MSNBC did an interesting piece on new research that examined where people shop for groceries and their obesity levels. The study followed 2,000 Seattle-area shoppers between December 2008 and March 2009. Conclusion: The thinnest people spend the most money on food. Just 4 percent of Whole Foods shoppers were obese, compared with 38 percent of shoppers at Albertsons.

At Whole Foods, an average market basket of food cost between $370 and $420; the same basket of food at Albertson’s cost between $225 and $280.

Lead researcher Adam Drewnowski, a University of Washington epidemiology professor who studies obesity and social class, says it’s all about money: People who have the ability to pay $6 for a pound of radicchio are more able to afford health diets than consumers who buy $1.88 packs of pizza rolls to feed their kids.

“If people wanted a diet to be cheap, they went to one supermarket,” Drewnowski told MSNBC. “If they wanted their diet to be healthy, they went to another supermarket and spent more.” Just 15 percent of shoppers chose a gocery store based on its proximity to their home — the rest focused on either price or quality. “Deep down, obesity is really an economic issue,” Drewnowski said.

I’m somewhat skeptical — maybe because I never shop at Whole Wallet, and no one in my family is obese. I think obesity is a function of lack of education about which foods are healthy and which are crap; lack of time to read up on nutrition, plan and prepare healthy homemade meals, and get some exercise; and lack of discipline, because let’s face it, it’s a lot easier to order a pizza and watch TV at the end of the work day than to grill vegetables and go for an invigorating walk.

For me, the money issue is more closely link to the time issue. Consider two-parent households that have the wherewithal for one person to stay home or work part-time; that person can focus on creating a healthy environment – growing vegetables, shopping, cooking, and supervising kids so they spend more time running around outside than surfing YouTube.

But creating healthy menus for a family on a budget? Not that hard. For breakfast, we serve oatmeal, eggs, whole grain breads, and fruit;  for school lunches, I buy bagged salad on sale for $2, rinse, and toss into a Tupperware container with some raisins, sliced almonds and grilled chicken from last night’s dinner; add a piece of fruit in season and a granola bar, and voila – meals for three kids for less than $2 a person. (Yes I know it’s cheaper to buy the head of lettuce, but it’s too crazy in the mornings to be shredding the stuff.)

Tonight for dinner we’re grilling beef shiskabob with red, yellow and green peppers, onions, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and yellow squash over rice. Dinner for a family of five for $16, or $3.20 a head — nutritious, delicious and cheaper than fast food.

We base menus on what’s in season and what’s on sale, use the store’s loyalty card, occasionally clip coupons and make the most of leftovers. I get produce at the farmer’s market between June and October. (You can find one near you on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Web site.) And I shop at a warehouse club for the basics like skim milk, orange juice, whole wheat bread and bananas. 

Are you able to maintain a healthy diet on a budget? What’s your best tip?

My fifth grader was out of school last Thursday and Friday. Because of  concerns over the H1N1 virus, there’s a new rule: A student with a fever has to stay home for 24 hours after the fever subsides.  So she picked up a book — the next installment in the Pendragon series, a huge hit with her friends — and read. And read. And read. And when the weekend came, she continued to read, and finished the book by Sunday afternoon.

All of my kids are reading more this fall, because we eliminated the cable television back in August. I’m not sure if it’s the lack of cable or simply academic maturity, but one of my kids advanced to the highest level in three of her core courses, and started the quarter with a brand new schedule (and class sizes of just 15 students. Hurray!) My youngest has not nagged me to buy her something she saw advertised in two months, and that was something that used to happen on a daily basis.

The games we have in the closet — Boggle, Mancala, Monopoly – are no longer gathering dust. We talk more. We laugh more. They listen better. The dog is loving the extra attention.

Television is a gigantic time suck. A recent news article noted that kids age 2 to 5 are now watching 32 hours of television a week, according to Nielsen. Kids age 6 to 11 are watching abotu 28 hours a week. Those figures are the highest since 2001.

It’s not that we’re Luddites; we get the news from the internet, and movies on Netflix. And I do miss the ability to veg a little with the TV on before bed. (I’m re-reading Chekhov’s short stories instead.) There’s a new sense of control, of proactive choice in terms of the media we consume. And my oldest shocked me the other day when she said, “I really don’t miss the TV.”  Music to a mother’s ears.

Would love to hear your experiences about life with and without television. Comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley dot com.

