | Weight | Opp. 1 | Opp. 2 | Opp. 3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prestige | 10% | 7 | 6 | 6 |
| Financial upside | 10% | 7 | 5 | 10 |
| Culture | 10% | 8 | 8 | 5 |
| Challenge | 5% | 8 | 9 | 5 |
| Adventure | 10% | 5 | 8 | 5 |
| Flexibility | 10% | 8 | 9 | 5 |
| Leadership opportunities | 5% | 8 | 7 | 4 |
| Mentorship | 5% | 8 | 7 | 5 |
| Growth opportunity | 10% | 8 | 8 | 6 |
| Merit based | 10% | 7 | 6 | 4 |
| Ability to use talents | 10% | 6 | 8 | 8 |
| Interesting, changing environment | 5% | 6 | 8 | 8 |
| Total (as printed) | 100% | 86 | 89 | 71 |
| Average (as printed) | 7.2 | 7.4 | 5.9 |
The printed totals and averages are unweighted sums and means of the raw scores, so the weights never enter. Applying them gives roughly 7.1, 7.35 and 6.0: the same ranking here, but in other grids the difference could flip a decision. Multiply each score by its weight.
Other things mattered too: he needed the skills and experience to succeed (though with a step back in pay and title he could relearn a profession through hard work), and the work had to be available. Still, the grid helped him think options through with his wife, who even offered to change their lifestyle to give him room to pursue work he loved. He moved to a smaller, values-aligned firm with more financial risk but more autonomy, entrepreneurship, financial upside, values alignment, hands-on work and fun. It ticked almost every box, so the short-term trade-off was easy, and if the firm succeeded it would not last.
- Set it up. Use a notepad or spreadsheet laid out like Table 3-1.
- List what matters. The job characteristics you care about, ten to fifteen or fewer.
- Weight them. Give each a percentage, totalling 100%.
- Get input, narrowly. Ask people who know you well but keep the circle tight (Coleman shared full details only with his wife and best friend, and spoke more generally with mentors) and be brutally honest; never shade categories or weights for fear of judgment.
- Score widely. Rate different opportunities, even radically different ones, and look for surprises where certain jobs, companies or fields stand out.
- Include your current job. Check whether it is structurally misaligned or could be rejuvenated less radically.
- Keep tuning. Adjust the grid as you learn about yourself.
Craft first, and don't let money lock you in
Coleman's consistent advice to people struggling to earn with purpose is to craft your current work first: make sure a change of mindset, responsibilities or position cannot fix it before doing something drastic. Sometimes you are in the wrong job, or the right field at the wrong company. A thoughtful search is also a chance to ask how much wealth you really need: targeting only roles that pay as much as or more than your current one may cut you off from something remarkable. Leading a smaller firm, he constantly meets people who know they are unhappy but insist they need their current income; the inertia of their finances and unwillingness to take risk or change lifestyle make a better career impossible.
Do not let your finances lock you in. With a financial finish line and a modest lifestyle (the subject of the next chapter), you see clearly what you actually need; if your lifestyle has crept beyond that, you can always change it. Anchor on the income that lets you and your family flourish, not on your current income, and beyond that weigh the more intrinsically meaningful parts of the work.
Nonprofits aren't the only path to purpose
Many people assume real purpose requires a nonprofit. Coleman calls this the mirror-image error: one group thinks maximizing pay maximizes purpose, the other that purpose means earning less. Sometimes you can have both.
The world needs teachers, social workers and international aid administrators, and it also badly needs neurosurgeons, auto mechanics, tech entrepreneurs and nurses. Each can be deeply purposeful for the right person without financial sacrifice: nursing pays well and matters enormously to patients; entrepreneurs found companies that change the world for the better; top Hollywood actors and directors are well paid yet can tell uplifting stories to millions. Their pay does not diminish their impact, and as a bonus they can give back and lift up others pursuing their dreams.
Kazuo Inamori
Kazuo Inamori, born in 1932 in Kagoshima and raised amid war and poverty, is a titan of postwar Japan.
- Kyocera. In 1959 he founded the company that became Kyocera, making products such as television tubes and silicon transistor headers; it grew to more than 70,000 employees.
- KDDI. In 1984 he founded what became KDDI, Japan's second-largest telecom company.
- Kyoto Prize. Also in 1984 he created the Kyoto Prize, honoring extraordinary contributions to science, civilization and the human spirit.
- Philosophy. Rooted in Zen Buddhism, his management style stressed optimism and self-confidence grounded in reality and kindling passion and purpose in employees.
Among his twenty maxims, paraphrased: a clear, pure mind senses positive energy while a selfish heart sees chaos; rather than looking for a job you like, learn to like the work you already have and fall in love with the task in front of you; concentrate on one line and one industry, work hard without boredom or worry, and your life will flower and bear fruit; and "the colder the winter, the more open the cherry blossoms": without suffering and trouble, people rarely develop greatly or find true happiness.
In 1997 he became a lay priest at Empukuji Temple in Kyoto, leaving business behind, a living example of purpose shifting over time across business, philanthropy and religious life. Yet he never accepted a wall between business and personal life: in 2010, at seventy-seven, he left the temple when the Japanese government asked him to rescue bankrupt Japan Airlines, which he led back to profit and a 2012 relisting (he died in 2022). His companies gave hundreds of thousands of people meaningful work, his philanthropy drove change in other sectors, and his religious practice anchored his worldview. Like Casey Crawford and Kelly Merryman, he showed that great purpose is possible in almost any work.
Conclusion: money as a sign of contribution
Coleman's estimate: 90% of the world's jobs can be made purposeful and socially useful in the right hands. He has enormous admiration for those who make real financial sacrifices in nonprofit work, public office and humanitarian charities, but not everyone is called to or suited for that path. Earning with purpose does not always mean earning less; optimizing for purpose may involve no trade-off and may instead mean getting comfortable with accumulating and using wealth the right way.
Money is a tool for creating opportunity. Its accumulation is not bad in itself and is often a sign of real contributions made through work. Since earning is how most of us bring money in, earning with purpose, in the private, public or nonprofit sector, is a central part of making money good. Never wait for success to pursue significance: there is no true success without it, and with the right mindset it can be found in almost any profession.
Consume Wisely
Spending is the category that most decides whether money turns good or bad in a life: buy the wrong things and each purchase breeds new wants; buy too much and debt leaves you serving money instead of it serving you. Coleman's five habits are to spend less than you make, buy experiences rather than stuff, direct discretionary money to health, time and relationships, smash the possessions that have become idols, and simply consume less. Never let your net worth go negative: debt obligates your future self to pay for what you consume today.
A vision trip to Central America
A few years before writing, Coleman took his oldest son, then nine, on a one-week vision trip to a lower-income Central American country, organised through a foundation run by one of his business partners. The boy had never seen poverty beyond what is visible in a large US city. The trip had two strands:
- Prosthetics. They accompanied a nonprofit led by Brian Copes, who works with his high-school students to build simple, cheap prosthetic limbs for amputees in the developing world. Commercial prosthetics often cost tens of thousands of dollars, out of reach for most people on the planet. Where most work is manual, losing a leg or arm usually means losing the ability to earn; amputees often then lose their spouse, slide into poverty and lose hope. The nonprofit gives the limbs away free.
- Hope centers. They visited the churches and hope centers the foundation had set up to serve local communities, especially children, checking on progress and celebrating with singing, dancing, a cookout and toys.
At first the trip was hard on the boy. He cried at the crumbling, exposed homes and schools; he struggled to step off the bus to meet the first amputees; he asked why these children could not live as he did, and, hearing that many limbs were lost because medical care was too far away, he worried the same could happen to him. Then the shock wore off. He saw that the children were just like him inside, played soccer and sang with them without a common language, watched people who had been devastated walk for the first time in years, debriefed with the group each evening and fed the iguanas that visited their rental house. Coleman's verdict: the trip cost money, but its return was beyond calculation.
The broader point opens the chapter. Lives and relationships are defined by experiences (Little League games, hikes, honeymoons, semesters abroad, service trips, theme parks, pilgrimages), while phones, cars and clothes rarely leave a lasting mark.
Why spending decides so much
People work to pay for necessities (food, housing, transport, medical care) and then layer discretionary purchases on top. Coleman argues that almost no category shapes whether money is a good or bad force in a life more than spending does:
- Spend on the wrong things and the outlays simply breed further insecurity, needs and wants.
- Spend too much and you can be crippled by debt and deeply unstable.
- Spend on the right things at the right level and money funds some of the most memorable moments of your life.
The chapter's principles follow from this: choose experiences over stuff; recognise that the best experiences need not be expensive and are best shared; live within your means; and refuse to tie spending to status. Before any of that, Coleman explains the psychology that makes overspending so tempting: hedonic adaptation.
Why spending more doesn't make us happier
Two lottery stories
Keith Gough, Shropshire. A baker of modest means, Gough and his wife Louise won a £9 million (about $16.4 million) lottery prize. They quickly tried to buy everything they had ever wanted: he bought and bet on racehorses, acquired luxury cars and took an executive box at Aston Villa football club. Within two years the couple's 25-year marriage was over. He developed an alcohol problem and eventually died alone, the windfall gone. He later told a British newspaper that his life had been brilliant before, but the lottery had ruined everything, and asked what money was for if it sent you to bed in tears.
William "Bud" Post III, Pennsylvania. In 1988 Post won a $16 million Pennsylvania jackpot while living on disability benefits with $2.46 in the bank. He chose an annual payout of nearly $500,000, spent $300,000 in two weeks and was $500,000 in debt within three months, while a former girlfriend sued him for a third of the winnings. Over the following years he bought several homes, a luxury sailboat, a twin-engine plane he could not fly, many cars and trucks and assorted luxuries. His brother hired a hit man to kill him (the attempt failed). He was convicted of assault for firing a gun at a debt collector and served 24 months in prison. He died in 2006, concluding he had been much happier broke.
Coleman says he dislikes telling too many cautionary tales (both men have since died), but money sometimes needs vivid examples of the damage it can do; its love and misuse can be the root of all kinds of evil, and it can wreck lives startlingly fast. His aim is not to mock Gough or Post but to admit that most of us would react the same way, our psychology torn apart by the problems that come with wealth, especially sudden riches.
The numbers on sudden wealth
- Lottery winners. One well-known study found almost one-third bankrupt within three to five years; stories of despair seem to outnumber stories of success.
- NFL players. A Sports Illustrated article claimed 35% are bankrupt or in financial distress within two years of retirement, with a very large share of NBA, NFL and MLB players distressed within five years.
- Conservative estimate. The National Bureau of Economic Research found about 16% of NFL players bankrupt within 12 years of retirement.
- Baseline. Only 0.12% of ordinary Americans go bankrupt per year, despite far lower earnings than pro athletes.
Coleman concedes the athlete figures are disputed because the data are opaque, but the pattern holds across celebrities and their heirs who get hooked on luxury or drugs. Jim Carrey once said everyone should get rich and famous and live out every dream, just to learn that it is not the answer.
The mechanism is simple. Sudden wealth is dangerous unless you cap your lifestyle, because it is easy to overspend now without grasping the limits of future earnings:
- Lottery winners spend as if they have $10 million today, rather than $10 million that must last a lifetime.
- Athletes match their annual spending to their annual pay, forgetting that careers may end in a few years.
- Lawyers, dentists, IT consultants and other high earners face the same temptation; it simply unfolds more slowly because their careers are longer.
When people define their lives through material things, Coleman says, they lose sight of their true value.
The "one-third of winners bankrupt" figure circulates widely but is thinly sourced. Better evidence is mixed: a Florida study (Hankins, Hoekstra and Skiba, 2011) found that winners of moderate prizes mostly delayed bankruptcy rather than avoided it, while large Swedish lottery studies found winners generally better off financially and more satisfied with life years later. The NBER athlete estimate (16% within 12 years) is the most solid number Coleman gives. The cautionary tales are real; their typicality is debated.
Hedonic adaptation and the treadmill
What drives these lifestyle escalations is hedonic adaptation, defined in the research as the reduction in affective intensity of both favourable and unfavourable circumstances. People adapt to change remarkably fast, and once adapted, the new situation becomes their baseline. Coleman stresses that this flexibility has real upsides:
- Resilience. It is why people can live bravely through war or famine, and why people in poor countries often rate their happiness above people in rich ones.
- Contentment. It is why Coleman and his wife were so happy in their first cramped apartment, though going back to it now would be hard.
- Achievement. Once we reach a goal we set a new one, which keeps us working, exercising or practising an art.
It also has a dark side: the disillusionment felt by those who reach the top of their field and find nowhere left to climb, a known hazard for astronauts and professional athletes that can lead to serious psychological problems.
The same impulse makes people uniquely vulnerable to wealth when they use it carelessly to acquire stuff, or worse, to chase new highs through drugs and other harmful pleasures. That is the hedonic treadmill: the general fact of adaptation, plus the danger that we adapt to every new pleasure and always want more. A new home, even a dream home, soon feels normal; we start noticing its flaws or envying a friend's slightly bigger house. A long-wished-for car is barely in the driveway before we start dreaming of the next one. Like drug users chasing a fix, we find each purchase's high fades quickly. How much land is enough? A little more. How much stuff? A little more.
This is why there is little relation between prosperity and happiness at either the national or the personal level. Spending on stuff, Coleman writes, is a race with no finish line that can run you into the ground unless you consciously step off the treadmill. The rest of the chapter gives the habits for doing so.
Spend less than you make
A cautionary scandal
Early in Coleman's career, a man at a branch of the firm he worked for managed accounts for ultrahigh-net-worth clients. Dazzled by their wealth and status, though his own means were far smaller, he tried to copy their lives (cars, properties, vacations) by spending more than he had, borrowing from those trusting clients to fund it, sinking deep into debt to them, and finally taking his own life.
Coleman's principle: Money is good when it works for us and bad when we work for it. Owing money, or running expenses above income, means serving money, and many people now live to serve their next payment.
- Negative net worth. In 2019 the Aspen Institute estimated that over 10% of US households (13 million families) owed more than they owned.
- Net worth literacy. A Credit Karma survey found more than half of Americans cannot calculate their net worth and 30% have a net worth of $0 or less.
- Debt load (Pew Research Center). 54% of Americans hold secured debt (mortgages, car loans) and 56% of those households also carry unsecured debt such as card balances; the average household has a debt-to-assets ratio of 30% and a debt-to-annual-income ratio of 84%.
- Household debt. From just over $8 trillion in 2004 to nearly $18 trillion in 2024, mostly mortgages (the most understandable and safest kind), but auto loans total $1.6 trillion and credit cards (the most dangerous debt most people carry) exceed $1.1 trillion at nearly 23% annual interest.
- Student loans. Over $1.7 trillion, up from $0.5 trillion in 2006; the average graduate owes more than $40,000.
- Other countries. Data are thinner, but Canada, the UK, Sweden and Australia are even more indebted than the US.
- Bankruptcy. More than 450,000 Americans declared personal bankruptcy in 2023.
Some of this debt comes from bad luck, above all catastrophic medical bills. But Coleman judges that most of it is poor decision-making: spending money we do not have on things we do not need, attending an expensive private university for a degree that will not pay off, or buying electronics, clothes and even experiences we cannot afford, then paying close to 23% a year in card interest for those choices.
The countercultural rule: never let net worth go negative
Coleman calls his core advice radical and countercultural: never let your net worth go negative. The calculation is simple:
- Net worth = assets − liabilities. Assets are things like cash, investments, home and car; liabilities are things like credit-card balances, student loans and mortgage.
- Negative means borrowing from your future self. If liabilities exceed assets, you have committed your future self to pay for what you buy today, and debt interest makes a negative position a vicious cycle that is hard to escape.
Keeping assets above liabilities at all times creates flexibility and security. Coleman notes that, before modern credit markets for mortgages, college, private schools, cars and consumer goods, the advice never to owe more than you have would have sounded almost too obvious to say; for most of history people tried hard to avoid being debtors. Today many people live on debt, mainly because of two categories.
Category one: consumer credit
Credit cards let people buy what they cannot afford in the hope of paying later, while racking up double-digit interest that is hard to overcome. Plenty of books and programmes deal with getting out of this hole, so Coleman does not repeat them. His instructions are blunt:
- Carry no balance. If you hold a credit-card balance of any size, stop.
- The pay-period test. If you cannot fully pay for something (apart from a home or perhaps a needed car) within your current pay period, you probably should not buy it.
Category two: education debt
More controversially, Coleman says do not take on significant debt for education. He expects pushback, but argues that, in the US at least, almost nothing limits the financial futures of people under 40 more than student loans.
| Degree | Typical debt | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Undergraduate | $38,000-41,000 per borrower; about 43 million US borrowers | Expected average starting salary only $52,000 |
| Law (JD) | $130,000 on average | Only 80% go into law; median start $85,000 |
| Master's | $84,000 median | Debt often more than doubles versus a bachelor's |
| PhD | $126,000 median | Long training, uncertain payoff |
The averages hide big differences. The average student owes about $40,000, which is barely more than the entire tuition bill for a four-year state school; four-year private colleges cost almost three times as much. Some fields, such as engineering, pay new graduates far more than others. Overall, though, many people dig a near-insurmountable hole before their first job.
Coleman insists this is not a tirade against college: he went to a four-year private university, holds graduate degrees and sits on a private college's board of trustees. His objection is to the idea that borrowing for college is fine when you do not have to. Student loans are one of the main reasons so many Americans cannot build a positive net worth. His education rules:
- Only attend what you can pay for. Community college, state school or Ivy League, the principle is the same; affordability may come from savings, scholarships or a cheaper institution.
- Work through school. Work during term and summers to build stability. At his alma mater, Berry College, almost every student works on campus; Coleman worked seven of eight semesters, which built discipline and reduced financial need.
- Skip degrees you don't need, especially graduate ones. Many US students drift into grad school when unsure what else to do, often more than doubling their debt. Meanwhile people in the trades, who skip four-year degrees, often finish more than $140,000 ahead of four-year graduates by the time those peers graduate.
Debt-financed everything
Modern, especially American, society encourages debt for homes, education, cars, phones and furniture. Coleman grants that some of it makes sense: a home bought with an appropriate down payment is worth its debt and may appreciate, and a modest car needed for work can be sensible if it is within your means and you keep it long enough. But a habit of consuming only what you can afford now, even for big items like education, preserves the freedom of a positive personal balance sheet.
- Never let your net worth go negative. Keep assets above liabilities at all times.
- Pay off credit cards every month. No revolving balance, ever.
- Buy only what this pay period can cover. Exceptions: a home and possibly a needed car.
- Avoid significant education debt. Attend what you can afford, work through school, skip unneeded degrees.
- Cars: essentials only, cheap money only. Borrow only for an essential vehicle, at a low, reasonable rate (wait for 0% financing deals).
- Mortgages: big down payment, 20% rule. Borrow only with a down payment large enough that the home is always worth more than the loan, and keep the mortgage payment plus taxes and insurance at about 20% of gross income, with a cushion.
