This question may be more fruitfully understood, however, if it were re-phrased as “what is it (if anything) about money that makes us happy?” In other words, turning our attention from the level of individuals’ household income (the key variable of interest in most studies) to measures of how individuals spend the money they have (i.e., the composition of spending) provides an opportunity for testing more specific hypotheses about why money may (or may not) matter to individual life satisfaction. We know of no existing studies that have addressed the question in this fashion, but we offer some guiding hypotheses here.