I write this post with a heavy heart. A few months ago I wrote a Yahoo!Finance column about a couple, Patrick and Suzy, who had been married three years and had just bought a home in Seattle. They decided to wait a year or two before having children while they paid down debt and built up their savings. Last week, while the couple walked their dog in the park, Patrick was killed by a falling tree limb. He was 32.

Patrick felt strongly about preparing fi- nancially for parenthood, while Suzy was ready to get started. When he asked my opinion, I agreed with Patrick that it made sense to wait: They needed both of their salaries to cover the bills, carried some heavy student loan obligations and didn’t know how they would afford daycare. Maybe they could have worked it out. Now we’ll never know.

I am wondering if I led them astray. Patrick was firm in his thinking; a friend reassures me that I was just a “data point” on the couple’s decision-making spectrum. But what if I had suggested they go for it, start a family and figure out the money later? What if I had advised them simply to have faith in themselves and in each other, to be flexible and open to major adjustments that might occur down the road, and jump in with both feet?

After all, my own parents took that approach. Good Irish Catholics, they had eleven children; I was the tenth. It was a different world, of course. My mother stayed home and never had outside help. (She went back to work part-time when the youngest was in first grade.) She made our clothes for a number of years. We thought nothing about sleeping three to a room. My parents never spent a dime on car seats; we all squashed into a station wagon, my brother and I squabbling in the space between the middle and back seats.

If we did “enrichment” it was a sport or activity at school, and it was free. There were no summer camps; we just took off on our bikes in the morning and came home when the streetlights came on. We drove to Michigan exactly twice on vacation when I was a kid. For years we had just one television, with a dozen channels. We spent a lot of Sundays at museums and in forest preserves, playing games and jumping in leaves.

And it worked out, because both my parents labored around the clock for decades, and prayed mightily for divine support. They had no “me” time scheduled into their calendars, and when we were small, their couple time typically involved sitting in the living room after we were all in bed, my dad rubbing my mom’s feet. In the dark, under the covers, we could hear them laughing. They were deeply committed to their child-rearing enterprise, regarding it as their purpose in life. Married 49 years with nary a public quarrel, their faith made all the difference. (My father died in my mother’s arms a week before their 50th wedding anniversary.)

Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it creates lots of options. A lot of parents, myself included, use money to try to get things right with our kids – the right safety devices, the right neighborhood and schools, the right tutoring and enrichment, the right 529 savings plans, the right colleges — so we can launch them on the right path. On the other hand, money should never replace creativity or commitment. My parents had both in spades.

Maybe money is something you should watch out of the corner of your eye when you’re contemplating decisions about life and your purpose on the planet — rather than letting it hover front and center, like a roadblock. Maybe when your heart’s desire is involved, a certain leap of faith is called for, because things can work out. Maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference, but I wish I had told Patrick that when I had the chance.

My column today on Yahoo!Finance discusses how to manage volatile income. Long-time readers know I often write from direct experience, and that’s what inspired the story. My spouse and I both work for ourseives, and our household income has fluctuated by as much as 100% from year to year.

Everywhere I look I see households experiencing similar income fluctuations: Someone is laid off, or had their hours cut; someone has to stay home with a sick child or a sick parent; someone ends up unemployed for years because of a structural change in their industry — manufacturing, IT, journalism — and goes from full-time employee to full-time contractor for the same company (with no benefits), or cobbles together a living as a consultant or freelancer. As one reader noted: “From what I see, the line between contract employee and direct employee is blurring more and more.”

I interviewed financial planner Mike Masiello of Rochester, New York, for the story. “What we’re seeing is a ton of very talented electri- cal, mechanical and indus- trial engineers who have (lost jobs) as the manufacturing base dwindles,” he says.  ”The difficulty is there really aren’t positions. One guy I knew had two master’s degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering, and was competing for a job against a guy who has two PhDs.”

People with fluctuating incomes have to behave like the biblical Joseph, Masiello says: Store the seven years of bumper crops so you can get through seven years of famine. In good years, overfund retirement savings, and build four to eight months of cash reserves.  Don’t tap home equity, build up credit card debt or cash our retirement savings.

Those are the behaviors of his wealthy clients. “The millionaire-next-doors,” Masiello says (referring to the famous book by Thomas Stanley and William Danko), “are joys to have as clients because they get it. They are not into conspicuous consumption. They have a structured long-term strategy and long-term goals; they know where they are going and have a plan to get there.”

