When Do You Have Enough Money?

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When do you have enough money?

Well, that depends. Enough for what? That is the key and the question that too many of us fail to answer. There is just this nagging feeling in the back of our brains that screams out, “I don’t have enough money!”

There is a good reason for that. Unless you were born rich (and I’ll leave it to you to define rich), you probably never had quite enough money. And if you are a young family, just starting out, I guarantee you there is never enough money.

Enough for what? That depends.

I came from what I later defined as the middle class. It was probably toward the lower end of middle class, but we always had a home, clothing, and plenty to eat. Well, maybe not plenty, but enough.

I grew up in a home I would generously describe as a brick ranch. Looking back, I would probably call it a bungalow. Real estate agents would most likely list it as a starter home. It was small. Three bedrooms and one bath for the four of us.

I didn’t consider it small at the time; it was what it was. It was home. My brother and I each had our own bedrooms. At least after our parents decided trying to keep us in one room just wasn’t going to work.

Everyone I knew lived in a similar size house. I had relatives who had larger homes with basements or maybe even two bathrooms. But it was plenty big for us with a large backyard in a decent neighborhood.

We had enough to eat. Looking back, it wasn’t the best food in the world. Opening a can was about as far as my parent’s culinary skills went, but we were never hungry. At least not until we hit the teenage years.

My first apartment was an $85 a month duplex in a relatively unsavory suburb of Atlanta. That was when I first began learning the value of money and what it could and couldn’t buy. I lived there out of choice, but most of my neighbors didn’t. It was the best they could do.

But they were happy.

A few years later, I met my future bride, and we moved into our first house. By today’s standards, this would probably also be called a starter home, but to me, it was a mansion. Two-story, three bedrooms with one and a half baths. It was here that I first learned the lessons of not enough money. I remember selling my high school class ring so we could buy groceries.

Tough times, but it’s where we both grew up and grew together.
It’s also where we started our long journey toward retirement. We couldn’t save much, but we did what little we could.

Seven years later, we moved into our second and largest home. Still not a mansion by some standards, but it was to us. This is also where we came into our own, began serious careers, and, most importantly, began investing in our future.

There was just enough money, but now it was because we were saving more. We contributed to 401K plans and bought into stock options. We invested wisely, and eventually, made a decent return on selling that home.

Next, we moved into our last large house. We wanted to downsize some but ended up not getting much smaller. It was hard to find a home that met all our needs that was also small. But that was okay; we began thinking about the finish line. We were still fifteen years away from retirement, but we could see the end game.

As soon as we had enough money.

We had been together twenty years at that point, and we went from not enough money to just enough money in that time. We never had what we considered plenty of money, but we lived how we wanted and took vacations that made our earlier holidays seem like the literal drive to the beach they were.

But to retire, we needed enough money. Enough for what? First and foremost, enough so we didn’t have to work anymore. Enough so we could live, as they say, in the style we had become accustomed to.

Enough.

So, we had loosely defined enough for what, but we had no idea how much was enough. How would we know? So many people seemed to jump into the deep end of the pool and hope they could keep their heads above water.

2008 came and went during this period, and we knew plenty who had drowned. But we were diverse enough, savvy enough, and yes, damn lucky enough to come through that okay. Our retirement savings grew. But would it be enough?

I wrote another article on managing your money that went into great detail on how I ultimately planned and defined enough. I won’t repeat all of that here, but suffice it to say, it involved a relatively detailed and complex set of spreadsheets.

Basically, although we had never used a real budget, I set up one showing how much we spent annually on everything. And that is the key to this part of the plan; everything. Then, I planned out the rest of our years, with a good and probably overly generous life expectancy. In that spreadsheet, I put line items for everything we were spending now and how some of those expenses would change. I shifted income from jobs to 401k disbursements and social security.

Basically, I laid out what we had and what we would need.

And guess what?

We had enough.

At least we thought we had enough. It was tough to wrap our heads around that concept. I haven’t been unemployed since I was 13 years old, and here I was, planning thirty or forty years of life without a job? How could you possibly have enough?

That was five years ago and spoiler alert; we had enough. Of course, things can always change. For instance, the world could fall prey to some global pandemic or a rise of zombies or something. But, I was conservative in my estimates, and we moved most of our money into conservative and safe places.

So, when do you have enough money?

First, you need to decide enough for what?

Next, you need to estimate how much is enough for that thing.

Finally, and most importantly, you need to get comfortable with the fact that you have arrived there. Most people spend their lives saving for the future. Some never reach that future. More people reach that future but don’t know it. They have saved and invested all their lives, and they can’t stop.

But at some point, if you reach the point where you have enough, stop is what you should do.

Stop saving and start spending. It’s what you spent your entire life working toward.

As of this writing, my dad is still with us and still living alone and independently. He lives in a house that is paid for and drives a car he paid cash for. He never travels and doesn’t buy anything new until the old one is completely worn out.

He has enough money, but he never came to the point of realization.

Determine what you are trying to achieve with your money. Figure out how much is enough.

And when you get there, know that enough is enough.

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