Rethinking the notion of a 'wealthy life'

Yahoo

08-03-2025

If you've ever felt that your relentless pursuit of money was sabotaging your ability to lead a fulfilling life, you're in the same boat as Sahil Bloom.
His quest for more was zapping him. On one hand, he writes in his new book 'The 5 Types of Wealth: A Transformative Guide to Design Your Dream Life," he turned 30 and had achieved every marker of what he believed success looked like. 'I had the high-paying job, the title, the house, the car — it was all there.'
Beneath the surface, he was miserable.
That led him to the theory that most people have a narrow measurement of wealth, success, happiness, and fulfillment entirely defined by money.
And that backfires. For Bloom, the greatest discoveries in life have come not from finding the right answers but from asking the right questions. To learn how to do just that, I asked him to share some of his advice. Below are excerpts of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Kerry Hannon: How do we play the game wrong when it comes to wealth?
Sahil Bloom: Focusing on money as the sole measure of your life is the way that we typically play the game wrong. Money isn't nothing, but it simply can't be the only thing. Money is part of your wealthy life, but it is not the entirety of it.
What are the five types of wealth as you define them?
Time wealth is the first. This is all about the freedom to choose how you spend your time, who you spend it with, where you spend it, when you trade it for other things.
It starts with an awareness of time as your most precious asset, as the only thing that you cannot get back or can't get more of. That awareness is what changes everything.
The second type is social wealth: your relationships, the people, the few deep close connections, and then the broader circles of looser connections in your life. This provides a lot of the texture and meaning on your journey.
The third type is mental wealth. This is your purpose, growth, and creating the space necessary to actually wrestle with some of these bigger-picture, unanswerable questions in your life, whether through religion, solitude, or spirituality.
The fourth type is physical wealth. This is about your health and vitality, taking the controllable actions to fight against the natural decay that your body will go through as you age.
And then the fifth type is financial wealth — with the specific nuance of really understanding your definition of enough, what it looks like to live your life with the recognition that expectations are your single greatest financial liability. Because if your expectations rise faster than your assets, you will never feel wealthy. You'll never feel rich.
You write that you can cut your expenses only so much, but you can make your income grow forever. Can you explain that a little bit?
The traditional wisdom in personal finance is to talk to people about budgeting and expense management. It's oh, stop spending money on the $5 Starbucks coffee. And that's how you walk toward financial independence.
While I do believe in expense management as an important pillar, it is very challenging to cut your way to a wealthy life because, fundamentally, you can only cut your expenses so far, but your income and skills can continue to scale in perpetuity. It's actually much more effective to, yes, live below your means and be prudent in how you manage expenses, but focus your attention and energy on growing your income and building the skills necessary to do that.
You have a somewhat contrarian view on investing. Let's discuss.
Don't get so caught up in all of the details and nuances of your investments. What happens to a lot of people is they'll have $100,000 in investible assets and also $100,000 in income. And they're focusing so much time and energy on how they invest the hundred thousand that they have, rather than taking that same energy and thinking about how to double their income.
If you double your income, that's a 100% return. But if you get another 1% return on your investible assets, that's only $1,000. It's a dramatic difference in terms of the impact you can create by focusing on your income versus focusing on the investment of your assets.
For someone who is retired or nearing retirement, how can they benefit from learning more about these pillars of wealth?
The most important concept to understand as you get close to retirement is what enough looks like.
The tendency is to be told by the world that you should be chasing more. You're told that there's this mountain that you haven't climbed yet, this thing that you have to do. You're compared to others and you're told you have to do it faster and faster, do more and more. And that's a recipe for unhappiness. Understanding what enough looks like to you, what that life actually looks like that you are trying to build toward is a recipe for fulfillment and contentment and happiness.
The other piece is recognizing that these other types of wealth are going to be the things that drive incremental happiness after you've achieved a baseline level of financial wellness. It's going to be time, people, purpose, and health. So using money as a tool rather than as the goal is where you are trying to get to as you get closer to the end of that work journey.
What do you see as the most radical takeaway from your book?
The single most radical idea is just to recognize that most of us spend our entire lives rapidly and furiously climbing up these mountains without ever taking a moment to ask ourselves whether they are mountains that we actually want to climb.
Define what actually matters to you, not what the world tells you you should care about, not what your friends tell you, and certainly not what social media tells you.
And then go take actions to build your life around those things. That answer is going to be different for every single person. I can't give you the answers for your life because you are going to have an entirely different set of priorities and considerations. The point is that we all get to choose. You get to live by design rather than by default.
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You end the book with some advice that your father gave to you. Talk a little bit about that.
When I was graduating from college and about to start my first job, I had dinner with my dad and I asked him what advice he would give me. He said the single most important advice that I can give you is to never think twice about investments in yourself.
Books, quality food, fitness, mental health, personal development, those are all investments in you that are going to pay dividends for a long, long time. I thought that that was such an important and powerful articulation because it's very easy to start penny-pinching on things like that, especially in a world where you're told you need to be really disciplined about your budget.
Kerry Hannon is a Senior Columnist at Yahoo Finance. She is a career and retirement strategist and the author of 14 books, including "In Control at 50+: How to Succeed in the New World of Work" and "Never Too Old to Get Rich." Follow her on Bluesky.
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