I am a frugal, no-debt kind of person, so I find the lean times fairly easy to manage. (For instance, I just successfully sold an old coffee table on Craigslist. This is not actually a lean time, I just got sick of looking at the thing.) The problem is that while I’m harvesting the bumper crops, I feel richer, and begin to imagine the possibilities — a kitchen renovation, a trip to Paris. The hedonic treadmill is not easily avoided. Managing the psychology around the money is just as critical as managing the money itself.

ah, my dream kitchen

 
I especially liked the advice of Matt Wallert of Thrive.  You need to physically separate the account that your paychecks go into from the account that you use to pay the bills. That way the paychecks can accumulate like water in a reservoir, and you shift over a pre-determined amount each month to cover your expenses. (See the story for more).

Do you have any secrets or insights into managing a fluctuating income? I’d love to hear them.

Last night I watched the 2007 film “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly,” based on the biography of Jean-Dominique Bauby. Bauby, the former editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle,  suffered a massive stroke at age 42 which resulted in “locked-in syndrome” — he could hear and understand everything around him, but couldn’t move or speak. He was able to communicate only by blinking his left eyelid.

Bauby’s speech therapist develops a way to help him communicate (see photo); he blinks as she reads the letters of the alphabet, spelling out his thoughts letter by letter. When she initially presents him with the system, he blinks the sentence “I want to die.” Eventually he realizes that although he’s locked in, he still has his mind and his imagination, and he decides to write a book about his experience, dictating it to an assistant word by word, by blinking. (In case you haven’t seen the DVD, I won’t reveal the end.)

Despite all I’ve learned about money and happiness, I admit I’ve had moments in which I created my own locked-in syndrome by giving money more power than it deserves. I’ve allowed it to play a role in my choices that was limiting, even paralyzing. At those times, I lost sight of how powerful the mind and the imagination can be.

Bauby, who, at the top of his game, is suddenly deprived of everything — even, as he puts it, the simple pleasure of ruffling his children’s hair — doesn’t allow his circumstances to diminish his spirit. He focuses on what he has, rather than what he’s lost, and forges ahead.

I have a series of stories coming out this Wednesday (Oct. 7) on Savvy Money Moms, a special section on the website www.family.com. One of them looks at the silver lining in the recession. I had the privilege of interviewing a number of families who are suffering financial hardships but found ways to come together, focus on simple pleasures and laughter, and even renew old dreams of doing work they love.  They inspired me, as Bauby’s story did, and reminded me that attitude is a choice, and it costs nothing to be  joyful.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is beautifully directed by artist Julian Schnabel. I watched the film with two of my daughters, and was grateful for the luxury of ruffling their hair.

by Alix, the eco-czar

Buy. Less. Stuff. It’s that simple. Buy less stuff. When you buy less stuff you spend less money, so the economic angle is a given. When you buy less stuff you are also making a dent in the giant heaving mountain of garbage that almost all of our stuff eventually becomes. Buy less stuff and stem the tidal wave of consumption that for years has been the American birthright. It has also been giant contributor to the swirling gyre of plastic trash polluting the Pacific Ocean. This garbage dump is visible from satellite footage.

Buy less stuff is a simple rule, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Lest I get a bad reputation as a sanctimonious scold, let me be clear: I love nothing more than strolling through a swanky mall, shopping for wardrobe, access-ories, and cosmetics that I do not need. I love retail therapy.

Like a growing number of Americans, however, I want to save more money. The exuberant spending that marked the last ten years or so has been replaced by attitudes reminiscent of our childhoods when saving for a rainy day was the norm.

I still love to shop, but now I do it with a new attitude. I’ve had a paradigm shift, as they say. Now, whenever I am about to buy something, I take a moment and ponder, “Do I want this or do I need this?” When every item must pass the want-or-need test, far fewer items make it to the checkout aisle at Target. Perhaps initially shopping was not as much fun, but it’s like exercising an atrophied muscle. It might hurt at first, but when you get home and there is still that chunk of cash in your bank account, the pain will have subsided greatly. Like workouts, the more you do this, the easier it gets.  

If I find that the item I left on the store shelf is still haunting me days later, I’ll go back and buy it. But more often than not, I walk away from items in stores and never return to buy them. I have cultivated a strange sense of satisfaction when I walk out of a store empty-handed. I’ve discovered a strange power in my immunity to the relentless shills of our materialistic world.

As everyone with young children knows, there is a never-ending stream of stuff the world wants you to buy for your kids–from the patently unnecessary warmers for diaper wipes to expensive video games, to the way they rudely outgrow the shoes and clothing we buy. I think teaching them the lesson of want versus need is a vital part of my role as a parent. They almost always leave toy stores, Target, and supermarkets without the token piece of trash or candy they whine and plead for.