- Swear off "consume now, pay later." Spend less than you make, save, and do not dig a hole for your future self.
Sidebar: good debt
Coleman does not condemn all borrowing. Investors routinely use debt to fund what they could not otherwise afford (new equipment, new inventory, or simply cheaper capital to run a profitable, growing business with less cash), and individuals can do the same with a reasonably priced mortgage. Before borrowing, he suggests testing the loan against three principles, with student loans treated as a fourth, grey case.
| Principle | What Coleman means | Caveats he adds |
|---|---|---|
| Use debt that is asset-backed | A mortgage buys a house; with a down payment of 20% or more, the asset is worth more than the 80% borrowed from day one, and in a pinch you can sell it to repay the loan. Appreciating assets can turn the loan into a good investment. | House prices can fall by more than your down payment, as in the 2007-2010 crisis. A car needed for work may qualify, but cars lose value, so put more down and know its likely resale price. |
| Have the cash flow to cover payments | Debt obligates your future self, so be reasonably sure you can meet every payment and avoid distress or bankruptcy. A 0% car deal can beat paying cash if your investments grow faster than 0%; a small business can borrow for equipment that will drive revenue. | Always know the total cost of repayment, the consequences of default and the likelihood you can cover it. |
| Fund opportunity, not consumption | Homes, work cars and business loans aim to build income or buy an asset that may grow, which can raise flexibility over time. | Consumer debt is the most damaging kind: clothes or concert tickets on a card you cannot clear carry high interest with no asset behind them and signal living beyond your means. Furniture, phones and sweaters shrink flexibility. Use cash for consumption. |
| Student loans: a grey area | Education is a good investment, but students often misjudge both the payments and the career prospects that make repayment hard. Modest debt can occasionally make sense. | Estimate the total cost of the degree against the salary the field is likely to pay; if they do not match, pause and take a cheaper path. |
These rules assume American conditions: very high card APRs, $1.7 trillion of student debt and costly private universities. Elsewhere, income-contingent student loans (UK, Australia) behave more like a graduate tax than ordinary debt, and mortgage norms differ. Coleman's 20%-of-gross housing rule is stricter than the common 28% lending guideline, and the trade-school $140,000 advantage depends heavily on field and assumptions. Read them as one author's prudent guidance, not universal law.
Choose experiences, not stuff
The Andersons' three-year pilgrimage
Ike and Natalee Anderson, Jamaican-born and living in Palm Beach, Florida, took a DNA test that traced their lineage to 32 countries. They then made a radical choice: they sold many of their belongings and took their three young children on what was meant to be a one-year journey to see the world and explore their roots. They ran their marketing agency remotely, judging that trading some financial stability for shared experiences was worth the cost. Ike framed it as a question of legacy: leaving money to the children is fine, but travel, learning and an open mindset seemed a better inheritance.
- The route. They homeschooled on the road through places as different as Cancun (Mexico), Edinburgh (Scotland), Karnak (Egypt) and Bali (Indonesia).
- The outcome. The year stretched to 36 months, after which they settled in Ghana, which Natalee called their mission base for serving a cause larger than themselves. They built a business from it: organising similar pilgrimages for others, coaching and mentoring, and a Rite of Passage programme helping young adults of African ancestry experience the continent.
- Their advice. Natalee calls the exposure and family bonding priceless and urges even families who fear they will quarrel to try it, on the principle of moving toward your biggest fear.
Coleman grants that this is not for everyone: uprooting children is hard and even the Andersons eventually settled down. The point is the trade they made, giving up the material things people are told to prize and directing resources to meaningful experiences shared with others.
What lasts
Coleman asks readers to recall the purchases that brought real, lasting joy. His own were never jewellery, TVs, phones or gadgets but experiences: hunting for giraffes and monkeys at the zoo with his daughters, an outdoor concert with his wife and friends, fly-fishing with old classmates, and a San Diego to San Francisco road trip in a rented convertible during the winter break when he proposed to his wife. The moments were fleeting; unlike the objects, they have lasted a lifetime.
The research: Dunn and Norton
The evidence comes chiefly from Elizabeth Dunn (University of British Columbia) and Michael Norton (Harvard Business School), whose book Happy Money sets out five habits of happier spending; its very first chapter is "buy experiences." Their own and others' research shows that experiences make people happier than things, and that spending too heavily on material goods can make people less happy.
- Stuff disappoints. People expect new furniture or an outfit to lift their mood (hence "retail therapy"), but the evidence says shopping does not deliver, even for prized items like a dream home.
- Housing. Homeowners are no happier than renters, and better versus worse housing does not raise overall life satisfaction.
- Self-reports. 57% of Americans said experiential purchases made them happier than material ones; only 34% said the reverse. Experiences also tie into other parts of flourishing: well-being, health and relational connection.
- Social connection. It brings you together with other people.
- A story. It produces a memorable story you will enjoy retelling for years.
- Identity. It is tightly linked to who you are or want to become.
- Uniqueness. It is a one-off opportunity that resists easy comparison with alternatives.
Length is irrelevant. A month hiking the Appalachian Trail with a friend and an afternoon at the theatre with an ageing parent both qualify; so can a beach holiday, a concert, a Michelin-starred tasting menu or an equally good hole-in-the-wall.
Coleman, a former high-school basketball player, took his then 11-year-old son (newly playing in a league and a fan of Jayson Tatum, partly because the family had lived in Boston and his wife is from New England) to watch the Celtics try to close out the NBA Finals against the Dallas Mavericks with a 3-1 series lead. The family happened to be on holiday nearby. He paid more than he ever had for a sporting event. The boy sang, cheered and stood all game; father and son high-fived strangers as the home team dominated, waited for the confetti and trophies, then pushed out through thousands of fans. The son was asleep within five minutes of the drive home. On every Dunn and Norton test it scored: the deepest social connection, a story the boy retold daily for weeks, a link to their identity as lovers of the game and as father and son, and a once-in-a-lifetime event. Coleman judges it worth every penny.
Possessions, he concludes, never deliver the happiness they promise; adventure, experience, connection and memories do, and those priceless things are worth what they cost.
Spend on time, health and relationships
Experiences are not the only wise consumer spending, meaning spending on things that are not assets or investments. Coleman adds three more areas: health, time and relationships. They often overlap with experiences (a baseball game with your daughter is both an experience and relationship spending) but can also stand alone.
Health
Physical and mental health is one of Tyler VanderWeele's five domains of flourishing. Coleman says it is hard, though not impossible, to flourish without mental, physical and spiritual health, because they shape how we experience life and enable purposeful work and relationships. When money is available, wellness is usually the wise place to start. The backdrop is grim, especially in rich countries such as the US.
- Mental health. In 2019, 1 in 8 people worldwide (nearly 1 billion) had a mental-health condition such as anxiety, depression or PTSD, a figure that rose by as much as 30% during Covid-19.
- Lifetime risk. Half of all people will experience mental illness at some point; mental disorders account for over 14% of global deaths, and rates are more than double 1990 despite a safer, richer world.
- Spirit. Gallup's negative-emotions index fell in 2024 for the first time in a decade, yet the world is unhappier and lonelier than before; religious belief is stable globally only because of population growth in Africa, Latin America and Asia, while adherence has collapsed in North America and Europe.
- Activity. Over 80% of adolescents and nearly 30% of adults miss WHO physical-activity guidelines; inadequate exercise nearly doubled from 2000 to 2022.
- Weight. 43% of adults worldwide were overweight in 2022 (partly a triumph, as hunger falls), and obesity is tied to nearly 10% of deaths, likely an undercount given its role in heart disease, cancer and dementia (a link stressed by Peter Attia and Casey Means).
- United States. 42% of adults are obese and 74% overweight, a key reason US lifespan lags other rich countries and has plateaued; the gap between lifespan and health span (years lived in good health) has widened.
Coleman writes humbly here: many people live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford good medical care or fresh food. But many who can afford it still spend on poor food and consumer goods instead of choices that could transform their lives. His low-cost options:
- Fitness. A YMCA family membership is often the cheapest gym option locally and works at Ys across the US.
- Monitoring. Affordable devices such as the Oura Ring make people more aware of sleep, stress and activity.
- Food. Cut reliance on Uber Eats, DoorDash and restaurants; buying whole foods (fruit, vegetables, meat) at the grocery store costs less and is healthier.
- Mental health. Counselling is becoming cheaper and is often covered by insurance.
- Spiritual health. Membership of a local church, mosque or synagogue is free and offers both community and spiritual care.
- Learning. Read Blue Zones and Outlive, or listen to podcasts from Andrew Huberman or Peter Attia on habits, diet, exercise and supplements.
- Diagnostics. Tests these sources recommend, such as calcium scans and bone-density scans, give real data for managing health span and lifespan.
Many of these are free, insured, or cost less than one food delivery a month. Exercising, eating well, monitoring conditions, treating them early and tending mental and spiritual health form the foundation of a flourishing life: longer, happier, with less pain and more energy. Spending here, paired with the discipline to use it, usually pays off.
Time
In August 2017 Dunn, Norton and coauthors published "Buying Time Promotes Happiness" in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Against a backdrop of rising time scarcity (the harried, overcommitted feeling of modern life), people who paid to get rid of tasks they did not enjoy, such as housecleaning or yardwork, were happier. Norton and Ashley Whillans reviewed several studies in a Wall Street Journal piece arguing that spending money to save time makes you feel better, and the point reappears in Happy Money. Coleman finds the data helpful but the idea intuitive. He adds limits:
- Some chores are good. Folding laundry or gardening can be restful; others belong to children as part of growing up (a theme of chapter 8).
- Cost. Paying others to do the dishes, cook every meal, do the laundry and clean up after pets would be wonderful and unaffordable for nearly everyone. Private-jet users call their planes "time machines" for skipping security lines and connections, but they are out of reach for most.
- The rule. Where you can find the money to save time on something you dislike, even at the expense of other consumer spending, do it, especially if the time goes to relationships.
Two of Coleman's own choices show how this works:
Date nights. Early in their marriage, Coleman and his wife chose to give up material things for time together. With four young children, they aim for one date a week, usually cheap or free (a hike, a museum, even a grocery run with room to talk), but always requiring a babysitter. They buy cheaper clothes and cars to fund the childcare and have never regretted it.
The commute. Living in traffic-choked Atlanta, Coleman read research in 2017 showing that 20 extra minutes of commuting caused as much unhappiness as a 19% pay cut. Podcasts, audiobooks and hands-free calls soften the cost, but commuting time is still time away from family and meaningful work. When they moved in 2018, they paid a little more for a home 5 minutes from the children's school and 15 from his work, which made it easier to catch dance recitals and get home for family dinner.
Time is one of life's most precious goods, and savings are within reach for those who budget consciously: a monthly deep clean, an occasional babysitter to get out of the house, or grocery delivery. Spending a little to avoid what you dislike and free time for what you enjoy brings more fulfilment.
Relationships
Nothing drives fulfilment and flourishing as much as the depth and breadth of positive relationships. Seligman and VanderWeele say so, and it was the central finding of Harvard's Grant Study, summed up by its longtime director George Vaillant as happiness equalling love, full stop. Dunn and Norton stress experiences with others, not merely experiences:
- Better shared. The Grand Canyon is better with a spouse and kids; a European tour with three close friends; a theatre night with a parent or sibling laughing alongside you.
- The best time to buy is time with loved ones, such as taking a son to a chess tournament or watching a daughter's diving practice.
- Even for introverts, nothing replaces living in community; expenses are worthwhile when they deepen or broaden relationships.
His practical rules: invite someone to join a special trip; pay extra for the kids' tickets to the exhibition you want to see; accept a little less pay if the alternative frees time for loved ones. Relationships raise happiness and also longevity; Dan Buettner's Blue Zones, a study of the regions with the most centenarians, found living in community a key factor in long life.
Smash your idols
The golden calf
In the 1956 epic The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, Moses leads the Israelites out of Egyptian slavery, climbs the mountain and records God's law on two stone tablets, then returns to find his people worshipping a golden calf. Enraged, he smashes the idol with the tablets and it explodes, killing those nearby. Coleman's lesson: when a possession, or consumption itself, becomes an idol, deprioritising it is not enough. Smash it: decide in advance that you will not pursue it at all.
100 percent is easier than 98 percent
In his article (later a book) "How Will You Measure Your Life?", the late Clayton Christensen set out the principle that holding to something 100% of the time is easier than 98%. A Mormon who kept the Sabbath as a day without work, he played basketball as a young man, and his team had a championship game on a Sunday. Tempted, he chose not to play, reasoning that life would always offer an important reason to break the rule "just once" and that, once he began making exceptions, he would never stop. A fixed rule proved easier to keep than a flexible one. Alcoholics apply the same logic: others may enjoy a glass of wine, but for them the 2% of exceptions inevitably leads to more, so total abstinence is easier. Material consumption can work the same way.
Precommitment
Psychologists call this precommitment: deciding in advance to limit your future choices, among the best-confirmed tools for resisting temptation and, Coleman adds, for gaining freedom. It features in Dan Ariely's Predictably Irrational, Angela Duckworth's Grit and Jon Elster's Ulysses and the Sirens. Elster's emblem comes from Homer's Odyssey: warned by the sorceress Circe about the Sirens, whose irresistible songs lure sailors onto the rocks (a metaphor for all temptation), Ulysses (the Latin name for Odysseus) has his men plug their ears with beeswax, has himself bound to the mast so that he alone can hear the song, and orders them to tighten the ropes if he begs to be released.
Total abstinence fails for necessities such as cars, phones and clothes, which you cannot give up without living as a hermit. There, Coleman's version is to precommit to the least fancy version that still works.
| If you notice this idol | Coleman's precommitment |
|---|---|
| Phone. Fretting whether yours is good enough, what it says about you, whose is better | Buy the oldest functional phone you can, drop all aspiration in the category, and keep the cracked screen |
| Car. Embarrassed that a friend's car is nicer | Commit to not caring, buy a used minivan, and decide in advance that cars do not measure your self-worth |
| Clothes. Spending more on them than on good food or time with your children | Sell the nice clothes on eBay and rebuild your wardrobe from a secondhand shop |
| True luxuries. Anything you cannot control | Abstain entirely |
Nothing is wrong with a well-made car, phone or jacket (though Coleman notes many luxury goods today are poorly made status symbols). The trouble starts when they become idols that distract from what helps you and those around you flourish.
Keeping up with the Joneses
In 1913 Arthur "Pop" Momand launched the comic strip Keeping Up with the Joneses, which ran until 1940. It followed the McGinis family, consumed by status and forever trying to match their neighbours, the Joneses, who never actually appear. The joke was their transparent social climbing, which made them miserable. It came at a time of public debate about American materialism: in 1899 economist Thorstein Veblen had coined conspicuous consumption in The Theory of the Leisure Class for buying flashy clothes, houses and goods valued not for improving life but for signalling economic power and status. Such idols, Coleman says, are false measures of self-worth that we worship because we think others do, and they lead to comparison, materialism and insecurity.
No object defines your worth, and fixating on what things say about your status relative to others is a path to permanent insecurity. There will always be someone richer and a nicer car, watch or house. Most people, most of the time, are content with their things and do not dwell on them. But where an idol has taken hold, abstain, or buy only the most basic version that works. Coleman adds that this can be a fun, contrarian way to defy a culture of endless consumption.
Consume less
Jobs and the minimalist turn
Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs portrays the Apple founder's minimalism. Obsessed with simplifying design (the habit behind Apple's elegant hardware), Jobs applied it to his life: he wore the same outfit every day to remove a choice, buying multiples of the same shirts and trousers, and even when hugely rich kept his house almost bare, buying only essentials. Coleman links this to Jobs's personality and his adopted Buddhism, which prizes simplicity and enjoyment without attachment (an idea introduced earlier in the book), counsels buying only what you need and giving away what you do not, and has helped inspire a modern minimalism movement of buying and owning less in a world where goods are more plentiful than ever and equated with status.
How much is too much
Overconsumption is sharpest in the US but spreading with global prosperity and the innate wish to own more.
- Possessions. In 2015 Time featured Elinor Ochs's decade-long study of hyperacquisition; the first house her team examined held 2,260 visible possessions in just three rooms.
- Toys and storage. US children are 3% of the world's children but buy 40% of its toys, while parents spend tens of billions of dollars on self-storage; the average US house move weighs 8,000 pounds.
- Clutter industry. Americans own so much that they buy books, tools and gadgets just to manage the clutter.
- Not only Americans. The average British woman owns 30-35 pairs of shoes, the average British man 18.
So the overarching lesson, beyond redirecting money to experiences, health, relationships and time, is to buy less, period. Most readers do not need more clothes, shoes, gadgets, furniture or art. Coleman acknowledges real deprivation, from rising homelessness in US cities to desperate poverty for hundreds of millions worldwide, but for billions the question is how to be happy amid excess.
Three findings support the turn:
- University of Arizona. Millennials who saved more and spent less reported higher well-being and lower stress.
- University of Minnesota. Having fewer consumption choices generally raises happiness.
- Literature review (four academics). Most studies found reduced consumption linked to higher well-being or no significant change; a few showed possible negative effects. Overall, cutting consumption typically does not harm well-being in wealthy nations.
Millburn and Nicodemus
In October 2009 Joshua Fields Millburn lost his mother to lung cancer and his marriage to divorce. From that crisis he became one of minimalism's chief advocates. It began with his mother's belongings: instead of renting a storage unit, he donated them. With childhood friend Ryan Nicodemus he radically downsized (smaller homes, decluttering, giving things away) and the pair helped launch a worldwide minimalism movement, finding the change freeing practically, spiritually and emotionally. Millburn's argument, paraphrased:
- Decluttering is step one, not the goal. The relief is immediate, but lasting contentment comes from what the space is used for; you can give away everything you own and still be miserable.
- The enemy is compulsion. Consumption itself is not the problem; compulsory consumption is, and it yields to deliberate everyday choices.
- Less makes room for more. The aim is more time, passion, experiences, growth, contribution, contentment and freedom.
Coleman concedes that Millburn-style minimalism is radical and not for everyone. What he defends is its core, which he says is backed by the research and by traditions as varied as Buddhism, Stoicism and Christianity: love of stuff, like love of money, is an endless pursuit that complicates life. The studies he cites are mostly correlational (people who spend less may differ in other ways), so the safer reading is that cutting consumption rarely costs happiness, which is exactly how the literature review he quotes puts it.
Buy less, enjoy more
Coleman ends by agreeing with Jobs that, with possessions, less is more. Consuming less frees money for more fulfilling purchases, investing or giving, and lets you savour what you do buy, putting quality over quantity. His proposed motto is "buy less, enjoy more", and his concrete exercise is for almost every reader to pause new purchases for a while and declutter what they own, clearing mental and physical space for what is truly valuable.
