The WSJ reported a couple weeks ago on a study by Princeton economist Angus Deaton and psychologist Daniel Kahneman that:

The magic income: $75,000 a year. As people earn more money, their day-to-day happiness rises. Until you hit $75,000. After that, it is just more stuff, with no gain in happiness.

The conclusion came from a series of Gallup surveys of 450,000 Americans in 2008 and 2009. I thought it was interesting that happiness pretty much peaked at $75,000 (lending credence to genius of Biggie’s “mo’ money, mo’ problems”) but “contentment” was the only thing that increases with income. “More money does boost people’s life assessment, all the way up the income ladder. People who earned $160,000 a year, for instance, reported more overall satisfaction than people earning $120,000, and so on.”

What do you think your magic number is? Is it $75,000? Higher? Lower?

I’m a sucker for statistics, probably why I enjoy looking at numbers like the average retirement savings or the average tax refund, but I never gave the term “middle class” much thought until recently.

Fortunately for us, U.S. News & World Report has compiled some statistics on what the “average” is for a lot of money related statistics, like income, hours worked, etc.

Let’s take a look…
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I bet this Devil’s Advocate is going to ruffle a lot of feathers! Frugality is a pretty big topic in the personal finance blog community because there are so many things you can do to trim a few cents or dollars off here or there. You can buy gadgets like a Kill-A-Watt to find out how much energy your appliances are using and disconnect them when they’re not in use. You can make your own detergent for your washing machine or buy a rack to line dry your clothes. There have been books filled to the brim with thousands upon thousands of ways to save a few dollars and cents here or there… however they never get to the heart of the issue – being frugal should be the very last thing you try to be when all other options have been exhausted.

If you think of yourself as a business, you have two ways of generating a profit. You can increase your income or you can decrease your expenses. When you focus entirely on being frugal, you only look at half of the equation. That’s foolish.

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An MSNBC article this week discussed how women are increasingly earning more than their husbands. Twenty years ago, 17.8% of women outearned their husbands. In 2007, 25.9% outearned their husbands if they both worked and 33.5% of married women outearned their husbands period. It’s estimated that the percentage bas probably jumped because of all the jobs lost in the recession, it’s estimated that nearly 75% were held by men.

The Shriver Report conducted a survey and found that 65.3% of women and 61.2% of men were comfortable with women earning more than men. I want to know, what do you think?

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Six months ago, I became a professional blogger (or problogger, as the lingo goes) but the process of going professional was easily six months in the making (three years if you ask my wife).

I don’t know if it’s come through in my writing, or if you’ve read long enough to tease this out, but I’m a predominately conservative person with regard to risk (not political leanings). However, given the right opportunities, I’m willing to make aggressive moves that some would consider extremely risky. Resigning my full time position to pursue what is essentially a freelance writing gig ranks as extremely risky in my pantheon of risk. While you’re never 100% safe in your job, it’s certainly more stable than working for yourself. Being self-employed has its benefits, stability certainly isn’t one of them. This article will detail how I mitigated those risks, as best I could, and how I prepared to become a professional blogger.

This article is pretty long and might not be all that useful to many people, but several other bloggers and my friends have asked about how I prepared to become a freelancer/problogger so I thought I’d put it all together.

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