Another key to maintaining control with my kids is hand-me-downs and resale/consignment shops. Other kids are outgrowing their clothing and gear as fast as yours are, and somewhere in your town is probably a store like Milk Money where you can get great “gently used” kid stuff, cheap. If no stores near you are good, try handmedowns.com or e-Bay. (For the latter, just search on your child’s shoe size or clothing size.)

Changing my attitude has led me to discover a host of other ways to get what I need and want while still saving money or not spending any money at all.

The Library has been a huge “a-ha!” for me. I spent my childhood going to the library but somehow forgot about it as a childless adult. Now I don’t know how the parents of young children do without a library—you cycle through so many picture books with kids. As an adult, you can ignore both sides of the Kindle debate, still read whatever you want, and keep all your money in your pocket. Get yourself a library card and it’s all free: Books, DVDs, books on tape, CDs. I check out tens of books, for my kids and me, and if we don’t like a book there is not an ounce of buyer’s remorse. In fact, purchasing a book has become something reserved for gifts and very special book (i.e., a guide to gardening I’ll use all the time, or a picture book my boys adore)—a money saver for certain.

A few years ago we had a sofa bed that we couldn’t pay someone to take. We couldn’t even get goodwill to pick it up. Then we posted it on Freecycle and within 24 hours it was gone. We quickly discovered it’s a two-way street. Our big living room TV was free, and I found a piano for my neighbor as well. Register locally and you can receive updates of what’s available, post your own ‘wanteds’, or just visit the Web site whenever you want.

Craigslist is like visiting every garage sale in your area without leaving the house. Like eBay, Craigslist is addictive. Once you score a great deal—like $75 for the ideal table and chairs for my back deck—you check it for everything.

Like so many elements of going green, a big change came from a small shift in my thinking. My contribution to the planet’s garbage problem is smaller, and my bank account stays… well, small too, but not smaller!

For more on the less-is-more movement, see this link. Have you cut back on buying stuff? Comment here or email your thoughts to laura at laurarowley.com.

Editor’s Note: Please welcome Alix, a writer and married mom of three kids (ages 6, 4 and six weeks!) who will be guest-posting for the blog on a regular basis. I met Alix when she moved to New Jersey from Washington D.C. She’s a sharp, thoughtful freelance writer who’s spend the last 15 years covering health care, the arts, education and the environment. When she moved to Jersey she decided to clean up her act, environmentally speaking, and spent the last year figuring out how to reduce, reuse, recycle — and save money. She’ll show you how going green can be easy and cheap – and she’ll chronicle her eco-exploits – and other adventures in saving money — here.

When it comes to your groceries, it’s easy to excuse yourself from “going green” by saying it’s too expensive. Just look at the price of organic food. Still, there are good reasons to go for it and you can start by “cross-shopping” — the way you might buy a dress at Target and splurge on the accessories at a department store. In other words, you do not need to buy organic everything. I sure don’t. Certain produce, milk, chicken and meat always get the bump up to organic. A few tips:

-Organic milk always costs more, but shop around—Target offers a good price, I‘ve noticed, and the Whole Foods 365 brand is not certified organic but the milk has no antibiotics.

-The criteria to earn a “Certified USDA Organic” label can exclude produce that is grown without chemicals or pesticides. Find a farmers’ market near you to buy local, and ask the sellers how the food was grown. Produce that has a thick peel — bananas, citrus fruits and avocados — offers some natural protection against pesticides.

We love farmers markets!

-Use coupons. Mambosprouts.com focuses specifically on healthy, natural and organic coupons — just click and print. Organic producers including Stonyfield Farm, Annie’s Homegrown and Earthbound Farms offer coupons on their own websites. You can find some of these brands, and other organics, in bulk at Costco.

-Spend more on organics by spending less on those individual snack-sized portions. According to research from the University of Florida, packaging makes up one-third of all waste generated. Per-ounce, single-servings can be 50 percent more expensive, and generate twice the waste as products packaged in bulk. You can save more than $50 a year by avoiding single-serving food items, the study found.  Buy reusable containers and then purchase cheaply in bulk.