Give Generously and Well
Coleman calls generosity the foundation of Good Money: giving breaks our attachment to money, improves the giver's health, happiness and relationships, and multiplies its effect through the recipient and the wider community. He offers two tools: the four Ps for giving more (percentage, passion, partner, participate) and TRUST for giving well (trusted advisers, research, understanding second-order effects, specifying intent, time-limiting gifts). Money simply cannot be good in your life without the act of helping others, but giving must be done with care, because badly aimed help can hurt.
Givers who went all in
Yvon Chouinard gives away Patagonia
Early life. Yvon Chouinard was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1938, the son of a handyman, plumber and mechanic who moved the family to Southern California when Yvon was nine. He began climbing in 1953, aged 14, through the Southern California Falconry Club, whose leader Don Prentice taught the boys to rappel down cliffs to falcon nests. He became a leading figure of Yosemite's golden age, with first ascents including the North American Wall (Yosemite), the north face of Mount Edith Cavell (Alberta) and the north face of Mount Sir Donald (British Columbia).
Business. To save money he taught himself blacksmithing: in 1957 he bought a used coal forge, anvil, tongs and hammer and made pitons, then sold them to friends from a backyard shop in Burbank and the back of his car, living hand to mouth and proud that climbing had no economic value. In 1965 he and climber Tom Frost formalised the business as Chouinard Equipment, redesigning tools to be stronger and lighter; in 1967 they moved into a tin shed in Ventura; by 1970 it was the leading US supplier of climbing gear. In 1972 he began selling rugby shirts and experimenting with clothing materials, and in 1973 founded Patagonia for that work (Chouinard Equipment later became Black Diamond after a 1989 bankruptcy).
A different company. Patagonia pioneered materials that improved performance and cut environmental impact, brought vivid colours to a field of tans and blacks, let staff dress as they liked (even barefoot), surf or play volleyball on breaks, sponsored ski and climbing trips, ran a healthy cafeteria and insisted on on-site daycare. In 1986 it committed 10% of profits to philanthropy, later pledging 1% of revenue, profitable year or not.
The gift. By 2022 the still-private firm had $1.5 billion in revenue, 3,000 employees, perhaps $100 million of annual profit and a value of about $3 billion. Chouinard, his wife and two children then put all the company's stock into structures fighting climate change: every dollar of profit not needed for reinvestment flows through the Patagonia Purpose Trust and the Holdfast Collective to environmental causes. Chouinard said existing options were not good enough, so the family created its own.
Others who did the same
Chouinard was not the first entrepreneur to take such a step, only one of the most celebrated:
- Kristin Groos Richmond and Kirsten Saenz Tobey built Revolution Foods, a B Corp supplying healthy meals to public schools on a sustainable business model while giving back to education.
- Bea Dixon founded the Honey Pot Company, a plant-based women's hygiene brand that gives part of its profits to women's-health charities.
- Casey Crawford (met earlier in the book) did the same at Movement Mortgage almost from the start.
- Alan and Katherine Barnhart of Barnhart Crane gave up personal wealth to give collectively alongside their employees.
Ronald Read, janitor-philanthropist
Giving well is not only for billionaires. Ronald Read, born in 1921, served honourably in the US Army in World War II, then settled in Vermont, working 25 years as a gas-station attendant and mechanic and 17 years as a janitor at J.C. Penney. Widowed, he never remarried, retired in 1997, and spent his days reading, first at the coffee shop of Brattleboro Memorial Hospital and, when that closed, at Brooks Memorial Library. When he died in 2014, his estate was worth $8 million: $2 million went to stepchildren and caregivers and the rest to the hospital and library that had comforted him.
The point
Coleman assumes Chouinard still lives comfortably. What he, Read, Dixon and Groos Richmond grasped is that there is no better use of money than helping others; no possession matches that fulfilment. Recipients need not be formal charities (helping someone directly can be even more powerful), and you need not give everything: most faith and philosophical traditions simply prescribe a percentage, a precommitment echoed in Patagonia's original tithe and Dixon's profit share.
The foundations of generosity
Generosity, Coleman says, is the foundation of Good Money. The anecdotal and scientific evidence shows that caring for others financially helps us thrive too, and giving forces us to end any unhealthy attachment to money.
What the traditions teach
- Hinduism. Generosity, dana, is part of a follower's dharma (religious duty); the Bhagavad Gita adds that right giving expects nothing in return.
- Buddhism. Sharing roots with Hinduism, it also calls giving dana, describing it as openness and the capacity to embrace others with compassion and love.
- Islam. The Koran instructs believers to give freely, not only money but time, help and kindness.
- Judaism and Christianity. In Proverbs 11:24 Solomon says the generous prosper and those who refresh others are refreshed; in Luke 12:33 Jesus tells followers to sell their possessions and give to the poor, storing up treasure in heaven that no thief or moth can reach.
- Secular ethics. Utilitarianism holds that those above the wealth thresholds discussed earlier should devote resources to others, and its best-known (or most notorious) modern offshoot, effective altruism, is a whole philosophy of material generosity. Immanuel Kant treated charity as restitution for past injustice, a duty owed to the rights of others.
Coleman suggests near-universal agreement because generosity is essential to the flourishing of families, communities, countries and the world; without it, life would be what Thomas Hobbes called "nasty, brutish, and short." Modern social science, he says, has confirmed the ancient wisdom.
What the science shows
- Source. Summer Allen (UC Berkeley) reviewed the literature on generosity's effects and origins for the John Templeton Foundation ("The Science of Generosity").
- Physical health. Giving and serving are linked to better blood pressure, hearing and sleep quality; volunteering delays death, and in couples where only one spouse volunteers, the volunteer lives longer.
- Toddlers. Children under two were happier giving treats to a puppet than receiving them, and happier still when the treats came from their own bowl.
- Spending on others. In a study of 632 Americans, spending on others predicted significantly greater happiness regardless of income; spending on oneself showed no link; the effect held for as little as $5.
- Relationships. Generosity and small kindnesses raise marital and romantic satisfaction, can break cycles of antagonism and build trust.
- The brain. As Jenny Santi summarised in Time, fMRI studies show giving activates the same reward areas as food and sex, suggesting altruism is hardwired and pleasurable.
Yet we are stingy
Despite knowing all this, people give little. In a 2016 Charities Aid Foundation comparison (global surveys are infrequent), the US was the most generous nation by share of GDP at only 1.44%; second-placed Canada gave less than half that share, and China 0.03%. More recent US data show giving roughly flat at about 2% of GDP in 2023, counting individuals and corporations.
GDP share is only one measure. The 2023 World Giving Index counts the share of people who donate, volunteer and help strangers. It ranks Indonesia first, with 82% of adults donating and 61% volunteering, against 61% and 38% in fifth-placed United States. Even those are thin numbers, and in most countries giving and volunteering outside the family are uncommon.
Coleman's verdict: if the most charitable country gives under 2% of its output, there is enormous room to improve, and by failing to act on what we know we handicap our own flourishing.
Flourishing is communal
That analysis covers only what giving does for the giver. Tyler VanderWeele told Coleman that true flourishing is communal: you can hardly claim to flourish while contributing nothing to the people and communities around you, which is where those fixated on individual well-being fall short. Giving is a force multiplier that improves the lives of giver, recipient and community at once.
- Scholarships. As a high-school senior Coleman needed scholarships (supplemented by work) to attend college and never forgot his donors. He and his wife now give to Berry College scholarships, especially the Griswell Scholars, named for philanthropist Barry Griswell and supporting students who have overcome the hardest circumstances.
- Leaders he admires. Najah Bazzy (Zaman International), Sofia Sprechman Sineiro (CARE International), Gary Haugen (International Justice Mission) and Edgar Sandoval Sr. (World Vision), whose work and donors are breaking barriers of homelessness, poverty and human trafficking.
Simply put, give more
If most people give 2% or less of income, nearly everyone can give a larger share. Coleman's four routes are the four Ps (his figure 5-3 arranges them as four circles around "better giving").
- Percentage. Precommit a fixed share of income and make it automatic.
- Passion. Give strategically to causes that move you, not tactically to whoever asks.
- Partner. Give together with family, friends, congregation or colleagues.
- Participate. Add your time and talent to your money in the causes you fund.
Become a percentage giver
Precommitment (chapter 4), first analysed by economist Robert Strotz in 1956, holds that deciding in advance and taking a concrete step (telling someone, asking to be held accountable) makes follow-through more likely. Budgets work better decided ahead of time, often with a friend or adviser; fitness improves with a competition, a gym membership or a trainer. For giving, Coleman's steps are:
- Commit a percentage of income in advance.
- Build it into your budget.
- Tell someone: a religious leader, spouse or partner, or friend.
- Set money aside monthly that you cannot touch and that goes straight to charity.
Donor-advised funds (DAFs), pioneered in the US in 1931, make this easy. You contribute regularly to a fund held in your name and grant it to charities later. A DAF is far cheaper and simpler than a private foundation, can draw a fixed percentage of income from your bank account each month, and is irrevocable, which is the precommitment. Coleman compares it to income-tax withholding, which governments use to blunt the pain of tax by taking it automatically each pay period. It also ends the year-end scramble (at Christmas, say) in which people give less than they should to charities they have not vetted: you deposit monthly, choose recipients at leisure, avoid decision fatigue, and give more, more freely and more joyfully.
DAFs are a US tax structure (contributions are deductible when made). Critics note they carry no payout requirement, so money can sit for years while the donor has already taken the deduction. Coleman's precommitment logic holds only if you actually grant the funds out; readers elsewhere should check local equivalents.
Pick things you are passionate about
Many people give tactically, not strategically: rounding up at the grocery till, giving because a friend asked, buying a seat or table at a charity banquet, handing money to someone on the street. None is wrong, but none builds a habit and mindset of generosity. To be passionate about giving you must care about the causes.
The Colemans' passion is opportunity creation through education. He was born into a home with few resources and owes his career to good schools and teachers; his wife, a child-development and psychology researcher, former classroom teacher and child counsellor, has seen the right schools transform children from the hardest backgrounds. They do not dismiss cancer treatment, clean water or animal welfare, but concentrating on their passion makes them give more cheerfully, engage more deeply and commit more firmly, and lets them combine time, talent and resources, the most powerful form of giving.
The Philanthropic Initiative, a nonprofit advisory firm, found in its report on passion in philanthropy that "finding a passion" ranks high among the motives that lead wealthy people to give more. Its founder Peter Karloff writes that aligning passion with giving is elusive but worth the search, because the gift becomes an expression of your core values and yields deep satisfaction. Coleman's questions for the reader:
- What are you passionate about?
- Which causes have touched you or your family directly?
- Where could you pour in your time and talent, not only money?
Finding those areas makes giving consistent and tireless, and if everyone did so, worthy charities of every type would thrive.
Partner with family and friends
- Compassion International. Founded by Everett Swanson in 1952 (the current name came eleven years later), it lets sponsors fund food, education and health care for children in poor regions, with a focus on holistic development. Its signature model pairs a family with one child abroad, supported monthly through childhood. The Colemans sponsor one child for each of their four children, matched to the same age, and make their son or daughter the sponsor; the children exchange letters, send birthday and holiday gifts, and grow up alongside someone in very different circumstances, which gives the parents a natural opening to talk about helping others.
- Habitat for Humanity. Founded in 1976 by Millard and Linda Fuller and made prominent with support from President Jimmy Carter, it builds and repairs homes for people in need. A common model lets churches, businesses and other groups sponsor a house, paying part of the cost and then building it themselves alongside experts. Coleman has come to know its CEO Jonathan Reckford, who showed him that Habitat builds communities as well as houses, by bonding the volunteers who commit to a build.
- Everyday versions. The same logic drives food drives, school fundraisers and college service days: working with others for others improves lives and communities like little else.
In Coleman's work with wealthy families, the best-adjusted consistently give together, making a big occasion of it and spending whole days presenting ideas and celebrating decisions. He grants the merit of quiet, anonymous giving like Ronald Read's, which many traditions encourage, but sees real power in community giving. His suggestions: start a family giving tradition; get your congregation or company to sponsor a Habitat house, a local school or a Compassion child; host a fundraising event; introduce a day of service at work.
Participate in the causes you care about
Giving is about time as much as money, and joining the two makes generosity more personal and more effective.
- Rye Barcott. A graduate-school friend of Coleman's, Barcott later served with distinction in the Marine Corps and founded Double Time Capital and With Honor, a nonpartisan PAC backing military veterans in Congress from both parties. As a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill student he went to the slums of Kibera, Kenya, to study youth empowerment and ethnic violence, and with Kenyans Salim Mohamed and Tabitha Festo cofounded Carolina for Kibera, now CFK Africa, linking UNC and US resources to Kibera's needs. Since 2001 it has mobilised millions of dollars and many Americans to improve lives in East African slums, reaching tens of thousands of young people through sport, education and public health. Barcott also wrote It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace. After the Marines, at about 30, he set a goal of earning enough to give the best hours of his days to mission work; he reached it, with a strong partner, through a solar-power finance business. He has chaired CFK's board as a volunteer for nearly 25 years, which he credits to its being locally led; local leadership, he says, is the essential ingredient of sustained progress in poor communities.
- Jackie Coleman. Coleman's wife sits on the boards of Skyland Trail (a youth mental-health facility in Atlanta) and their children's elementary school, and works closely with CureGRIN, which serves families affected by rare GRIN genetic disorders. These mostly strike children, causing seizures, cognitive impairment, serious behavioural problems, physical disability and sometimes death, as the Colemans have seen among families they love. CureGRIN organises families, funds research and connects families with researchers to spread news of treatments. Because her expertise matches the causes, she can steer the family's money and time away from organisations that are not genuinely making progress.
Building a Habitat home, writing to a sponsored child or sitting on a board all create deeper engagement, stronger buy-in and smarter philanthropy.
Make sure your generosity is put to proper use
Bob Morin was a librarian at the University of New Hampshire for nearly 50 years. Frugal, he drove a 1992 Plymouth, often breakfasted on Coke and Fritos, ate a cheese sandwich for lunch and a frozen dinner at home. He read every book published in the US from 1930 to 1938 (bar a few categories), watched an average of three films a day, smoked a pipe and loved the students. Through saving and investing he amassed $4 million by his death in 2015 and left it to UNH, restricting only $100,000 to the library and library-science scholarships. UNH, which paid adjuncts $3,000 a class, spent $1 million on a video scoreboard for its football stadium (and $2.5 million on a career centre), arguing that Morin had come to love the team during his last 15 months in assisted living. The national outcry raised two questions: the responsible use of donor money and the preservation of donor intent.
Help that hurts
Philanthropy has long been accused of perverting incentives and harming the people it means to help.
- PlayPump. In a 2014 New Republic article, Michael Hobbes described PlayPump International, which attached water pumps in water-scarce rural Africa to children's merry-go-rounds: each spin filled a nearby tank, and advertising space on the rig was meant to pay for upkeep. The pumps broke down quickly and sat unrepaired, sometimes leaving villages worse off because they had replaced working hand pumps, and occasionally leading to child labour.
- Aid villages. Hobbes drew on Nina Munk's The Idealist, which followed an economist's campaign to end poverty and found results that often showed how damaging foreign aid can be to local people and economies.
The book calls the subject of The Idealist "David Sachs." Munk's book follows Jeffrey Sachs and his Millennium Villages Project.
None of this means charity is bad. Philanthropy has made inroads against malaria, HIV, tuberculosis and polio, funded medical research, supported orphanages, fed and treated the desperate, fought human trafficking and sent talented young people to school. For every bad story there is a good one, but the evidence says to be considerate and deliberate.
Donor intent
We will never know whether Morin would have approved of the scoreboard. Family foundations and the charities they fund often drift from their original intent, especially over long periods; some argue that many large endowments now act in ways their founders never intended. Shorter-term betrayals happen too: universities and charities sometimes break the law to depart from donors' wishes, cases documented at length by Philanthropy Roundtable and others. A University of Chicago Press journal article, "You Did What with My Donation?!", showed such betrayals are common and make donors cynical and less willing to give.
The same risk applies to direct help to friends, family or strangers (chapter 8 covers children). Coleman's simple rule: before giving, think through how the money could be used destructively, and weigh that risk against the good it could do.
TRUST: five principles for giving well
There is no silver bullet, but Coleman's acronym (his figure 5-4) gathers five principles.
- T: Select trusted advisers. Give in community and never in isolation; pool money and research with friends; larger givers should recruit values-aligned boards and use groups such as Philanthropy Roundtable or AmPhil, or a good financial adviser.
- R: Research causes carefully. Check Charity Navigator, reviews, news and the charity's Form 990; call friends in the field, volunteer first, and question the nonprofit directly.
- U: Understand second-order effects. Ask how a gift could distort incentives or worsen the problem.
- S: Specify intent. Define what the money is for, or choose charities that clearly do.
- T: Time-limit giving. Prefer single-year and operating gifts to perpetual endowments; consider sunsetting a foundation.
Select trusted advisers
Giving starts in community, usually with close family, and can widen to friends who research causes together, serve together and pool capital for bigger impact, which also lets each giver weigh causes more carefully. Larger givers may need formal help: foundation owners are wise to recruit a board of knowledgeable, values-aligned people to assess opportunities together; Philanthropy Roundtable and AmPhil offer resources, events and paid research and consulting; a good financial adviser can help maximise giving responsibly and decide when to add new causes or drop old ones.
Research causes carefully
In 1998 Pat Dugan took his pharmaceutical-sales company PDI public and found himself far richer than he had imagined. Shaken by scandals at charities he had thought reputable, and wanting not to pour money "down the rat hole," he found no tool that reassured him, so in 2001 he launched Charity Navigator. It began with 1,100 charities, rated from their public Form 990 tax filings (which show how organisations use funds); its ratings have grown more sophisticated, it drew 11 million visitors a year by 2018, and it now rates over 200,000 charities, with several competitors.
For modest givers, research means checking Charity Navigator, reading online reviews and the 990, and searching for supportive or critical news coverage. Coleman also favours a personal approach and concentrated giving to causes you are engaged with: before giving to Habitat, say, call friends in housing, volunteer at a site alongside a first donation, and talk to someone at the nonprofit. You worked hard for the money; whether the gift is formal or to a relative, its point is positive impact.
Understand second-order effects
At college Coleman belonged to Hunger and Homelessness Outreach, Programs, and Education, which educated students and worked with local shelters and soup kitchens. An early lesson, common in the field, was to rarely give cash directly to people experiencing homelessness and instead fund the full-time organisations that serve them: such groups understand root causes, and because many unhoused people also struggle with mental illness or addiction, cash can feed the problem rather than recovery, whereas a shelter can make sure professionals address deeper needs.
The principle reaches further. In Afghanistan in 2011 Coleman saw the flood of charities create perverse incentives: talented Afghans learned English to work for charities or write grant applications instead of starting sustainable businesses that could have built the country, because working the aid system paid better than building native industry. Not every charity did harm, but the second-order effects of charity rather than investment were widely observed, there and elsewhere. PlayPump had a real problem and good intentions, yet its method produced poor results. Before giving to anyone, consider the second-order effects.
