The Nobel Prize-winning economists, Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman, researched in 2010 if money had a part in people’s emotional lives. They found that money can affect people’s emotions.

People with more money feel better about their lives. However, it could only happen until our salary reached $75,000 or around Rp1.065.386.250,00 or equivalent to around $90.000 per year (Rp1.278.463.500,00) in 2021’s value. If the salaries exceed this number, people do not really become “happier.”

The study found that “high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness.” Yet, “low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.”

In the same year with the research above, a senior fellow at the University Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Matthew Killingsworth, created a tool to track happiness by making an application named Track Your Happiness to investigate what makes life worth living, according to Bloomberg.

Killingsworth sampled 1,725,994 experiences from 33,391 employed U.S. adults using his Track Your Happiness app. The U.S. median household income in 2019 was $68,703, while the median household income in Killingsworth’s survey was $85,000.

The audience tell the app what they are feeling at several points throughout the month. Thus, it contributes to Killingsworth’s scientific experiment. Furthermore, it helps the user find out what variables are associated with their greater well-being.

However, unlike the Kahneman and Deaton research, Killingsworth found that well-being continued to increase past an annual income of $80,000.

As the research concludes, “… that higher incomes may still have potential to improve people’s day-to-day well-being, rather than having already reached a plateau for many people in wealthy countries.”