-Eat less meat. This is good for your body and good for the planet. Even Paul McCartney is advocating No Meat Mondays. A huge source of global warming is all the cows in our country, and waste runoff from the giant chicken farms near the Chesapeake Bay is poisoning the water. Alternative proteins are not only better for you and the planet, they are cheaper! Grains like quinoa, spelt, faro; any sort of bean; nuts, eggs—all of these are excellent sources of protein and much less expensive than meat. For recipes, check out the blog of Amanda Louden, a holistic nutrition educator in California and mom of two, who posts her recipes online at www.mydailydiner.com.

-Grow a garden! The cleanest tomatoes will always be the ones you grow in your backyard. Sites such as www.backyardgardener.com show you how to grow your own produce.

Finally, walk into the store with your canvas reusable bags in hand, ready to drop in your cart for checkout. I’m not going to try to sell you on the $0.10 per bag savings some stores offer. This is purely an altruistic move on your part. I will say that canvas or reusable bags are sturdier than paper or plastic so you will grow to prefer them. It’s a tough habit to start, however. So many times I was at the checkout with a cart full of groceries when I realized all my reusable bags were still in the kitchen. So I put the bags in my car. The frustration and aggravation at the checkout is considerably heightened when the bags are in the parking lot of the supermarket. Eventually I got into the swing of it, and now it’s a habit.

If you have ideas to save green while you shop green, comment here or send them to laura at laurarowley.com.

Today’s Yahoo!Finance column looks at the financial challenges that face prospective parents. I interviewed a couple from Seattle, Patrick and Suzy, who are doing all the right things with their money but still feel overwhelmed by the financial issues related to having a child.

One of the biggest challenges is that they bought a home near a city they love, but one that’s thousands of miles from their famillies. Because of the expense, they both have to work full time, and yet they lack the support network extended family can provide when the kids come along.

Their story resonated with me, because I faced similar questions about compromise when we started our family. Like them, I am originally from the Midwest and fell in love with the vitality and creativity of the best city in the world (New York). It presented wonderful career and cultural opportunities and still does. We are an hour from the mountains and an hour from the ocean, 35 minutes from Broadway shows and the best museums in the world.

But back when I started having kids, I thought seriously about moving to Chicago, even asked my boss about a possible transfer. Our cost of living is significantly higher here than in the Midwest, which requires us to work harder to afford those museums and Broadway shows (and property taxes) — which ultimately gives us less time with our kids. (Although I work mainly from a home office, which helps.) I would love my girls to have the same relationship with my mother that their cousins in Chicago do, but that’s impossible when you only see each other a few times a year. They do, thankfully, have my husband’s family nearby.

But that’s life — it demands compromises. Would Patrick and Suzy be happier if they moved back to the Midwest, where they could afford a better lifestyle and be close to family when they have their kids — and give up the city and friends that make them happy? Should someone make career satisfaction a higher priority — even if it means moving far away from extended family? Or should you settle for a less satisfying career to sustain closer family ties? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences. You can comment here or email me at laura at laurarowley.com.

The Wall Street Journal reported recently that luxury goods makers Louis Vuitton, Tiffany, Coach and Neiman Marcus are developing special marketing campaigns targeted at kids. Nieman Marcus joined forces with Theory, Nanette Lepore and Tory Burch to create an exclusive collection of dresses, promoted during a “hip event” weekend this month for teens. Designer Mark Jacobs is using 12-year-old actress Dakota Fanning to promote spring 2007 in Vogue and W. Coach and Tiffany have introduced “aspirational products” – silver bracelets, smaller wallets, gadget cases – to attract the younger buyer.

I find myself becoming increasingly vigilant in shutting out the marketing messages that saturate my kids’ lives at every turn. They adore Radio Disney, but we turn it off the second the DJ says “we’re taking a break,” because, as my four-year-old says, “commercials are stupid.”

I don’t find it that hard to say no to my kids when it comes to gadget cases and silver bracelets. That said, my kids devour a huge portion of my income – private school, college savings, enrichment programs, orthodontia, etc. There’s a fine line between expenditures that potentially enhance your child’s future, and the ones that simply diminish your finances. When one of my kids was struggling a bit in math, for instance, I enrolled her in an after-school tutoring program twice a week. Her sister, who is doing fine in math, showed some interest, so I enrolled her too. (Meanwhile, I never had a single academic enrichment class in my life. I did just fine.) 

Have you ever found yourself straddling the fence on a purchase or investment for your child, wondering if it will enrich his or her future — or just empty your wallet? I’d love to hear your story.

In 2002, after more than a dozen years in Manhattan, my husband and I finally bit the bullet and moved to the suburbs.

We traded our 900-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment in the city for a 2,000-square-foot, four-bedroom colonial in New Jersey. Just in time, too. Our third child was born shortly after we moved.