Specify intent
Nonprofits often prefer unrestricted gifts for flexibility, and for some givers and organisations that is right. Bridgespan Group has documented the "nonprofit starvation cycle": donors who fear misuse restrict gifts to programmes, leaving charities unable to pay the core overhead those programmes need.
Sometimes, though, specificity pays. The Colemans like Compassion International because their money goes to the health and education of a named child, which is more fulfilling and means they back 100% of the use. Specificity also guards against abuse: Greg Mortenson, author of Three Cups of Tea, misused millions of dollars from his Central Asia Institute and was made by Montana's attorney general to repay part of it; the Wounded Warrior Project was found to spend much of its donations on lavish conferences, travel and staff entertainment rather than on wounded veterans. Specifying use (a particular scholarship, a sponsored child) cannot guarantee compliance but does more to ensure money is well spent. Most charities, Coleman stresses, have clear missions and good people; still, as giving grows, donors are best served by spelling out intent so that both sides understand it fully.
Unrestricted. Gives charities flexibility and funds the core staff and infrastructure that restricted gifts starve (Bridgespan); best for some givers and some organisations.
Specified. Guarantees the donor supports 100% of the use and guards against Mortenson-style misuse; Coleman favours it as giving grows, with intent written down so both sides understand it.
Time-limit giving
Bernie Marcus, cofounder of Home Depot, wanted to deploy his wealth for others rather than accumulate it. His $25 million commitment let Bob and Suzanne Wright launch Autism Speaks, and the Marcus Autism Center now treats more autistic children than any other clinic in the world; his money also supports quality public education in Georgia. He confined his fortune to six areas:
- Medical research and health care.
- Jewish causes.
- Free enterprise.
- Veterans' initiatives and national security.
- Children's health and welfare, with an emphasis on civics education.
- Targeted community support.
The Marcus Foundation, founded in 1989, has given more than $2.7 billion, every grant approved by Marcus himself. Unusually, he arranged for it to sunset: after his death at 95 in 2024, a board will distribute all its assets within 20 years. He had watched endowed foundations drift from their founders' intent and become self-serving power bases for later leaders. In a Bridgespan interview he described, bluntly, perpetual foundations whose staff enjoy fine salaries and benefits decades after the founder dies, pay out only the minimum 5% to protect the principal, and pick successors as a reward for friends; letting a foundation run forever, he concluded, is a mistake.
More donors now give while living, sunset their foundations or fund only operating grants. Michael Moritz gave Ohio State University over $30 million for four professorships and thirty scholarships; his son Jeffrey later found the university had begun charging the endowment an annual fee, diverting $3 million over 15 years to its development office. Some causes merit permanent endowment, but there is a growing debate over locking capital up forever, where it can outlive its purpose or be abused.
For most giving, Coleman's advice is to time-limit: give annually rather than to endowments, make single-year rather than multiyear pledges, and fund operations rather than endowed programmes. Some 8-12% of foundations now include sunset provisions. Such limits protect fidelity, effectiveness and donor intent, and givers of almost any size can adopt them. Executed diligently, TRUST helps you give more and better. The chapter's cautionary cases map neatly onto the five principles:
| Case | What went wrong | Principle that would have helped |
|---|---|---|
| Bob Morin, UNH (2015) | $1 million of a librarian's unrestricted bequest went to a football scoreboard | Specify intent |
| PlayPump | Merry-go-round pumps broke and replaced working hand pumps | Research; second-order effects |
| Cash to the homeless | Money can feed addiction or untreated mental illness | Second-order effects (fund shelters) |
| Afghanistan aid (2011) | Talent drawn into grant-writing instead of enterprise | Second-order effects |
| Central Asia Institute | Greg Mortenson misused millions; partial repayment ordered | Research; specify intent |
| Wounded Warrior Project | Donations spent on lavish conferences, travel and staff perks | Research; specify intent |
| Moritz gift, Ohio State | Annual fee skimmed $3 million over 15 years from a $30 million+ endowment | Time-limit; specify intent |
| Perpetual foundations | Drift into power bases paying the minimum 5% (Marcus's critique) | Time-limit; trusted boards |
Coleman's passion-first approach, concentrated on causes you know personally, is the opposite of the effective-altruist method he mentions only in passing, which ranks causes by measured impact per dollar (for example, GiveWell's evaluations). Passion sustains giving; evidence of effectiveness guards against PlayPump-style failures. His TRUST research step partly bridges the two, and his own Afghanistan and homelessness examples show he accepts that good intentions are not enough.
Give more than money
A kidney for a stranger
In December 2021 Sophia Jackson saw a news story about Vadrien Alston, a New York Police Department officer and mother of two with renal failure. A kidney from a friend twelve years earlier had begun to fail, forcing her onto dialysis. Jackson volunteered as a living donor but was not a match, so she used the National Kidney Registry's voucher programme to swap: she gave her kidney to someone else so that a donor who matched Alston would give theirs. Alston compared the news to winning the lottery. By drawing another donor in, Jackson helped save two lives.
Generosity as a mindset
Coleman notes that this book deals with flourishing where it meets money, so it skips marriage, friendship, parenting and health as such. But generosity is a mindset as much as a practice: you are more likely to give money if generosity is a core value you bring to everything. It appears as serving others at work (a key way to craft purpose, from chapter 3) and makes you a better spouse, partner, parent, friend and mentor. The shift is to stop asking how to help yourself in a situation and ask instead how to use your gifts to improve others' lives, which brings more gratitude and joy and better communities.
Time and talent
- Jody Jonsson. Vice chair of Capital Group, which manages over $2 trillion, and a leader there for three decades, she took up flying at 50 and over the next decade earned several instrument ratings. Coleman heard her speak at a 2023 conference. She flies for Angel Flight, carrying people in desperate need of medical care (often cancer patients) to treatment; pilots donate their time, skill and the cost of operating the planes, and Jonsson says the patients inspire and humble her. She could simply write cheques and save time, but putting your whole self into a cause is different, and it meets a need money alone could barely satisfy.
- Davis Smith. A friend of Coleman's who grew up across Latin America, Smith founded outdoor brand Cotopaxi in 2014, naming it after one of Ecuador's highest volcanoes. A B Corp with a dual mission of financial value and "do good", it reflects his lifelong pairing of entrepreneurship and social impact. In 2022, at the height of his success, his church asked him to step back from daily work at the company and lead its mission in Recife, Brazil, overseeing Mormon missionaries there. He, his wife Asialene and their four children moved from Utah and have lived and worked there since; he calls sharing the gospel the greatest cause.
- Everyday versions. Coleman serves on nonprofit boards and organises events connecting nonprofit leaders with each other and with capital. Friends mentor as Big Brothers and Big Sisters; a friend's wife cares for animals at the city's Humane Society. Private-equity firm Halifax Group held a day of service for its team and its limited partners together.
Buying time (chapter 4) helps here: a shorter commute, efficient grocery delivery or outsourced chores can free hours for service.
Money and heart together
Time and talent are no substitute for financial giving. Give money at whatever level you can, because it loosens money's grip and shows that, even with little, money does not define you and generosity can transform you. Yet financial giving without heart (without personal dedication and passion) can be hollow. Coleman's conclusion is that combining the two produces the deepest and most lasting impact on giver and recipient alike.
Invest for Impact
Coleman's investing advice has two layers. The first is conventional: invest every dollar you reasonably can, as early as you can, keep an emergency fund, manage risk and let compounding do the work. The second is the book's distinctive claim: all investing is impact investing, because every dollar put to work does something for someone, good or bad. For most households in rich countries investments are the largest pool of money they control, so they deserve the same values scrutiny as earning, spending and giving, and Coleman closes with seven principles for aligning a portfolio.
The miracle of compounding
Coleman opens with the old saying that compound interest is the "eighth wonder of the world": whoever understands it earns it, and whoever does not pays it. Compounding, he says, is hard to grasp intuitively and is the reason we invest at all.
The $10,000 example
Suppose a 20-year-old puts $10,000 into the S&P 500, whose recent long-run return is about 10% a year, and leaves it untouched for 45 years.
Now give that investor three friends earning 2%, 6.5% and 15% over the same period, and compare what each holds at 65.
| Annual return | After 25 years | After 45 years |
|---|---|---|
| 2% | about $16,400 | $24,379 |
| 6.5% | about $48,300 | $170,111 |
| 10% | $108,347 | $728,905 |
| 15% | about $329,000 | $5,387,693 |
- The spread. The 2% friend ends just short of $25,000 (before inflation); the 15% friend has almost $5.4 million, about $4.7 million more than the healthy 10% investor.
- The cost of raiding. A friend forced to cash out for an expense at year 25 would forgo about 90% of the eventual growth. Hence a firm rule: resist the urge to raid your investments.
- The lesson. Even small sums, invested at decent returns for long enough, can be life-changing.
- Nominal, not real. The 10% S&P figure is a nominal, pre-fee average; after inflation, US stocks have returned closer to 6-7%, and past US returns are not a forecast. Coleman notes the chart is not inflation-adjusted.
- No one earns 15% for 45 years reliably; the top line illustrates the arithmetic, not an achievable plan.
- The Lakers comparison below assumes reinvested dividends and ignores 46 years of team profits; the 1979 price also bought the Kings and the Forum.
Two famous fortunes
- Warren Buffett. Now worth about $150 billion, he made his first million at 32 and became a billionaire only at 55. His fortune came from a remarkably steady philosophy compounded over decades, the habit many of history's richest families share: investing consistently and wisely from a young age.
- The Lakers. Simple tools often beat complex ones. Jerry Buss, a very good businessman, paid about $68 million for the Los Angeles Lakers in 1979 and built one of the most successful franchises in sport. In 2025 his family announced a sale (still pending when Coleman wrote) valuing the team at about $10 billion, the highest price ever paid for a US sports franchise. Yet the same money in an S&P 500 index fund, open to almost anyone, would now be worth about $13 billion.
The basic habits
Coleman's overarching mindset: put every dollar you reasonably can into investments as soon as you can, manage risk well, and your financial life will be transformed. The steps:
- Save as much as you can.
- Hold an emergency fund in cash.
- Invest the rest for a high risk-adjusted return, with a financial adviser. The decisions feel intimidating, but the habits are simple and qualified help is plentiful: just invest.
- Stick to the basics if you are an average investor: money-market funds, public stocks or exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and publicly traded bonds.
- Explore alternatives only with wealth, security and sophistication: options, futures, private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, asset leasing, litigation finance, film production and dozens more. Many are closed to ordinary investors by regulation and suitability rules; they can raise returns or lower risk but need real focus and an expert partner.
- Use an adviser. Coleman was once an executive at a firm managing over $1 trillion across hundreds of products and now runs an alternative-investment firm, yet still has an adviser who manages much of his portfolio, helps with tax and estate planning and gives him and his wife peace of mind.
- Learn the basics and seek wise counsel, whether a professional, a family member or a knowledgeable friend.
- Never invest in something you don't understand; keep saving and investing more every year.
What invested money does
Earning with purpose and spending less than you make (chapters 3 and 4) free the capital that compounding grows. What standard advice leaves out is what that capital does in the world. Fluid capital markets let individuals and institutions fund companies, build real estate, lend to growing businesses and even finance films. Almost every company and almost every office tower or apartment development in your city runs on investor money. That dynamism produces returns but also jobs, housing, innovation and opportunity. So investments can be judged by their influence as well as their returns. Coleman leaves tax strategy and vehicle selection to the thousands of other books and focuses on how accumulated investments can reflect your values and do good.
All investing is impact investing
James Tieng and Lumos Capital
James Tieng looked like a finance archetype: Princeton, internships in asset management and investment banking at Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan, management consulting at McKinsey, then private equity, an MBA from Harvard Business School and a prized job at Apax Partners. But he had two passions, investing and education, and was using only one. At business school he had studied education innovation, and as a child of immigrants he saw education as a main gateway to opportunity. Taking a risk, he joined Quad Partners, a private-equity investor in education, backing entrepreneurs with new approaches to learning. Later, with friend Victor Hu, who had led education investment banking at Goldman Sachs, he cofounded Lumos Capital Group, a growth-stage private-equity firm investing in education and human-capital development worldwide. Lumos judges every deal on both financial return and social impact against set impact criteria; Tieng and Hu see a natural alignment (he calls it collinearity) between business success and societal impact, and build the firm on purpose and faith.
The neglected fourth category
Chapter 1 established that we meet money in four ways: earning, spending, giving and investing. Investing is the most neglected. People seek work that fits their talents and purpose, spend with an eye to meaning, and give to causes they believe in, but when they invest they park their values at the door and look only at risk and return, or, daunted by complexity, outsource their money without knowing how it is used. That is odd, because for the typical person in the developed world investments outweigh annual earning, spending or giving.
- Income. US median household income was about $75,000 in 2022.
- Spending. Average expenditures run about 77% of income (in one study with slightly different income figures).
- Giving. A paltry 2% of GDP.
- Wealth. The median household's net worth is over $192,000; part is home equity, but 61% of US adults own stock.
- Over a lifetime. The typical American, especially with age, holds as much in savings and investments as annual income, and more than they spend or give.
- The top 1% hold more than $10 million each, with millions to deploy in public markets, private equity, venture and real estate.
The numbers look very different from Nigeria to Norway, but in the developed world and for anyone pursuing financial independence, investments are often the largest category of their financial life. Since every invested dollar affects the world, exploring what that impact is, who controls it and how to make investing an expression of values can be as rewarding as the same work on spending and giving.
The origins of values-based investing
GM, apartheid and the Sullivan Principles
Modern values investing began in 1971, at the height of apartheid, South Africa's system of institutionalised racial segregation guaranteeing white-minority rule. Many firms and governments still supported the regime. General Motors, while not formally endorsing apartheid, had extensive factories there that the regime made possible.
- The resolution. The Episcopal Church, owning just 0.004% of GM's shares, filed a shareholder resolution asking GM to leave South Africa. Almost any investor can file one, and a holder that small normally gets little attention.
- The ally. GM's only Black director, Rev. Leon Sullivan, pastor of Philadelphia's Zion Baptist Church, championed it at the shareholder meeting, arguing that American industry could not morally keep doing business with a regime so brutally dehumanising its people.
- The result. The motion won only 1.29% of the vote, but the campaign so caught the national imagination that GM eventually withdrew, and nearly all of corporate America adopted the Sullivan Principles, codes for how businesses dealt with the apartheid regime.
Older roots and the rise of ESG
Values and investing had met before: Jewish, Muslim and Christian scriptures contain detailed guidance on stewarding wealth, writers such as Upton Sinclair exposed corrupt business practices to a secular audience, and governments began policing corporate conduct. But 1971 roughly coincides with the birth of a mainstream values-investing movement driven by sovereign wealth funds, US public pensions, nonprofit and religious investors and individuals. Its most prominent, though not only, form today is ESG (environmental, social and governance) investing.
Coleman is explicit that the book is not an endorsement of ESG or any particular approach. ESG is not synonymous with values investing, approaches within it vary widely, and after recent controversy the movement is declining and fragmenting; many values investors have little to do with it. Still, ESG and sharia finance show the sheer scale of demand, from individuals to sovereign nations, and understanding the frameworks and tools is the first step to making your own invested dollars good.
The current state of values-based investing
Managed assets worldwide total about $120 trillion: not homes or private businesses, but the money in mutual funds, stocks, bonds, private equity, venture capital and REITs. This capital touches almost everything. Shareholders, pensions and retirement plans own the maker of the phone in your pocket; private equity stands behind your local HVAC company; investors funded the firms that made your e-reader or this book. Coleman likens it to oxygen: necessary, everywhere, shaping the companies and products we use daily, and your money is part of it. People and institutions are increasingly trying to steer that influence as the Episcopal Church did: in a recent poll, about two-thirds of Americans said they want to invest in a "socially responsible way", though far fewer do.
- Negative screening. Exclude sectors, products or services you do not want to support; common screens cover gambling, guns and other weapons, fossil fuels, adult entertainment, alcohol and tobacco.
- Positive screening. Deliberately invest in favoured sectors such as renewable energy, or in companies strong on human flourishing, human rights or environmental impact.
- Thematic investing. Use dedicated funds in areas you want to support: renewable-energy funds, green bonds, venture portfolios backing only female founders, health care, defence technology.
- Corporate engagement and activism. Now a dominant method: managers press companies through proxy voting (voting clients' shares for or against policies), letters and shareholder resolutions, as the Episcopal Church and Sullivan did; any shareholder can vote or file, which is powerful when done collectively.
- Company and cultural formation. As a significant or majority owner, mainly in private equity and venture capital, an investor can shape companies from the ground up; KKR, for example, has pioneered broader employee ownership in its portfolio companies to spread economic gains and stakeholder buy-in.
Coleman says the list may not be complete but sketches the options. Several frameworks apply them at scale:
| Framework | What it is | Scale (as cited) |
|---|---|---|
| ESG | Championed by sovereign funds, state pensions and international bodies; codified in documents such as the UN Principles for Responsible Investment; first and still mainly about climate and the environment, plus diversity and inclusion and human rights | 25-35% of the world's managed assets; some of your money is likely in ESG strategies by default unless you have opted out |
| Sharia-compliant finance | Follows Islamic principles: excludes haram businesses (alcohol, pork), charging interest in most cases, gambling and speculation, and some options trading; offered by specialist and mainstream managers | $4.5-6.7 trillion of Islamic finance globally |
| Christian-aligned investing | Guided by denominational rules such as the US Conference of Catholic Bishops guidelines or those of American Baptist Churches USA; mostly prohibitions, with some positive uses | At least $130 billion (Brightlight Research) |
| Niche theses | For example Andreessen Horowitz's "American Dynamism", investing in industries that build a more vibrant US culture and economy | Varies |
The case against ESG. Over the past three to five years, criticism of ESG has grown sharply, from the political right and left, fiduciary-standard advocates, regulators and academics. The charges: ESG factors are hard to quantify; returns may be lower; the framework is seen as carrying a progressive social and political bias; greenwashing (fake environmental credentials to attract money) is common; and standards and transparency are lacking. ESG nonetheless remains a major force.
Coleman, who works in values-based investing himself, concludes that almost anyone can now embed their values, avoiding what they oppose and backing what they favour. Some options are concessionary (accepting lower returns for impact) and some seek market returns; with so many providers, even a purely return-focused investor can build an aligned portfolio.
- Performance. The suggestion that values investing need cost little or nothing in return is contested: research is mixed, broad screens reduce diversification, and specialised funds often charge higher fees.
- Big numbers, loose definitions. The ESG share of assets swings widely with definitions, and Islamic-finance estimates range from about $3 trillion upward.
- Interest. Coleman runs a values-based investment firm and is affiliated with Vident, which he cites repeatedly; he says his examples are not endorsements or financial advice, but readers should weigh the connection.
Values-based investing in action
Rather than catalogue every approach, Coleman tells three short stories of different tools, stressing that they are not endorsements or advice, just a few among thousands.
