The Art of Buying: Coming to Terms with Money and Materialism

Money and possessions hold strong attractions, but being driven to acquire them in order to enhance one's social standing is associated with lowered well-being. Literatures on money and happiness, materialism, and cultural mediators are reviewed. Consumer well-being is associated with being neither very tight nor very loose with money, with having relatively low financial aspirations, and with being low in materialism. Price-related behaviors – whether to spend low, spend high, or attempt to maximize value – are ways of responding to economic outlay vis-à-vis material wants, and these "strategies" offer a window into broader consumer lifestyles: the Value Seeker type is tight with money and materialistic; the Big Spender is loose with money and materialistic; the Non-Spender is tight with money and not materialistic; and the Experiencer is loose with money and not materialistic. Each of these types is described in terms of the potentials for well-being as well as the risks. Intrinsic motivation emerges as a key to well-being. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.