I thought I’d died and gone to real-estate heaven. But it didn’t last.
Just as I had once longed for the classic-six apartments and Hamptons retreats of our Manhattan friends, I now began eyeballing the mansions higher up the hill and envisioning the delights of a summer place on the Jersey Shore.

Scientists call this phenomenon “the hedonic treadmill.” It simply means we adapt to the improvement in our circumstances and then seek more. The more stuff we have, the more we demand from life –and the more disgruntled we become when we don’t get it.

So what’s wrong with improving our material circumstances? This is just the pursuit of the American Dream, right? Well, not if your ultimate goal is happiness, according to three decades of research in the field of “subjective well-being.”

Scientists have found that while a certain amount of money does indeed make us happy, once basic needs are met, happiness doesn’t continue to rise in direct proportion to income. For instance, surveys of lottery winners found they are not much happier than the average person — and actually took less pleasure in routine events, like a friend telling a joke. I suppose once you win Powerball, the neighbor’s knock-knock jokes kind of pale in comparison.

But that’s not all. Researchers Tim Kasser of Knox College and Dr. Richard Ryan of the University of Rochester have found that people who make money a top goal in life are at greater risk for depression, anxiety, behavioral and relationship problems, and score lower on indicators testing for self-actualization and vitality (or feeling alive and vigorous). The results were consistent across different countries, income levels, and age groups.

So if scientists say chasing more money and more stuff can actually be bad for you, why do we keep climbing on the hedonic treadmill?
Here’s one compelling theory: People are bad at predicting what will make them happy. Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for his work in this area.

Basic economic theory suggests that you and I are motivated by self-interest. We know what we want, we can predict the most desirable outcome, and we can make the best choice to maximize our welfare. Not true, say Kahneman and others. We don’t always act rationally.

Consider the irrational attachment to New York City that would prompt a family of four to live in a one-bedroom apartment, for example. We left reluctantly, viewed it as a sacrifice for the kids, and predicted living in the suburbs would make us unhappy. Strangely, it turned out to be quite the opposite.

Why can’t we predict what will make us happy? As Kahneman explains, there are two people involved in our decisions: The self that actually experiences events and the one who remembers them. It’s the remembering self who keeps score and controls our destiny.

When we recall events, we craft a narrative for ourselves, paying closest attention to the peak and the end of the experience. And that results in a limited picture of what actually happened.

Psychologists discovered this phenomenon by having subjects do both real-time, minute-by-minute assessments of an experience and then an after-the-fact evaluation. Kahneman, for instance, did a study of patients receiving colonoscopy exams.

In the study, Patient A went through a buildup to sharp pain and then the procedure was over. Patient B went through a longer procedure — a buildup to sharp pain, which then declined to slight discomfort before the exam ended.

Here’s the wacky part of the findings: The people whose experiences ended on a less-painful note rated the experience better, even though they suffered exactly the same pain as Patient A and the event lasted for a longer period of time. They only remembered the peak and the end.

So what’s my point? Like the colonoscopy patients, we focus on the peak of an experience and the end, ignoring the stuff in the middle. So we’ll remember the rush of closing a big deal at work, but we won’t remember what it cost in time away from our families. We’ll remember how spectacular it felt to trade up to larger digs, but we won’t remember how long and hard we had to work to get there.

The bottom line: The bigger the trade-up in lifestyle, the bigger the monthly nut — and the harder we have to work to achieve material goals. Since there are only 24 hours in a day, we end up sacrificing other aspects of life that actually do create lasting happiness (at least according to scientists): Spending time with family and friends, exercising, volunteering, or swinging on that hammock in the back yard with a copy of Sports Illustrated and a cold Heineken. (Okay, that last one came from husband, not from scientific research.)

So how do we resolve this dilemma? Make a list of 10 things you value most in life. Make a list of the people, the qualities and the experiences that are most essential to your happiness. Then set goals for yourself as to how you’ll build a life that consciously reflects those values, connecting them to both money and time.

Value a relaxed, secure retirement? Max out your 401k or IRA contribution. Value a relationship? Schedule lunch with that person a couple times a month. Value helping others? Mentor a colleague or volunteer for a charity you strongly believe in. Consciously choose what the happy life looks like for you, rather than allowing the irrational self to run you ragged on the hedonic treadmill so you can buy more stuff.

Meanwhile, if you come across a bargain surfer’s shack on the Jersey Shore, let me know. On second thought, don’t.