Amee Parbhoo and impact-oriented venture investing
Amee Parbhoo grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, the daughter of Indian immigrants: her mother from Mumbai, her father from rural Gujarat, part of the 1950s-60s wave of Indians who sought opportunity in East Africa, a history that seems to inform her African work today. A Davidson College graduate, she traces her interest in international development to a middle-school family trip to India, when an aunt who was a social worker took her into a Mumbai slum; investing came much later.
- Path. Believing that private industry, alongside philanthropy and government, has a role in ending poverty, she worked in management consulting, then at a global microfinance institution making small loans to entrepreneurs in developing countries, which showed her how much more capital those markets needed.
- Accion. She joined Accion, a decades-old global nonprofit providing responsible financial services to the underserved. Alongside its philanthropy it created Accion Venture Lab, a leading early-stage investor in inclusive fintech, first funded from Accion's balance sheet and now partnered with global institutions for about a decade. Parbhoo now leads it, with a 13-person team spread across the globe, of different backgrounds, religions and languages but one shared mission.
- No trade-off. She says Accion's track record shows impact and return need not be in tension.
- Apollo Agriculture. An early Venture Lab bet, it gives small farmers the financing to buy better inputs, raise harvests and turn subsistence farming into commercial farming; its founders asked why places like Kenya and Zambia lag rich-country yields. It has grown into a business that is both profitable and highly impactful, raising money from SoftBank and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
- Her advice. Start by knowing what matters to you, the values you want to see in the world; then hold yourself accountable by defining each investment's impact thesis and checking whether the impact holds through the whole life cycle of the investment.
Aimee Minnich and investing through DAFs
Aimee Minnich grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, the youngest of five in a big Catholic family. Her father's alcoholism kept him to odd jobs; her mother held the family together with jobs including a paper route, and every child worked as early as possible. Her mother later remarried and built a successful business (which she still runs). Watching her mother and stepfather give, Minnich wondered whether mission could be built into day jobs, not just charity.
- Leaving law. She studied philosophy, then went to law school mainly because of a full scholarship, and never fitted in. Married during law school and then a mother, she remembers dropping her baby off each morning on the way to a job she disliked and realising she did not love money or power enough to justify it, so she looked elsewhere.
- Discovering DAFs. Her parents had taken their company public and started a foundation; through their giving she found donor-advised funds and a community devoted to making generosity a lifestyle. Working at a major DAF, she had a second insight: impact businesses worldwide do good that charities cannot, and DAF holders could invest in them while waiting to grant.
- The Impact Foundation. With colleague Jeff Johns she founded it in 2015 as a DAF built for impact investing: it accepts gifts and invests them in social-impact businesses and funds (African infrastructure, mission-driven film and TV, and more). Such investing used to be the preserve of large institutions; now someone with a $25,000 DAF can invest like the Rockefeller or Ford Foundation. Many investments aim for strong returns, which flow back to be recycled into further investments or grants.
- Results. After nine years it had deployed over $645 million; returns from dividends, distributions, loan repayments and sales come back into donors' accounts, and over $100 million has been granted on to other charities. Her phrase: you use the same dollar twice, once invested and once granted.
- Access. Because it is a charity, people barred from private markets by accredited-investor rules can still make such investments with philanthropic dollars.
Tahmina is a Persian girl's name meaning "brave". The company was founded by a young woman who moved to Afghanistan after learning how devastated it was and that one of its few profitable export crops was poppy, used for heroin. Saffron, also valuable, grows superbly there, so she partnered with local Afghans to build an ethical, sustainable agricultural business selling functional teas blended with ethically sourced saffron, aimed at mental well-being and conflict-affected communities. A startup farming and consumer business in Afghanistan is far too risky for a conventional portfolio, but for impact investors who believe lasting change needs domestic businesses, it was ideal. US investors rallied through the Impact Foundation, and the firm has grown. Minnich, who knows the founder, praises her grit: even after the US withdrawal and the country's collapse into disarray, she still employs her farmers and factory workers.
Minnich's driving conviction is that money is rarely neutral: every investment is doing something for someone, so investors should ask what their money is doing, with whom, and whom it helps or hurts. She wants to redefine a successful investment, which we assume is one-sided (the investor earned a lot for the risk taken), forgetting the many people affected as money makes its round trip. Her image is a playground merry-go-round: the investor runs outside it, pulling it faster, while people inside, not all strapped in, fly off. The goal is not to sacrifice returns but to make it normal to weigh the externalities of how money is made.
Vanguard and the power of proxy voting
The Vanguard Group, founded by John Bogle in 1975, popularised the index fund: passive investing that holds a broad basket of stocks or bonds instead of picking winners, typically replicating indexes such as the S&P 500 (the 500 largest US public companies) or the Russell 3000 (the 3,000 largest). Bogle's first fund tracked a Standard & Poor's index created just before Vanguard, and in the fifty years since, passive investing has come to dominate.
- Passive overtakes active. At the end of 2023, US passive-fund assets exceeded active-fund assets for the first time, topping $13.29 trillion.
- Buffett's endorsement. He advises most people to own a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, buying all the big companies consistently and cheaply rather than trying to pick the right one.
- Scale. Vanguard manages over $10 trillion, more than the GDP of all but two countries, second only to BlackRock; its S&P 500 ETF alone holds about $500 billion.
The controversy is proxy voting. Shareholders may vote on board directors, executive pay and policies on matters such as DEI and ESG, but when you hold a fund through BlackRock or Vanguard, the manager votes for you. Together BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are the largest shareholder in almost 90% of S&P 500 companies, so their votes carry great weight. Coleman notes that, as anyone ordering pizza with friends knows, people rarely agree on everything, and managers voting millions of people's shares by their own convictions has angered those who see them pushing progressive agendas, leading to public battles and congressional action.
Vanguard's response is proxy voting choice, letting fund holders pick from a menu of voting policies or not vote at all. It is a partial fix, since public companies hold tens of thousands of votes a year and no individual can research them all, but it shifts power back toward the people who own the shares. AI-driven mass customisation may eventually let investors set detailed preferences and receive tailored voting. Upstarts such as Prospr Aligned and Vident Asset Management (with which Coleman is affiliated) make proxy voting and corporate engagement (letters and resolutions) central to their offering, so that even an ordinary index-fund investor with no interest in alternatives or active management can have an impact.
Accion Venture Lab, the Impact Foundation and Vanguard are three of thousands of firms; the field is now broad enough that almost any investor can find aligned partners.
Seven principles for aligned investing
Because money can be extremely complicated, Coleman offers a few simple principles to start (his figure 6-3).
- Seek an aligned adviser.
- Screen out what you don't want.
- Engage consciously.
- Allocate positively to themes and managers you are excited about.
- Invest your charitable dollars.
- Expand your options with your wealth.
- Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Any one step is a good start, and there are probably more ways in; what matters is accepting that your investments have impact and beginning a lifelong effort to direct it toward the good you want to see.
1. Seek an aligned adviser
The easiest first step, and one that enables the rest, is an adviser with whom you have a conscious conversation about your values. That may mean a firm that shares your focus across the board, or simply an individual (in a large firm or solo practice) who understands what you want to express. Managing money yourself is risky if it is not your day job; even finance professionals are wise to use advisers for their personal assets. Sit down and outline what matters. Coleman's examples:
- Environment. Screen out companies with poor environmental records and include funds or firms making positive contributions.
- Human trafficking. Make sure the portfolio is alert to trafficking in supply chains or backs companies fighting it.
- Faith. Exclude industries such as adult entertainment or alcohol, or favour companies whose traits match your view of human flourishing.
- Positive passions. Overweight entertainment and the arts, scientific research or biotechnology.
Then instruct the adviser to build those goals in, or better, choose a wealth manager focused on the same values across many portfolios, which means less confusion, time and risk.
2. Screen out what you don't want
Most people's money sits in cash (money markets), bonds and stocks, held directly or via ETFs and mutual funds, especially in 401(k)s and IRAs. For anyone who needs liquidity (who cannot lock cash in private funds), public stocks are usually the best long-run source of return: at about 10% a year, the S&P 500 has historically doubled money roughly every seven years.
- Aligned funds. For these holdings, consider sharia-compliant funds for Muslim investors, Christian faith-aligned funds from a trusted manager, or funds matching your ideology, and avoid securities that conflict with your values. Many mutual funds and ETFs apply such exclusions; an adviser can help, or you can research their screens yourself.
- Screened indexes. To buy the broad market (S&P 500, Nasdaq, Russell 3000), several off-the-shelf products exclude common categories such as alcohol and gambling.
- Direct indexing. Providers such as Vident let you hold the index's shares directly while removing the ones you don't want.
- Don't overdo it. Negative screening is a limited form of alignment. Coleman has seen lists of up to 800 securities, including hotel chains with minibars and most major media companies; such sweeping screens can hurt returns and catch firms that are not truly misaligned. Limited screens, though, give peace of mind.
- A cautionary example. One cancer charity discovered that, through index funds, it held more in tobacco stocks than it granted each year to fight cancer, and changed its holdings to exclude them. Individuals can now do the same easily.
3. Engage consciously
Owning a share means owning a piece of the company and the right to vote on key initiatives, usually exercised by proxy by your fund manager. Invest in a BlackRock S&P 500 fund and BlackRock votes your shares as it judges best, and can also engage: write to CEOs, file resolutions and push social or business positions. Fidelity, State Street, J.P. Morgan and most others do the same, and their positions differ, so part of your responsibility is to pick a manager who shares and advocates your values. Alternatively, direct indexing lets you own the S&P 500 shares yourself rather than ceding the vote through a fund; firms such as Parametric Portfolio Associates and Vident offer direct ownership plus an optional proxy-voting or engagement service that acts on your behalf.
4. Allocate positively to themes and managers you are excited about
Where screening says what you will not fund and engagement makes your voice heard, positive allocation means understanding the good you want and finding the route to invest in it, often at market rates of return.
- Health innovation. Coleman's friend Finny Kuruvilla founded Eventide, a Boston mutual-fund company that first screens out technologies or firms violating its values and then selects biotech and related treatments it believes can transform care. In Seon Hwang, through private-equity firm Ascend, builds scaled physician practices for underserved communities; Garheng Kong, CEO of HealthQuest, invests in growth-stage health companies; hundreds more exist, plus passive ETFs and mutual funds for those who prefer them.
- Energy transition. Funds and ETFs target electric vehicles, renewables and climate-friendly sectors; venture and private-equity funds back new energy sources or enforce climate goals in portfolio companies.
- Other themes. Similar options exist in education, food and more, along with country or regional funds and newer niches such as charter-school bonds that finance facilities for new and existing charter schools.
Coleman again disclaims endorsement: each investor must evaluate opportunities with an adviser who understands the risks. The aim is a dual commitment to impact and return, on the belief that solving big problems can pay, turning a routine act into one aligned with what you care about.
5. Invest your charitable dollars
Charitable money exists for charity, but many people and institutions set it aside, invest it and give over time.
- Endowments and foundations. Harvard manages about $50 billion, funding scholarships and other initiatives from investment returns; Atlanta's Robert W. Woodruff Foundation invests hundreds of millions for education, the arts and other causes. Such bodies often give only 5-7% a year and invest the rest so that they can give more over time.
- The objection. One could argue they should give in real time, and some philanthropists choose spend-down trusts like the Marcus Foundation (chapter 5). Individuals, Coleman agrees, should give and help others now.
- The case for investing meanwhile. Being deliberate about grants while investing in the interim is sensible, and those dollars are ripe for values investing. The Rockefeller Foundation has a detailed ethical-investment policy so that its investments serve the same mission as its grants (within the need for positive returns); the World Wildlife Fund treats investing as an extension of its mission, backing regenerative agriculture and sustainable forestry.
- For individuals. Few can justify a family foundation like the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative or the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, but DAFs from Fidelity, Charles Schwab, the National Christian Foundation, WaterStone, the Bradley Impact Fund or the Impact Foundation provide institutional infrastructure. You give to the DAF today (the money then technically belongs to it, held in your account and granted on your recommendation) and invest while deciding.
- Freedom to take risk. Because these dollars are already meant for others, you may feel freer to take risks or invest concessionarily (deliberately accepting below-market returns for a social mission), from aligned stocks and ETFs within the DAF to private deals via groups like the Impact Foundation. Coleman has used DAF money for entertainment projects he found meaningful and has explored charter-school bonds that lend to public charter schools serving disadvantaged children.
6. Expand your options with your wealth
A joy of investing, Coleman says, is backing remarkable entrepreneurs. In private equity, venture capital and real estate he can support world-changing founders, buy companies that treat employees well and build great cultures, or fund developments designed to create community. Public markets can be strong and impactful, but private markets (companies, developments and other entities not listed on exchanges) widen the options for both return and impact.
US rules restrict access. Below about $1.1 million of net worth (as of 2025), by Coleman's figure, most people cannot buy private securities, and becoming a qualified purchaser, able to invest in almost anything, takes $5 million or more in investable assets. Investment-firm general partners like Coleman qualify through expertise regardless of wealth. The rules aim to protect less experienced investors from products they do not understand or that are illiquid, meaning money that sometimes cannot be reached for five years or more, which is risky for anyone who might need it. As wealth crosses these thresholds, options multiply: startups, mature companies, every kind of real estate, private credit, aircraft leases and litigation finance. It is complex enough that expert advice matters even more, and because private investors often hold board seats or full control, the scope for thematic impact and cultural formation is deeper.
The book puts the US accredited investor line at "$1.1 million net worth (as of 2025)." The SEC test is $1 million net worth excluding your primary residence, or income of $200,000 ($300,000 with a spouse), plus some professional credentials; qualified purchaser status needs $5 million in investments. The 401(k), IRA and DAF vehicles are US-specific too.
7. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good
The maxim, attributed to figures from Voltaire to architect William McDonough, warns that chasing perfection blocks progress. Running a values-based firm, Coleman often meets people who are overwhelmed: unable to convert 100% of their portfolio at once, they give up before starting. Their questions are fair (can a low-cost index portfolio ever fully reflect my values? what if my 401(k) has no values options? what about my bonds or money-market cash?), but solving everything at once is exhausting and self-defeating.
- No portfolio is perfect. Few are fully aligned, including Coleman's own, and some holdings, such as gold or US Treasuries, may be essential yet have little connection to values.
- Make one change. Add one thematic ETF, or make one private investment in something you care about.
- Iterate. Dipping a toe in shows what works for you; then try a second, third or fourth step.
Coleman's closing formula: a Good Money approach to investing cares about both values and returns, pairing financial responsibility with positive social good.
Save for Freedom, Not Retirement
Coleman's closing principle takes aim at one of the most deeply held financial goals there is: conventional retirement. For people who are healthy, he argues, stopping work entirely tends to harm body, mind and society, because meaningful work is a main route to purpose, relationships and service. The right goal is not to stop working but to build enough savings to buy freedom, agency and autonomy in the work we do for the rest of our lives. The practical vehicle is a fortress balance sheet: no debt beyond a sensible mortgage, a year of cash, high savings and proper insurance.
A model "retirement": Rick Woolworth
Coleman opens with a man he thinks designed close to the perfect retirement, precisely because it was not a retirement in the usual sense.
- The career. Woolworth spent more than thirty years on Wall Street, 1977 to 2010, much of it at Morgan Stanley, where he was known for the "Woolworth rule": do the right thing by the clients. Colleagues remembered him as joyful, encouraging and effective.
- The exit. When he left investment banking and investment management in 2010, he had the means to unplug entirely: golf, his wife of more than thirty years, three daughters (later two sons-in-law and three grandchildren), three siblings and friends. He did spend more time with all of them.
- The "shadow". He also felt pursued by a sense that the next chapter should hold something more, and he was drawn to mentoring. He had benefited from good mentors and loved mentoring at work, and he took a holistic view of it: he wanted young people to build character, strong relationships (marriages above all), to serve others and to work with purpose, the same tenets of flourishing that Seligman and VanderWeele identify.
- The network. Encouraged by his wife Jill, a marriage and family therapist, he founded the Telemachus Network to link older, more experienced couples with younger ones. The name comes from Homer's Odyssey: leaving for Troy, Odysseus put his son Telemachus in the care of an older man called Mentor, the origin of the English word. Woolworth liked that the name put the focus on the protégé, not the guide.
- How it ran. The couple funded it largely themselves, hosted an annual gathering plus individual coaching and speaking sessions across the country, and charged nothing. Hundreds of people joined and thousands more heard them speak on mentorship, marriage and work.
- Still learning. He went back to school at Stanford's Distinguished Careers Institute to study mentorship further. His mission statement, in investing and mentoring alike, was "to grow fruit on other people's trees". Coleman and his wife learned from the Woolworths several times.
- The end. Fit, energetic and joyful, he died suddenly of an aortic dissection at 69. A mentee called him "the embodiment of love."
The point of the story: had Woolworth stopped after investing, he would still have been remembered fondly. But the decade he gave to others afterward was arguably (after his family) his largest impact, a legacy touching thousands of lives. Coleman uses that life as the template for reconceiving retirement, and how we save for it, in radical ways.
Why retirement dominates our plans
Retirement is a near-universal dream: work is hard, and more leisure, less stress and more time with friends and family are alluring. Everyone who lives long enough will leave the workforce eventually, by choice, by poor health or by other obligations, so it is a central topic for anyone thinking about financial flourishing.
- Saving priorities. In the US, retirement is usually the first or second reason people save, often behind emergency funds, which itself signals how financially insecure many people are.
- Ages. OECD data put the effective retirement age between 60 and 70 in most countries: lowest in Saudi Arabia and Luxembourg (59), highest in Indonesia (69), with the US dead center at 65.
- No savings at all. About 3 in 10 Americans over 59 have no retirement savings, and many young people start too late; many others end up on minimal government pensions such as Social Security at a sharply reduced standard of living.
- Readiness versus reality. Only 45% of Americans believe they are ready to retire, yet 74% find they have enough to get by when they do.
- Satisfaction. Only 4% of US retirees say they are "living the dream"; half sit somewhere between "living a nightmare" and "not great, but not bad."
The averages hide big differences between groups. The Reddit FIRE community (financial independence, retire early) maximizes earnings and savings to hit a number that lets members retire in their thirties or forties and live frugally, or aims for "Fat FIRE", a bigger pool that pays for travel and luxuries. Coleman sees some wisdom in the number-targeting, which matches his earlier idea of a financial finish line.
For readers of this book, he suspects, retirement is the top goal discussed with advisers, even among the reasonably wealthy: the dream of hanging it up like Danny Glover's detective in Lethal Weapon. The pull is easy to understand given what work feels like for most people. Coleman recalls the figures from earlier chapters: only 15% of people globally feel engaged at work, only 6-43% (depending on country) rate work as a significant source of purpose, and nearly half of professionals consider leaving their jobs in a given year. With numbers that dismal, longing to escape work makes sense.
