How Much Money Is Enough? The Number I Wish I'd Calculated Sooner

A few years ago I sat across from a man worth more money than I will probably ever see. Nice watch, nicer car, the kind of house you point at from a boat. Halfway through dinner he told me, without any irony, that he was "almost there" and would relax "once the next deal closed." He had been almost there, by his own account, for eleven years.

I remember driving home thinking: the man has everything, and he has no idea how much is enough. Which means he has nothing that matters most — a finish line. And a race with no finish line isn't ambition. It's a treadmill with a very good view.

That dinner is why I eventually sat down and did something almost nobody does. I calculated my number. Not my net-worth fantasy. The actual figure at which more money stops buying me anything I care about. It was one of the most clarifying afternoons of my adult life, and I want to walk you through how to do it — and, more importantly, why the number is the easy part.

The finish line keeps moving on purpose

Here's the trap, and it's a good one, because your own brain builds it for you.

You set a target. Fifty thousand saved, then it's a hundred. A paid-off house, then a bigger one. "Once I hit X I'll feel secure." Then you hit X, the feeling lasts about a fortnight, and X quietly becomes the new zero. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill and economists call it lifestyle creep, but sailors have the plainest name for it: chasing the horizon. You can sail toward it for forty years and never once touch it, because it moves at exactly your speed.

The reason this matters for money specifically is that the finish line moving isn't a bug in your character. It's the default setting. Left alone, "enough" will always be defined as "a bit more than I have now," forever, no matter how much you have. The man at that dinner wasn't greedy or broken. He'd just never once stopped to draw the line, so his mind drew it for him, in the only place it knows: just out of reach.

What the research actually says about money and happiness

You've probably heard the old line that money stops buying happiness past around $75,000 a year. It's the most misquoted finding in personal finance, and the truth is more useful than the myth.

The better reading of the data is this: more money keeps nudging life satisfaction upward, but the curve flattens hard, and past a certain point what you're really buying is *optionality*, not joy. The first jump — from "I can't cover an emergency" to "a broken car is annoying, not catastrophic" — is enormous. It changes how you sleep. The jump from a very comfortable life to a slightly-more-comfortable-plus-a-second-property life barely moves the needle on anything real, and often costs you the one thing that actually correlates with a good life: time you control.

So the honest goal isn't "as much as possible." It's "enough to remove money as the thing that runs my decisions." That's a specific, calculable number. And it's usually far lower than the number your ego has been quietly aiming at.

How to actually calculate your number

This is the part people expect to be complicated. It isn't. You need two figures.

One: what your life actually costs per year. Not your dream life, not your worst-case-poverty life. Your real, current, honest annual spend. Rent or mortgage, food, insurance, kids, the lot. Most people have genuinely never added this up, and the number surprises them in both directions.

Two: multiply it by 25. That's the shorthand version of the "4% rule" — the rough idea that a sensibly invested portfolio can pay you about 4% a year, more or less indefinitely, without you eating the principal. So 25 times your annual costs is a working estimate of the pot at which your money covers your life without you working. It's not gospel — it's a rule of thumb built on historical market returns, sequence-of-returns risk is real, and I'm not your financial advisor — but as a north star it's remarkably clarifying.

Spend €40,000 a year? Your rough freedom number is a million. Live leaner at €28,000, as a lot of people quietly could? You're looking at €700,000. Suddenly "enough" isn't a mystical infinity. It's a figure you can see, aim at, and — this is the point — stop at.

Two things fall out of this the moment you run it:

• Cutting your annual costs is mathematically twice as powerful as it feels, because every €1,000 you shave off your yearly spend knocks €25,000 off the pot you need to be free. Frugality isn't just saving money; it's lowering the entire finish line.
• The number is personal and non-transferable. My freedom figure and yours have almost nothing to do with each other, because they're built from two completely different lives. Comparing your number to anyone else's is the fastest way to put the finish line back on wheels.

Enough to be free is not the same as rich

Here's the distinction that reorganised my whole relationship with money.

"Rich" is a moving, social, relative thing — it's always measured against someone else, which is why there's no amount of it that sticks. "Free" is a fixed, personal, absolute thing — it's the point where your portfolio covers your life and money stops being the boss of your calendar. You can be free on a number that would make a hedge-fund guy laugh, and you can be objectively rich and completely un-free, like my dinner companion, because you never defined the line so the line never stopped moving.

I know which one I was actually chasing, and it wasn't the yacht. Once I understood that, my investing got calmer and, weirdly, better. When you're aiming at a real, finite number instead of "more," you stop making the panicked, greedy, or envious moves that wreck most portfolios. You just let good assets compound and get out of the way — which, as I've argued before, is why the most boring investors quietly win. Knowing your number is what makes the boredom bearable, because you can finally see how close you are.

Where I actually put the money

Knowing your number is direction. Getting there is allocation, and I've laid mine out in full in my investment portfolio, explained — including why I hold around 20% in Bitcoin and sleep fine through the volatility. The short version: a spine of broad index funds, a meaningful Bitcoin position as my asymmetric bet, some gold and real assets, and enough cash that a bad month is never a forced sale. None of it is exciting, which is the whole idea. Exciting portfolios are usually just expensive lessons.

This is also, honestly, half of why I built Fabulous 21 — a community of people playing the long game instead of the loud one. It's a lot easier to stay patient toward your number when the people around you are aiming at theirs instead of flexing a new car.

The number is the easy part

Now the twist, because I'd be selling you the same hollow thing that dinner sold that man if I stopped at the maths.

You can nail your freedom figure to the euro and still be completely lost, because the calculation answers "how much" while carefully dodging the only question that matters: *enough for what?* Money is a tool for buying a life, and almost nobody has actually decided what that life is. So they default to the one target that never requires a decision — more — and spend forty years sailing at a horizon precisely because a horizon lets you avoid ever choosing a port.

Figure out the port and the number often shrinks, sometimes dramatically, because half of what people are frantically saving for is stuff they'd stop wanting the moment they got honest about what they're actually after. I've written about the harder inner version of this in how to figure out what to do with your life, and it's the conversation I have most often with people who come to me with a money question that turns out not to be about money at all.

If a spreadsheet could solve this, everyone with Excel would be free and at peace, and they are visibly neither. What people are usually missing isn't a formula — it's an honest outside voice to help them decide what the money is even *for*. That's exactly the ground The Clarity Map is built to cover: you answer a set of deep questions and I hand-build you a picture of where you actually are and where you could go, for nineteen euros, personally reviewed by me. And if you want to talk it through properly, Unfiltered Advice is the longer conversation — money, direction, and the uncomfortable questions underneath both.

The bottom line

Run the maths this week. Add up what your life truly costs, multiply by 25, and look at the number. For a lot of people it's the first time "enough" stops being an abstract feeling and becomes a real, reachable place.

Then do the harder half. Decide what the number is *for*. Because the tragedy of that man at dinner was never that he had too little. It's that he had far more than enough, and had never once let himself notice, so the having never turned into any kind of living.

Enough isn't a feeling you'll stumble into by accumulating. It's a line you draw on purpose — and then, having drawn it, actually respect.