The challenge
Coleman concedes that saving enough to retire is practically sensible: nobody knows when a medical emergency will hit or when a loved one will need full-time care. But his book is about mindsets and values, not tactics, and he uses its last principle to attack the belief that people should retire and that retirement will be good for them.
- Escape is self-defeating. Making the flight from a purposeless job a core financial goal undermines flourishing, because meaningful work, done right, delivers purpose, meaning, relationships and service; without it people tend to settle for less.
- Waiting costs the present. People of any age who wait out a meaningless job, grinding for the money and hoping to pivot later, miss the chance to live well now.
- A flawed concept for the healthy. You may leave full-time work or switch to work you love, but most healthy people should not retire in the conventional sense, so saving for retirement as such is misguided.
- The real desire. What we want, or should want, is more freedom, autonomy and purpose in our work, and the real financial goal is to make that kind of work possible: an arc like Woolworth's in which the pace may change but the work done with poet Mary Oliver's "one wild and precious life" stays important to the end.
Coleman's reframe in one line: save for freedom, not retirement. The money is the same; the target it is aimed at changes everything about how you use it.
Retirement can be bad for you
Society, Coleman says, needs to accept that retirement is not the panacea people hope for; done poorly it carries real costs to mental and physical health.
What retirees say
On self-report the picture looks good. A 2024 MassMutual survey (an insurer, which Coleman admits may be biased) found about two-thirds of retirees happier than when they worked and a third the same or worse. But around 77% had expected to be happier than they turned out to be, and about a third of all respondents felt "forlorn at times." The happier ones filled their days with loved ones, exercise, hobbies and travel. So the promise is there, especially when retirement is done well; peel back the self-reports, though, and the research turns darker.
What the health research finds
- Johns Hopkins Medicine. Leaving the workforce can raise the chance of heart disease and other serious conditions by 40%; older adults who volunteered 100+ hours a year were two-thirds less likely to have poor health and a third less likely to die than non-volunteers.
- Harvard School of Public Health. Retirees were 40% more likely to have a heart attack or stroke than people still working.
- National Bureau of Economic Research. Complete retirement brought a 5-16% rise in difficulties with mobility and daily activities, 5-6% more illness conditions and a 6-9% decline in mental health. The harm was mitigated by being married with social support, staying physically active, or working part-time.
- Chenkai Wu, Oregon State University. Delaying retirement by one year, 65 to 66, lowered mortality by 9%; Wu points to the activity, engagement and peer contact that work supplies and that can vanish abruptly.
- Social Security Administration study. Men retiring at exactly 62 had 23% higher odds of dying than men retiring at 63, and 24% higher than those retiring at 64.
- Institute of Economic Affairs, Europe. 9,000+ participants across 12 EU countries: declining self-assessed health, more clinical depression, more physical illness and a higher probability of needing medication.
The mechanism Coleman offers is straightforward: retirement often brings more isolation, less activity and fewer sources of purpose and direction, all linked to decline. He adds the growing evidence that challenging mental activity supports health and helps ward off dementia in older people. The European study adds a telling time profile: retirees felt better for about a year, then physical and mental health noticeably deteriorated, presumably as activity, meaning and social contact fell away. Its author suggested rethinking the balance of work and retirement to avoid the harm; Coleman's reading is that the conventional model, stopping work entirely, may be counterproductive.
Purpose after work
This fits the flourishing research: Seligman and VanderWeele tie the good life to community, relationships, service, purpose, meaning, health and well-being, all of which can shrink when people retire without a future direction. A study indexed by the National Library of Medicine looked at purpose and retirement directly; results were mixed, but the overall trend went the expected way.
- Who gained. Only low-income people who had found little purpose in their jobs got a boost from retiring, and it faded over time.
- Who lost. For people in higher income bands, like most of Coleman's readers, losing the identity and meaning of work was a net negative.
- What we have all seen. Younger readers have watched a parent, grandparent or mentor decline after retiring, or someone eager for pure leisure turn bored and aimless; older readers know friends who found unlimited free time came at the cost of meaning.
- Selection. Poor health often forces people to retire, so the 40% heart and stroke figures are associations, not proof that retiring causes illness; the studies that try to control for this (NBER, Wu) show smaller and more varied effects.
- Engagement. Coleman repeats the older 15% engagement figure here, then cites Gallup's current 23% (2023) a few pages later.
- Naming. The book calls the European source the "Institute for Economic Affairs"; it is the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free-market UK think tank that has argued for later retirement ages, so its framing is not neutral.
The cost to society
Woolworth's story also shows that the traditional model is bad for society. Older people hold a large, untapped stock of wisdom and experience that could change families, communities and workplaces.
- Long retirements. A US man who reaches 70 typically lives to 85 (and half live longer); a woman to 87. In high-longevity countries such as Japan the figures run higher, so the average person now spends 20-22 years in retirement, many living into their nineties.
- Unmet needs. Community organizations and schools face perennial shortages of volunteers, and many workplaces have roles best filled part-time by someone experienced.
- Beyond family. Most retirees do lean in with their families, but a broader world could use their perspective, and thinking about retirement creatively could also change its financial calculus.
Coleman is clear that he is not asking 80-year-olds to work like 20-year-olds, or anyone to grind full-time until death. His claim is narrower: drop the conventional view of retirement from your plans, and even if you can afford to retire, use the savings to fund new direction, meaning, service and relationships.
Save for financial freedom
If retirement is the wrong target, what is the right one? Two things.
- Never accept disengagement. Refuse purposelessness or meaninglessness at work (the subject of chapter 3), aim to see purpose in every dollar you earn, and actively craft your workdays and career toward it.
- Buy autonomy. What makes that far more achievable is having the financial means to purchase autonomy and freedom in your work.
- The man. Coleman's father-in-law was one of the kindest, happiest and most other-centered people he knew. He met Coleman's mother-in-law Sandy in middle school; they became close friends and started dating in college. A love of children and medicine made him a pediatrician, adored by parents and kids, and he had three children of his own.
- The move. When his Rhode Island hospital closed, he joined a private practice in the suburbs of Atlanta, trading a hospital job for one with more ownership, agency and autonomy. He became a community fixture, an extrovert who loved socializing and service. Financial prudence, plus Sandy's own career, made the switch low-risk.
- The taper. In his late fifties he began to reduce his workload gradually: fewer weekends on call, less paperwork, but no quitting the job he loved. The freed time went to children and grandchildren, model trains, his place of worship and especially a weekly prison ministry, leading a group meant to share love with incarcerated men.
- How they afforded it. Elliot and Sandy saved aggressively, both worked most of their lives, avoided conspicuous consumption and took family vacations well within their means. Sandy kept working as a magazine editor (she still does); neither wanted to retire, only to make time for what they loved.
- The legacy. He died of pancreatic cancer. Hundreds came to his memorials, and the inmates in his group held their own memorial service at the prison, giving his wife and children crafts made in his honor.
Coleman reads Feit's legacy as having two sources: a habit of giving everything he did a purpose, and the prudent money management that gave him room to shape his career to fit his life at each stage.
Agency and autonomy
- Agency. In psychology, the feeling of control over actions and their consequences: being in the driver's seat of your own life. It is one reason Coleman prefers the idea that purpose is built, not found, since that makes us shapers of our lives rather than passive observers. A Chilean study found agency as important to psychological well-being as income.
- Autonomy. The ability to make choices yourself rather than having others make them for you. It is what children and teenagers rightly feel they lack while parents are in charge, it drives happiness and life satisfaction broadly, and it matters most at work.
Gallup's 2023 survey put global engagement at 23% and estimated that disengagement costs workplaces $8 trillion a year in productivity, almost 10% of global GDP. High-engagement companies report higher client satisfaction, retention, productivity and profitability, but Coleman cares more about the individual: nobody wants to turn up every day disengaged, and disengaged employees are exactly the ones who long to retire.
A growing body of research makes autonomy a central driver of engagement: people who feel some control and self-direction (autonomy) and believe their output matters (agency) are happier and more engaged.
| Study | Sample | Finding |
|---|---|---|
| Denmark | 4,340 people | Job autonomy positively linked to psychological well-being |
| Colombia and Spain | 1,100+ young people | Nearly every dimension of the Psychological Well-Being Scale correlated with the EDATVA autonomy scale |
| United Kingdom | 20,000 people | More control over tasks and schedule linked to higher reported well-being |
The common-sense version: we work better when the work matters, affects others well and leaves us agency and autonomy over how to do it. With those, most people would not want to retire in the usual sense; they would want to contribute.
The real target: a buffer
The goal worth aspiring to is an adequate financial buffer that guarantees agency and autonomy at work: freedom to switch jobs, go part-time, travel, spend time with others or pursue passions, and to take risks and make bold choices.
What FIRE gets right. Building financial flexibility early (sometimes too intensely): no debt, living within your means, investing well, earning a good living, so you can pursue the life you want at any time.
Where it goes wrong. Members who use the money to retreat into pure leisure. Coleman's better models: Anand Kesavan moving into nonprofit work on schools, Davis Smith funding the launch of Cotopaxi, Woolworth leaving Wall Street early to mentor, and Feit cutting hours for family and prison ministry.
Even people who never change employers gain: a buffer gives the confidence to job craft, working with an employer to reshape a role around their talents and impact.
The arithmetic of freedom
The good news is that freedom can be cheaper than retirement.
- The 4% rule. You can safely withdraw about 4% of savings a year for living costs, so a target is annual need ÷ 0.04.
- Full retirement. A $50,000 lifestyle needs $1.25 million so the money never runs out.
- Freedom. Earning $50,000 and moving to a more fulfilling job paying $35,000, you only need to replace the $15,000 gap: $15,000 ÷ 0.04 = $375,000.
- Plus a cushion. Add an emergency fund of perhaps 12 months of expenses and your autonomy rises sharply.
- Freedom comes in waves. First, a pool big enough in your twenties, thirties or forties to take passion work that pays less; later, enough for part-time work, volunteering, travel, family and cultural enrichment.
A nurse for 55 years who beat cancer twice (in her twenties and sixties) and lost 25% of her lung capacity, Hillary had saved for freedom, not retirement. At 75, in 2007, she became the first Black woman to reach the North Pole, and later the first to reach the South Pole. She reinvented herself as a public speaker and activist, traveled to Mongolia to speak in 2019 shortly before her death that year, was honored by Congress and the National Organization for Women, and was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
The book places Hillary's South Pole trip "five years later" than 2007; she reached it in January 2011, about four years later.
Build a fortress balance sheet
What we save for
Retirement is only one of many saving goals. Young people save for college, a car or a phone; later come funds for emergencies (health events, job loss), childcare and education (through tools such as 529 plans), home ownership, and small luxuries like vacations. Invested for impact, that money also compounds. Behind all of it sits one idea: well-used money buys freedom for life's most important pursuits and a fortress against storms, so that we master money rather than it mastering us: freedom from money itself.
Where the idea comes from
Coleman takes the phrase from Greg Brenneman, a turnaround CEO and investor, and his book Right Away and All at Once: 5 Steps to Transform Your Business and Enrich Your Life. Brenneman ran Continental Airlines, PwC Consulting, Burger King and Quiznos before becoming a private equity investor at CCMP Capital, and argues that his turnaround principles apply to living well too.
- The J.P. Morgan example. Under Jamie Dimon, the bank went into the 2007-2009 financial crisis with a "fortress balance sheet": capital comfortably above the legal minimum. That may have trimmed short-term shareholder returns, but it let the firm survive almost any single shock, act as a partner to the US government in stabilizing the economy, and acquire and stabilize weaker rivals that had been less prudent.
- "Cash is king." In every turnaround, whether of a company, a nonprofit or a person, one of Brenneman's first moves was to check the budget and balance sheet and make sure they were ready for whatever might come.
Translating it to a person
For an individual, the fortress is a cash and investment position that ensures you are never in financial trouble because of events outside your control. Pieces covered earlier already belong here: the 4% rule sizes what you need to live on, and a cash emergency fund, ideally 12 months, carries you if the worst happens. Two further rules: never have a negative net worth, and, following Brenneman, carry no debt on cards, cars or anything else except perhaps an appropriately sized mortgage. If savings are thin, you live at the mercy of your job, the markets and circumstance; if the balance sheet is strong, you earn the freedom to work with purpose, help others and invest with impact.
- Track net worth and never let it go negative, even early in your career. College is the hardest stage; manage it with summer and part-time work and a clear-eyed view of what education you can afford.
- Hold an emergency fund in cash or money-market funds worth 6-12 months of spending.
- Keep housing under 20% of income, and keep at least 20% equity in any mortgaged home (a 20% down payment on a purchase); this takes real discipline in expensive markets such as the US or Australia.
- Carry no other personal debt (business debt is a separate question), with the possible exception of a car.
- Invest at least 20% of income every year (30%+ in peak earning years), aiming for enough to cover basic expenses by 55, in retirement or ordinary brokerage accounts. Example: $20,000 a year from age 22 at 8% grows to almost $3 million by 55 (about $1.6 million after inflation), great career freedom, especially if you own your home by then.
- Carry adequate disability and life insurance against the most unexpected events and to protect your loved ones.
Coleman notes the right fortress depends on age, health and spending, so these are rules of thumb for the average person, not a formula. The arithmetic in rule 5 holds up: 33 annual deposits of $20,000 at 8% come to roughly $2.9 million in nominal terms.
A fortress takes discipline, realism and sacrifice, but Coleman's point is that it buys freedom from money itself: the security to pursue purposeful work, help others and invest with impact at any age, which is what a flourishing "retirement" like Woolworth's or Feit's actually required.
Good Money and Kids
Once Good Money habits take hold personally, Coleman turns to the people around us, above all children. For the families he works with, especially wealthy ones, kids and money is often the single largest source of stress. His answer is to start not with money but with a family mission, vision and values, then raise children as financial apprentices who learn to earn, spend, give and invest alongside their parents, and finally to treat inheritance with great care. Parents who aim only at their children's financial independence often miss the real goal: a foundation for a good life, with money taught as the means to it.
The questions this chapter answers
Coleman recaps the book's countercultural program in a line: change how you think about money; earn, spend, give and invest wisely; save for freedom, not retirement. Simple concepts, rarely practiced. Applied to children, they raise three questions:
- How do you teach kids to manage money well?
- How do you give them a financial foundation for flourishing while shielding them from the destructive side of too much wealth, especially inherited wealth?
- How much is enough to provide, and how much should they be expected to earn themselves?
Not every reader faces these yet, he admits, but in wealthy families they are frequently the number one source of stress.
Wealth and kids
What parents want
Parents care intensely about their children, and about their children's money.
- Identity. 87% of US parents say their children are among the most important parts of who they are.
- Reward. 82% say having children is rewarding most or all of the time.
- Sacrifice. A majority would give up almost anything (vacations, social media, even best friends) to secure their children's well-being.
- The top goal. In Pew Research Center data, 88% say it is extremely or very important that their kids reach financial independence and have jobs or careers they enjoy, parents' number one goal.
Around the world parents want their children to have more prosperity and financial freedom than they did. Coleman calls the goal admirable, especially for people who have known poverty, and repeats his steady point that flourishing is hard without the financial stability that supports meaningful work, health, relationships and community.
How the goal backfires
The trouble starts when parents treat financial security as the end rather than a means in their children's lives. Then they teach the wrong priorities or spend their own time in counterproductive ways.
- Time matters most. One study found quality time with parents the best predictor of child flourishing.
- Parents' health matters. Another tied children's flourishing to parental health and well-being, both things some parents sacrifice in order to provide.
- The trap. For some families longer hours are genuinely necessary, but parents often assume their kids need the money from extra work more than a healthy, happy parent. Usually they do not.
Too much money harms children
Anyone who has spent time around wealthy people knows that excess money can be destructive for children.
- Suniya Luthar, "The Problem with Rich Kids." Children of the affluent show disturbingly high rates of substance use, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, cheating and stealing.
- National Institutes of Health. Upper-class children show elevated disturbance in substance use, anxiety and depression, traced to two factors: excessive pressure to achieve and isolation from parents, both literal and emotional.
- Norway and other studies. Inherited wealth lowers labor-force participation among heirs, unsurprising to anyone who knows multigenerational wealth but troubling given how much meaningful work matters to flourishing.
- The proverb. A Chinese saying holds that families go "from rags to rags in three generations", which Coleman finds true of many wealthy families.
Coleman keeps both sides in view: being poor is harder than being rich, and that is worth remembering. But wealth that is not stewarded can have tragic effects on families.
The questions change with wealth
| Family situation | Typical money questions |
|---|---|
| Middle class | Whether and when to pay an allowance; tie it to chores?; summer and after-school jobs; help with a first car, phone or college; how far kids choose their own purchases |
| Growing wealth | How lavish birthday parties, clothes and experiences should be |
| Significant wealth | Inheritance, family giving, trusts, foundations, vacation homes |
What he has seen go wrong, and right
Working with families of extraordinary means, Coleman has seen both faces of family wealth.
- The bad. Kids lose focus and never find purpose in a career; substance abuse; siblings torn apart over money; children waiting for parents to die to inherit, and parents resenting their kids; young people losing touch with reality, living beyond their means, never learning the value of hard work and resilience. Every generation can find that poorly managed money is a trap that makes a meaningful life harder.
- The good. A planned, thoughtful approach can build great relationships and generosity, give families time to live deeply with one another, and buy kids autonomy: a good education, a business, or measured professional risks. Very few parents, especially those who grew up without money, do not want their kids always to have food, shelter and health care; Coleman's own family dreamed of that for him.
- Even without wealth. Teaching Good Money habits early gives children a proper relationship with money for the future.
The lesson Coleman draws from families who have already succeeded: those who reached the goal of financial independence for their children often realize that the true goal was a foundation for a good life, built on the book's principles, with money taught as what enables it.
Coleman's framework
Coleman maps the chapter onto a simple house, aligned with the book's earn, spend, give, invest steps.
The order of the chapter follows it: ground everything in a family mission, vision and values; teach through apprenticeship (parents model behavior, give age-appropriate visibility and a voice on family finances, and let kids learn by doing); work through the four pillars; and close with inheritance, one of the most complex topics any parent faces.
Collaborate on a family mission, vision and values
The right place to start, Coleman says, is not with money at all. Because money is only a means to the good life, the first conversation is about what flourishing together means for your family.
Some elements are close to universal. The VanderWeele and Seligman frameworks, and similar ones in many faith and philosophical traditions, agree that nobody thrives without meaningful relationships, character, virtue and service. But each family differs, and parents should decide consciously what a successful life looks like and how to pass that on. Companies state a mission, vision and values; families should too.
- Mission (from their faith). "Love God and love others" and "live justly, love mercy, and walk humbly."
- Parenting vision. Raise well-adjusted, independent, faithful adults who want to spend time with their parents and each other.
- Values. "Kind, curious, and courageous", worked out with the children when they were very young.
- How it is used. The statements are fleshed out in the family's life philosophy, in the rules set for kids and parents, and in how the parents model behavior. Life is complex, but simple statements anchor the family when it sorts through complex issues, money included.
Why firms push mission statements
Two wealth firms make the case for linking a family mission to money.
- Ashley Bleckner, Ellevest. A mission statement gives purpose and direction, which drive life satisfaction, so there is no reason to keep them at work. Writing one together deepens connection, helps resolve disagreements and leads to better decisions, and it is most useful for money, because money talk is never only about money: it carries generational differences and gender expectations, strong emotion, a sense of competition inside families, and taboos that make people avoid the subject altogether.
- Brown Advisory. For high-net-worth families, a mission statement plus a strategic plan to carry it out lets a family filter out the "background noise" of daily problems and focus on long-term goals. The process builds agreement on core values and a shared vision. The statement itself is a succinct account of purpose and values with three components: personal, financial and philanthropic; the strategic plan sets out the goals and the actions needed to reach them.
Money is a tool, not the goal, so Coleman suggests three questions to build a values-driven foundation.
- What is our family's mission statement? The core impact you hope to leave, what it says about your beliefs, and whether it is pithy enough to remember yet distinct enough to guide decisions.
- What is our vision, as parents, for our kids? What you hope for their adult lives, aligned with the mission but giving parents more direction on child-rearing choices, and reaching beyond financial security.
- What values do we embrace in pursuit of that mission and vision? A succinct list of anchor virtues, not a comprehensive one, ideally crafted with the kids and allowed to evolve.
Question 1: the mission
- Priscilla Claman ("What's Your Family's Mission Statement?", Harvard Business Review). Her childhood motto was "We never get seasick." They never did, literally, but it meant that whatever others around you were doing (being sick over the rail), you stepped up, spoke up and defended your position, even with your parents. The result: loud dinners and persistent adults. One line could not hold everything the family believed, but it was a rallying cry for courage, resilience and perseverance, from which more detailed beliefs could flow.
- The Rivo family (American Academy of Family Physicians). In several short family meetings, each person's voice carried equal weight: Jessica, 9, wanted to grow a rose garden, skate better and do well in school; Julie, 6, wanted to be a good student and make new friends; parents Karen and her husband wanted to volunteer in the community. They settled on "be thankful for what we have and what we can give to others" and ten family priorities. The statement is framed on the kitchen counter, and each year they review accomplishments, reassess priorities and revise it.
Coleman draws the money thread out of the Rivo mission: gratitude and giving imply a financial life of moderation, gratitude and generosity. That becomes explicit in one priority, "perform mitzvoth (good deeds) for the community," which leads to another, "invest in the future financially, professionally and spiritually."
His advice for writing your own: sit down with the family, whatever the children's ages, talk about the good life and your family's distinctive approach, and do not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Revise it like a company would, but make it memorable, fun, distinctive and authentic.
Question 2: the parenting vision
Vision and mission are often used interchangeably; here the vision is a statement of what you hope for your children's future, consistent with the mission but more directive about parenting choices.
- Independent and well adjusted. The Colemans want their kids ready for whatever life brings, so they let them work through problems alone, have adventures and fail in manageable, educational ways. Independence also requires the financial security to live alone.
- Faithful. True to the family's philosophical principles and religious faith.
- Wanting to spend time together. If that holds in twenty years, the parents will have taught the value of family and relationships and built real connection, and the children will have companions for their own "wild and precious" lives.
- A fuller example. Dennis Trittin and Arlyn Lawrence (Parenting for the Launch) aim to raise leaders of excellence who live purposefully and honorably, know and passionately offer their unique assets, leave a legacy of significance and joyful service, value relationships and faith, show gratitude and courage, and live knowing they are loved unconditionally and believed in.
Whatever the wording, Coleman's test is that your vision reaches beyond financial security and describes the good life set out in your mission.
Question 3: the values
The list of possible virtues is nearly endless (character, generosity, resilience, grace, love, prudence, courage, kindness), so a family's values should be a short list of anchor virtues that serve the shared mission. Meagan Rose Wilson, who counsels families on mission, vision and values, publishes her own family's fifteen.
- Love one another through thick and thin.
- Surround the children with what is beautiful, good and true.
- Get outside every day to connect with and respect nature.
- Plant, grow, get dirty and harvest.
- Be kind.
- Respect, love, compassion and empathy for others and the planet.
- Share, and be gracious, grateful and humble.
- Teach and lead by example, being the change you want to see.
- Be faithful, proud, honest and supportive of one another.
- Be passionate about learning, expanding and growing.
- Read, read and read some more.
- Keep a quiet, reflective, inward practice each day.
- Surround yourselves with music, art and creativity.
- Learn about other countries, languages, religions, cultures and traditions.
- Find beauty in all your differences.
Coleman likes the list because it states familiar virtues (kindness, love, creativity) in catchy, distinctive ways and mixes them with practices: "read, read and read some more" both names a value (education) and describes a habit that supports the rest. His own family's "kind, curious, and courageous" was chosen when the kids were small and their problems simpler; it is punchy and memorable and may change as life gets more complex. What counts is the family conversation and the guidance it produces on good and bad behavior for individuals and the family as a unit.
How this connects to money
- Independence implies the financial freedom to live on your own and pursue a thriving life.
- Hard work implies that each person has something to offer, that work is about dignity and contribution, and that money means more when earned.
- Relationship and service almost always imply generosity, financial generosity included.
Family values should concern life's ends, the intrinsically meaningful things, and treat financial stability as a means. Anchoring first in mission, vision and values points the family's money habits toward children who flourish.
Embrace financial apprenticeship
With a mission, vision and values the kids helped shape, parents can start early showing how money habits connect to those values, and apprentice children in Good Money.
- What apprenticeship meant. A traditional apprentice attached himself to an experienced tradesman, a carpenter say, and learned firsthand until he mastered the craft, quite unlike classroom instruction. Paul Revere began as a silversmith's apprentice to his father at 13, a normal age for the trade then; George Washington started as a surveyor's apprentice at 15.
- Its modern forms. A junior management consultant absorbs a senior colleague's work; a young electrician follows an older one on jobs until she knows the trade.
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Applied to money. Train kids not by teaching but by apprenticing: involve them early in family financial decisions, give them growing responsibility, give them visibility into how parents think about and manage money, and give them ways to practice the values themselves.
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Stockpile survey. 64% of teens rely on parents for financial education, yet only 20% of parents talk money with their kids regularly.
- Visibility. 45% of Americans of any age say they have no understanding of their parents' finances.
- Slowly improving. Only 10% of people 55+ learned investing from their parents, against 29% of 18-34-year-olds.
- Global literacy. Only 33% of adults worldwide are financially literate, which Coleman links partly to the lack of intentional apprenticeship at home.
Kids look to parents more than any other source for financial modeling, but many parents never structure real conversations. The apprenticeship follows the earn, spend, give, invest sequence and has four parts: model the right behavior, talk openly about it, educate through intentional experiences, and, most important, go beyond literacy by coaching children through their own decisions, letting them try practices alone, and letting them fail and learn under the guidance of someone who loves them.
Connect meaningful work and money
Money matters more when it is earned, and earning without meaning runs against what we know about flourishing. So from early on parents should link meaningful work and money, offering opportunity but not entitlement, and a grounded sense of what financial stability will demand of the child.
Talk about your own work
- Explain the why. When a child asks why a parent is leaving in the morning, "I have to go to work" is the usual answer. Go further: work is how the family pays for food, housing, clothes, education and other necessities.
- Show what things cost. As children grow, let them see real prices, so they have a realistic picture of independent life and of what a career must provide; many high school and college graduates are shocked when they first support themselves.
- Explain the meaning. Have age-appropriate talks about what you do and why it is meaningful, or how you work to make it so.
Model it
Children see far more than parents think, and every professional decision is a lesson being absorbed.
- Shirking discipline and hard work sets an example that can damage children over time.
- Overworking when wealthy, at the expense of family time, teaches that money matters more than relationships.
- Never showing purpose in work, as both a route to independence and a way to direct talents meaningfully and missionally, leaves kids thinking a job is only money.
Bring kids into your work
Coleman loves going beyond Take Your Child to Work Day. A colleague, Tom, took his children on business trips once they were old enough: they joined client meetings, dressed the part and briefed and debriefed with him. Coleman now does the same, starting with his oldest child, who travels with him, meets clients, joins lunches and dinners and visits portfolio companies. Direct exposure demystifies work, shows why it matters and shows how an adult can earn purposefully.
Make them earn
Almost every flourishing wealthy family Coleman knows makes its kids work young: cutting grass or cleaning bathrooms before they can work outside the home, waiting tables or landscaping at 16.
- Household chores (from age 4-5). Everyone carries age-appropriate responsibility for running the home; a chore chart helps. Young children dress themselves after bath time, tidy their toys and put dirty clothes in the hamper; older ones walk the dog, mow the lawn, wash dishes, set the table, do their own laundry, even tutor or babysit younger siblings. Escalating tasks build responsibility.
- Allowance. More than 1 in 3 US families pay one, over 60% of them under $20 a week, and those families discuss money decisions more. Tie it to chores so it rewards work and shows consequences when work is skipped; amounts depend on the family's means and rise with obligations. Pay it in cash using the three-jars method (spending, giving, saving), through a kids' platform such as Greenlight, or via a ledger the child keeps so parents can coach.
- A neighborhood business (around 12). Weeding or mowing for neighbors, turned into a real business with a name and strategy; or an Etsy craft store; or produce sold at a farmers market. Keep it in proportion: school and the joy of childhood come first.
- Formal jobs (mid-teens). Lifeguard, ice cream shop, waiting tables, a summer construction crew. These matter most of all.
Coleman learned some of his best lessons as a 16-year-old Applebee's busboy and a 17-year-old sales associate at an outdoor sports and fitness store during high school summers: the value of money and hard work, plus a bank account and early money management while he still lived at home, so his parents could see and coach his decisions before college made them more complex.
Who works summer jobs
- Decline. Almost 60% of work-eligible teens had summer jobs in 1979; by 2024 it was 38%.
- The surprise. Wealthier kids work most: 44-46% in households earning over $100,000, against 27% under $30,000.
- Coleman's reading. Social factors such as access to jobs play a part, but families with positive money mindsets also tend to pass them on, building habits around work that last.
Coleman's mindset explanation is one hypothesis. Labor economists usually stress job access: lower-income teens are more often in areas with fewer openings, lack transport or networks, or already work year-round to support the household, which summer-only figures miss. The chart shows correlation, not that affluent parents instil better attitudes.
Jobs do more than teach the value of a dollar. They create natural openings to talk about crafting purpose at work using the four sources from chapter 3: serving others, learning and growing a craft, building relationships, and fitting work to your talents. Any job, from walking dogs to waiting tables, has purpose, and the earlier children learn that, the likelier they are to flourish in their careers. Jobs also build grit, resilience, self-reliance and endurance, skills best started early, with a loving parent coaching.
Model and moderate spending
What should children do with money from chores, a landscaping business or a summer job? Spend, give and invest it alongside their parents, starting with spending.
In Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs tells Wired how the family chose a new washer and dryer. American machines, he concluded, were made "all wrong"; European ones used about a quarter of the water and far less detergent, left clothes cleaner, softer and longer-lasting, but took twice as long. The family debated the trade-off (an hour's wash or ninety minutes; soft, durable clothes; a quarter of the water) and talked about design and family values at dinner every night for about two weeks. They bought a German Miele, which Jobs said thrilled him more than any high tech in years.
The family was by then extraordinarily wealthy: it could have hired a laundry service or bought the priciest machine. But Jobs cared about design, function and detail and lived with surprising moderation, so a minuscule purchase became a teaching moment about the value of money, careful consideration, and thinking about the purpose of even mundane buys. That, Coleman says, is apprenticeship: involving the whole family in decisions in a way that models healthy decision-making.
Explain and model
The book has already named good outlets for spending (experiences, health, relationships and time) and shown that lavish consumption fulfils no one at any income. Many parents, though, never explain their spending, or model the wrong things.
- Explain. Share what you spend on and why: family vacations and travel, household help that frees quality time, a gym membership for health, restraint on luxury goods. Kids then see how the habits connect to a philosophy.
- Model. A parent who preaches "experiences, not stuff" but skips the family trip to buy a sports car or a watch teaches the lesson seen, not heard.
- Accountability. Knowing the children are watching gives parents an extra reason to hold to their own principles, and every purchase is a chance, as for the Jobses, to talk it through.
Entitlement or opportunity
Beyond those habits, parents should ask whether money kids spend, or money spent on them, builds entitlement or opportunity.
Entitlement. The core fear of wealthy families. Entitled people never learn the value of hard work: given too much, they lose motivation or come to expect the world to provide, breeding dependency and arrogance. Hard work for money is its opposite, but spending priorities can feed it too.
Opportunity. For big-ticket items, favor what creates advancement and growth. The Colemans spend freely (within means) on books, educational games, museums, classes and camps; on decent gear for activities kids work at (a guitar, good basketball shoes, sturdy book bags); and modestly on relationship-building (birthday parties, friends to the zoo, a game with Mom and Dad), watching for entitlement.
Keep them hungry
The biggest error Coleman sees wealthy families make is a safety net so solid that children never struggle.
- "Keep 'em poor." At a marriage retreat run by Greg and Ronda Brenneman (Greg a private equity executive and CEO) and Britt and Julia Harris (Britt a renowned investor), a session on wealth and kids came down to Britt's rule: never let family wealth raise the children's standard of living or let them think they would not have to build their own wealth and careers.
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Silent trusts. Several of Coleman's friends are building trusts for their children but not telling them until the right habits, mindsets and values around work and spending are in place.
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The business no one can cash in. One of the wealthiest families Coleman knows owns a company nobody in the family can ever sell out of: half of profits are reinvested, half go to charity. Children and grandchildren may work there but must interview for jobs and are paid market rate, nothing more.
- Income matching. Another family will match its adult children's earnings up to a cap, so they can live comfortably as teachers or ministers without ever receiving unearned wealth.
None of this stops families providing for children; all parents want better lives for them. Some spending naturally creates opportunity: summer camps, college, family travel, seed capital for a small business. Coleman's approach is to fund those from the family's success while making kids build their own foundation for consumer spending, which teaches responsibility and the gradual earning of financial agency and autonomy.
Share a passion for generosity
Chapter 5 told how David Robinson caught a passion for helping others from his father, Jackie. The pattern repeats: when parents are generous and involve their children with real zeal, the children grow more generous.
- Fidelity Charitable. Among the 69% of parents who give, 81% had children who were generous in the past year, and 51% of those children gave money as well as time; 54% of parents said having kids raised giving's priority in their own lives.
- Strong traditions. A second Fidelity Charitable study found families with "strong giving traditions" give more, volunteer more and report closer bonds in immediate and extended family.
- Costly helping. A study in Psychological Science found, as in adults, that children who help others at a cost to themselves promote their own well-being too.
- Clinical view. Sara Loftin, a clinical therapist at Children's Health in Dallas, says giving builds gratitude (foundational to optimism and joy) plus empathy, kindness and perspective-taking, which make relationships deeper.
- Mental health. Via the nonprofit news network Charitable Advisors: a UTHealth Houston study found children who volunteer 18-35% less likely to have anxiety or depression, and the National Institute on Out-of-School Time reports 76% of volunteering children feel happier and more connected than peers.
None of this surprises Coleman: the book has argued that service, including giving, is a main path to meaning and happiness, so families who give and serve together should be closer and happier.
Family giving in practice
- The Korns. Usa and Tommy Korn volunteer with their teenagers Iris and Lucas at Feeding San Diego, a Southern California hunger charity. The kids started it through a school requirement and then pulled their parents in. Iris calls Friday evenings there a weekly "refresh" for the family; Usa says they have no real parent-teenager problems.
- The Colemans. They sponsor economically disadvantaged children overseas through Compassion International, a lesson that scales with a family's resources.
- Four generations. An enormously wealthy client family spends sparingly but gives and invests conscientiously, with every member involved. A family committee decides philanthropic allocations; all members may join, to learn careful giving and watch elders model it. Opinions count even when an experienced subset decides. Katherine Dunlevie, a veteran multifamily office leader, calls this separating "a voice and a vote": kids contribute ideas without final authority, and the voice can grow into a vote.
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Thanksgiving DAF meeting. A smaller family meets every Thanksgiving to allocate its donor-advised fund: everyone brings ideas, they talk them through, allocate, and celebrate their gratitude together.
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Self-perpetuating. Committed multigenerational giving lets each new generation learn its benefits for themselves and their communities, draws families closer, and teaches that those with resources and talents have some obligation to pay them forward.
- Give first. Whether with jars, ledgers or apps, many families have kids allocate to giving before spending or investing, so the habit becomes consistent, free and larger over time, often paired with hands-on service at the organizations they fund.
Coleman's conclusion: lives are better when we give time, talent and treasure, the effect is especially strong for children, and Good Money families should bake generosity into their mission and values and serve together.
Invest together over time
Compounding for children
- $10,000 at birth in the S&P 500, never added to, grows to about $1.2 million nominal ($200,000+ after inflation) by age 50.
- $10,000 at 15 plus $10,000 a year until 50 reaches nearly $1.3 million in inflation-adjusted terms, which Coleman puts at 4 times the US median net worth and 144 times the global median.
Chapter 6 showed the power of compounding; it is strongest for kids who start early under a parent's guidance. Coleman keeps the priority in its place: financial stability stays secondary to a flourishing life. But parents who want wealth for their kids do best by teaching investing early and apprenticing them in managing money, so that by adulthood the habits, mindsets and values are in place.
- Open an account early, even on the day they are born, with as little as $500. Options: a formal vehicle the child owns, such as a trust; a custodial account (the child's, run by a parent until the age of maturity); or a tracked subaccount in your own brokerage (a later transfer may trigger gift tax). A 529 education plan or local equivalent adds a second lesson: valuing and planning for education while learning how investing works.
- Run a "bank of Mom and Dad." Friends Christian and Brooke Hempell have their kids split allowance one-third each into giving, saving and spending. The parents double the giving bucket, pay 50% interest on savings (reduced as balances grow) and pay nothing on spending: money not spent earns money, the central tenet of investing.
- Move to real markets as the child matures (about 12 or 13): money-market funds, equity ETFs or single stocks. Watching their own accounts turns it into a game, with harder lessons: markets fall and money can be lost, when to persevere through a downturn and when to cut losses, and how risk and reward pair. A child who learns this early leaves home far better equipped.
- Include them in family investments, cautiously. A parent's $100,000 or $1 million can be hard for a child to grasp and can teach the wrong lessons: comparing family wealth with friends' (breaching family privacy) or assuming the money is theirs, which breeds entitlement. Some kids are ready sooner; some parents never open the books fully. Newport Capital Group advises that maturity matters more than age, along with the complexity of your finances and your goals (business succession, philanthropy or independence). Done right, visibility gives perspective and peace of mind (only about half of people understand their parents' finances) and prepares heirs for eventual responsibility.
- Bring adult children into the family office. Most wealthy families Coleman works with eventually introduce children to their family offices. Several friends now run portfolios for parents, siblings and even cousins, with professional advisers and family investment committees of educated members who vote on new investments. Some heirs neither want nor suit the role and rely on professionals; families that last for decades or centuries have a deliberate process for bringing each generation in.
- Teach literacy through real decisions: mortgages, student loans, retirement plans, emergency funds, proper use of credit cards and credit scores. Lessons taught and guided through real management stick better than classroom ones.
- Make impact visible. Coleman's children know the family invests in private companies, funds and movie productions and have visited some in person, which makes investing real and shows the family's values. A family holding a stock might visit the company and discuss practices it admires and how it treats employees and customers. Investment dollars sit behind almost every company and real estate development, with influence for good or bad.
The "4 times median net worth" figure does not square with the book's own US median of more than $192,000 (chapter 6), which would make $1.3 million closer to 6.7 times. The $10,000-at-birth projection also assumes about 10% nominal returns for 50 years, and leaves aside fees and taxes.
Approach inheritance with care
The last topic is often the hardest for families with significant means: how to transfer wealth. Each family must decide how much to leave, how, who oversees it, what rules heirs must meet and what structure fits. Coleman leaves tax and legal design to estate attorneys and wealth advisers and offers values and tools instead.
The starting principles
- Unearned wealth is bad for people. It damages self-worth, resilience and drive, and can cause wandering and purposelessness or feed entitlement and addiction.
- Sudden wealth is worse. Studies of lottery winners and professional athletes show calamitous results for the unprepared.
- Age helps. Older, settled people with careers decide more prudently; younger people are often rash.
- So limit transfers.
- Income matching. Lets kids or grandchildren take work they love while softening the trade-off: a child earning $35,000 gets a matching $35,000, for $70,000 in total. Many families cap the match so it stays sensible.
- An inheritance finish line. Decide by a clear logic how much to pass down, just as you set your own financial finish line.
- Opportunity spending. Pay for education, small-business startups and similar for children and grandchildren, while still making them build their own path.
He grants the exceptions: peers who inherited vast sums and still lead fulfilling, well-adjusted, hardworking lives. Every family and person differs; the task is to think hard about what wealth does to a person and what you truly want for your kids.
Four questions wealthy families face
As wealth grows, so does complexity, and even good things (a foundation, a vacation home) can turn bad if managed poorly over the long run.
| Issue | Typical problem | Coleman's suggested approach |
|---|---|---|
| Vacation homes | A beloved beach, mountain or overseas home breeds arguments over use and upkeep costs after the parents die; costs often outweigh benefits | Have the trustee sell on death and donate or split the proceeds, or (Dunlevie) bring the kids into the decision in advance so they own the process |
| Family foundations | Perpetual foundations become a burden and source of division: heirs argue over causes, differ in involvement and passions | A sunset provision (as with Bernie Marcus, chapter 5), or split the foundation on death into separate foundations or DAFs per child |
| Trusts | Equal shares or needs-based? Joint or separate management? What if one heir runs through the money? | Usually separate trusts of equal size, overseen by a trusted friend or relative who can hit the brakes; family office or corporate trustees where complexity or permanence demands |
| Misuse | Money magnifies apathy, addiction, unethical behavior and mistreatment of others | Gradual apprenticeship first; then trusts that delay release, fund only valid expenses (education, housing) and let the trustee withhold when an heir is vulnerable |
Many wealthy families, Coleman notes, are ambivalent about leaving anything at all, fearing the entitlement and purposelessness of unearned wealth.
Preventing misuse
Enabling bad habits, or worse, abuse, sits beneath all these choices and is harder than it looks.
- When young. It may mean refusing iPads as babysitters or video games that crowd out life skills.
- As they age. It gets far more complicated.
A family of above-average means has an adult child who struggled with addiction and lack of professional purpose, at times close to homelessness or hunger. For a while the parents sent cash whenever the child was desperate, until they saw it was enabling the bad decisions. They made the very hard call to cut the child off, offering support only for a rehabilitation program, or a home and food if the child moved back and kept house rules. It caused great angst and friction, but it was the wake-up call that began a turnaround.
- Why money magnifies. As the book's opening argued, lottery winners, athletes and entertainers who get money without an apprenticeship in managing it are often overwhelmed and make tragic choices. Money that serves flourishing can be a terrible enabler for someone already prone to self-destruction: apathy, drug and alcohol abuse, even mistreating the less fortunate.
- Prevention. Gradual apprenticeship, making kids earn gradually through effort (allowances, summer jobs), counters much of this. But missteps still happen and money makes them bigger and harder to control, and some children face psychiatric, intellectual or psychological challenges that make excess wealth riskier even in adulthood.
- Why trusts help. They can delay release until heirs are old enough, let the trustee (the person appointed to oversee distributions) fund only valid expenses, and withhold money during addiction or unethical activity. Such controls can be abused, and some parents use wealth to control children unhealthily, but they have a purpose: the average 20-year-old is ill equipped to receive $1 million (most of us would have blown it), the average 30-year-old is far more settled, and some behaviors, such as drug abuse, should never be funded at any age.
It is easy to overlook bad habits when money makes life easy, and agonizing to watch a child struggle. But "helping" a child in a way that enables their worst impulses is rarely help at all.
There are no perfect answers. Coleman's closing counsel: think long and hard about the long-run consequences of every family financial decision, and keep communication frequent and open so that no surprise sets loved ones against each other.
Good Money for the Good Life
Coleman closes with a blunt choice: do you simply want to be rich, or do you want the true riches of purpose and meaning? Ancient traditions and modern social science agree on what works with money, he says, and the evidence from lottery winners, pro athletes, high earners and wealthy heirs shows that money can be both good and bad. Money is a means, not an end: in Coleman's phrase, "a tool, not a totem."
The argument restated
The culture sends one loud message: make as much as you can, because your worth, happiness and social standing depend on it. Coleman's reply, distilled from the whole book, runs in three steps.
- Mindsets shape the relationship. Poor or rich, our mindsets and values about money shape how we relate to it and to ourselves.
- Habits decide the outcome. Our habits of accumulation determine whether the economic stability everyone seeks brings greater freedom or traps us in a cycle of negative mindsets and behaviors.
- The stakes are lopsided. Handled thoughtfully, money supports a prudent, free and fruitful life; bad mindsets and values about it can be uniquely ruinous.
His hope is that the book's simple six-part framework (figure C-1 repeats figure 1-1) equips readers and their families to look at their own circumstances and treat money and flourishing more consciously than before.
A privileged moment, and its trap
Coleman reminds readers how unusual their position is. The average person on earth is richer than at any point in history, and many people now wrestle with problems of excess rather than deprivation. Most readers of the book have, or will have, more than they need to survive, a situation their ancestors would envy.
But the human goal is to thrive, not merely survive, and money can block that.
- Nations. Richer countries today are not flourishing more.
- People. Wealthy people often warp their mindsets so badly that, amid prosperity, they fail at the things that matter most: relationships, character, meaning, purpose, service to others and joy. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, they end bitter, hollow and alone.
- The scoreboard error. We use money as a scoreboard without knowing what game we are playing or when it ends, and finish life with money in the bank and regret that we did not make more of Mary Oliver's "wild and precious life."
The cultural script. Earn as much as possible; money is the scoreboard of worth and status. The end point is money in the bank and regret.
Good Money. Money is a means to flourishing: relationships, character, meaning, purpose, service and joy. The end point is a life, and a legacy, that keeps purpose alive for future generations.
Your wild and precious life
Coleman ends on encouragement. Each life is one of a kind; it can be happy and fulfilled, can make the world better, and can help build a culture in which family, community, nation and world thrive. The obstacle is the wrong habits, mindsets and values around money, and he urges readers not to let them win.
- Any age works. From a graduate choosing a first real job to a retiree rewiring for significance, it is never too early or too late to think about money differently and build a life of meaning, purpose, joy and flourishing.
- Start today. Use the book's principles, challenge them and add your own, but do not sleepwalk into an obsession with finances that lets accumulation become a hollow, self-destructive force.
- The habits. Earn with purpose. Consume wisely. Give generously and well. Invest for impact. Live purposefully your whole life, and make sure that purpose outlives you in the next generation.
The choice
Coleman's last questions are the book's thesis in miniature: will money be good in your life or destructive and distracting, a means to flourishing or a misplaced end? Everyone wants the good life; money can stand in the way, and the choice belongs to each reader. Good Money, in his telling, is the set of habits that makes money serve the good life instead.
Master Takeaways
Coleman's program reduces to one sequence: decide what the good life is, decide how much is enough, then make every dollar earned, spent, given, invested and saved serve that life, and pass the same habits to your children. Money becomes good when it buys freedom, relationships and service, and turns bad the moment it becomes the scoreboard.
- Money is a means, never the measure. Financial stability is a baseline for flourishing; beyond it, relationships, meaning, character and health matter far more than wealth.
- Set a financial finish line early. Decide how much is enough before you have it, then freeze lifestyle creep; otherwise you will always want "just a little more."
- Never let net worth go negative. Carry no card balance, avoid large education debt, borrow only for essential cars and well-capitalized homes.
- Purpose is crafted, not found. Job crafting, treating work as a craft, service and relationships can make about 90% of jobs meaningful.
- Give first and give well. Precommit a percentage, then apply TRUST so generosity helps rather than distorts or enables.
- Save for freedom, not retirement. Build a buffer that buys agency and autonomy at work; full retirement is linked to worse health and lost purpose.
- Your worth is not your net worth. Human dignity is intrinsic; using money as a scoreboard breeds insecurity toward richer peers and contempt for poorer ones.
- Abundance without attachment. Past a threshold, more money adds little happiness (diminishing, not zero, returns); seek stability, then refuse to love money above intrinsic goods.
- Richer is not more flourishing. The Global Flourishing Study finds richer countries score lower on composite flourishing; national prosperity does not deliver national flourishing.
- Watch for money that steals time. If a house, car or purchase eats hours meant for family, work or service, reevaluate it with a trusted friend.
- Don't take a job only for the paycheck. Rajat Gupta's fall shows that a pay scoreboard never says "enough"; success without significance is not success.
- Score career moves honestly. A weighted grid of 10-15 criteria, scored for every option including your current job, exposes what you actually value; multiply scores by weights.
- Buy experiences, time, health and relationships. Social, story-worthy, identity-linked, unique experiences beat stuff; paying to escape disliked chores and long commutes raises happiness.
- Sudden wealth ruins the unprepared. Lottery winners and pro athletes show that money without habits magnifies bad choices; hedonic adaptation erases most of the lift.
- Smash idols by precommitment. For necessities you obsess over, commit to the least fancy version that works; 100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent.
- Use the four Ps to give more. Percentage, passion, partner and participate; a donor-advised fund automates the percentage and makes it irrevocable.
- Specify intent and time-limit big gifts. Bob Morin's scoreboard and drifting perpetual foundations show why; sunset provisions keep money doing what donors meant.
- Generosity is open to anyone. Ronald Read, a janitor and mechanic, left $8 million mostly to his hospital and library; Sophia Jackson gave a kidney through a swap to save a stranger.
- Compounding punishes raiding. Cashing out at year 25 of a 45-year run forfeits about 90% of the growth; invest early and leave it alone.
- All investing is impact investing. Every dollar invested does something for someone; screening, engagement, positive allocation, proxy voting and DAF investing let you steer it.
- Small shareholders can move giants. The Episcopal Church, with 0.004% of GM, sparked the Sullivan Principles; proxy voting choice now spreads that power to index-fund holders.
- Make one aligned change. No portfolio is perfectly aligned; start with one screened fund, one thematic ETF or one private investment.
- Retirement can harm health. Studies tie full retirement to higher heart risk, a 6-9% mental-health decline and higher mortality, softened by marriage, exercise, volunteering or part-time work.
- Freedom costs less than retirement. Under the 4% rule, replacing a $15,000 pay gap needs $375,000, not the $1.25 million to replace a $50,000 lifestyle.
- Build a fortress balance sheet. Six to twelve months of cash, housing under 20% of income with 20% equity, no consumer debt, 20-30% saved, proper insurance.
- Start with a family mission, not money. A mission, a parenting vision and a short list of values give every money decision an anchor.
- Apprentice your kids. Model, explain, let them practice and fail: chores, an allowance in three jars, a small business, then real jobs.
- Spend on opportunity, not entitlement. Fund education, camps, travel and seed capital; do not let family wealth raise children's standard of living ("keep 'em poor").
- Give children a voice before a vote. Family giving committees and Thanksgiving DAF meetings teach generosity; decision rights grow with maturity.
- Inherit with limits. Unearned and sudden wealth tends to harm; income matching, an inheritance finish line and trusts with brakes reduce the damage.
- Helping that enables is not help. Cutting off cash to an addicted adult child, while funding rehab or a home, can be the wake-up call that works.
Frameworks & mental models
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| PERMA (Seligman) | Positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, accomplishment | Checking whether a choice feeds flourishing |
| Five domains (VanderWeele) | Happiness, health, meaning, character, relationships; finances only as stability | Testing any purchase, gift or investment |
| Six steps of Good Money | Mindsets, earn, consume, give, invest, save for freedom | Auditing your whole financial life |
| Four Good Money mindsets | Money can't buy happiness; finish line; callings first; worth is not net worth | Resetting beliefs about money |
| Financial finish line | A preset net worth or spending target, sized with the 4% rule | Income rises and lifestyle creeps |
| Five questions for significant success | Purpose, missing meaning, relationships, service, daily craft | Choosing or reshaping a career |
| Four practices for meaningful work | Craft your job, make work a craft, serve, build relationships | Work feels stale but leaving is costly |
| Weighted career grid | Weighted criteria scored across all options | Weighing a job change |
| Debt rules | No negative net worth, no card balance, limited student, car and mortgage debt | Before any borrowing |
| Experience test (Dunn & Norton) | Social, story, identity, unique | Choosing what to spend on |
| Precommitment | Decide in advance; abstain or buy the plainest version | A possession has become an idol |
| Four Ps | Percentage, passion, partner, participate | Planning how much and where to give |
| TRUST | Trusted advisers, research, understand effects, specify intent, time-limit | Making a significant gift |
| Five ways to express values | Negative and positive screens, thematic funds, engagement, shaping companies as owner | Choosing aligned investments |
| Seven aligned-investing principles | Adviser, screen, engage, allocate, invest charitable dollars, expand options, make one change | Aligning a portfolio with values |
| Freedom arithmetic | Savings target = income gap ÷ 0.04, plus 12 months' cash | Planning a lower-paid, purposeful move |
| Fortress balance sheet | Cash reserve, low housing cost, no consumer debt, 20%+ savings, insurance | Building freedom at any age |
| Three family questions | Mission, parenting vision, anchor values, agreed with the kids | Before any money talk with children |
| Earning ladder | Chores, allowance (three jars), neighborhood business, formal jobs | Teaching kids that money is earned |
| Bank of Mom and Dad | Split thirds; parents double giving, pay 50% on saving, nothing on spending | Teaching returns to young children |
| Voice and a vote (Dunlevie) | Kids contribute ideas before they get decision rights | Bringing heirs into giving or investing |
| Inheritance tools | Income matching, inheritance finish line, opportunity spending, trusts with brakes | Planning a wealth transfer |
- Audience and place. The advice is written for affluent Americans: 401(k)s, DAFs, 529s and accredited-investor rules are US-specific, and Coleman explicitly excludes people living paycheck to paycheck.
- Evidence stated too neatly. The income-happiness plateau is attributed to the wrong measure and newer work finds well-being keeps rising with income; lottery and retirement-health findings are often correlational (poor health also forces retirement); some figures (engagement 15% vs 23%, giving totals, saving rates, median-wealth multiples) are dated or inconsistent across chapters.
- Small factual slips. Rajat Gupta's dates, "David" for Jeffrey Sachs, the accredited-investor threshold, the "Institute for Economic Affairs" and Barbara Hillary's South Pole year are off.
- Interests and lens. Coleman runs a values-based investment firm and names affiliated vehicles; his faith perspective shapes his framing of giving and family values. Readers can take the principles without the religious frame.
- Anecdote-heavy. Many cases are friends, clients and relatives (Woolworth, Feit, the Hempells, unnamed wealthy families), told admiringly; they illustrate rather than test the claims.
- What's missing. Little on effective-altruist evidence, fees and taxes, real versus nominal returns, structural barriers (such as job access for low-income teens), or how lower earners can apply the steps.
Who's who
| Name | Role | Why they matter |
|---|---|---|
| Martin Seligman | Psychologist, Flourish | PERMA model of flourishing |
| Tyler VanderWeele | Harvard Human Flourishing Program | Five domains; money as stability only |
| David Robinson | NBA star, Sweet Unity Farms | Money can't buy happiness; generosity learned from his father |
| Casey Crawford | Movement Mortgage founder | Model of a financial finish line |
| Rajat Gupta | Ex-McKinsey head, convicted of insider trading | The scoreboard that never says enough |
| Anand Kesavan | Equitable Facilities Fund | Money skills redirected to school finance |
| Kazuo Inamori | Kyocera and KDDI founder | Purpose and craft in business |
| Yvon Chouinard | Patagonia founder | Gave the company to a purpose trust |
| Ronald Read | Vermont janitor and mechanic | Quiet saver, $8 million to his community |
| Bernie Marcus | Home Depot cofounder | Time-limited foundation |
| Leon Sullivan | GM director, pastor | Sullivan Principles, origin of values investing |
| Aimee Minnich | Impact Foundation cofounder | DAF impact investing |
| Rick Woolworth | Ex-Morgan Stanley, Telemachus Network | A purposeful "retirement" of mentoring |
| Elliot Feit | Pediatrician, Coleman's father-in-law | Savings that bought autonomy and a prison ministry |
| Barbara Hillary | Nurse, polar explorer | Saved for freedom; North Pole at 75 |
| Greg Brenneman | CEO and investor | Fortress balance sheet idea |
| Britt Harris | Investor | "Keep 'em poor" rule for wealthy parents |
| Suniya Luthar | Psychologist | Research on the problems of affluent children |
| Katherine Dunlevie | Multifamily office leader | "A voice and a vote" for heirs |
Connect it
- Banking. Coleman's fortress balance sheet is borrowed from J.P. Morgan's capital buffers before 2008; the same logic of holding more than the minimum applies to household liquidity planning, and his debt rules mirror affordability tests lenders use.
- Wealth management. Proxy voting choice, direct indexing and screened funds are where client values meet product design; an adviser who asks about values first is the book's entry point to aligned investing, and family-office governance (investment committees, voice before vote) is where the kids chapter becomes practice.
- Retirement products. The freedom arithmetic (replace a pay gap, not a whole income) suggests planning tools that model career breaks and part-time phases, not only a single retirement date.
- AI. Coleman expects AI to make customized proxy voting practical, letting each fund holder's values shape how pooled shares vote.
About this book
Good Money: Six Steps to Building a Financial Life with Purpose by John Coleman, 2026. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions