The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - How to Know When You Have Enough, Build a Safety Net, and Spend Money Well — ft. Morgan Housel

Episode Date: November 14, 2025

In this special episode of Office Hours, Scott Galloway brings back Morgan Housel to answer your questions on “enough,” financial independence, and the art of spending. They discuss why our money goals keep moving, how to know when you can slow down, and why saving is really about buying independence, not things. Morgan also explains why holding extra cash can be a smart emotional hedge, while Scott shares how he spends today and what he wishes he’d known earlier. Morgan’s latest book, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life, is out now. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Support for today's show comes from Zoom. Work isn't just meetings. It's calls, chat, docs, emails, events, and more. Zoom brings it all together in one platform so workflows and ideas move faster. Learn more at zoom.com slash podcast and Zoom ahead. Welcome to Prop G on Money, a special series where we're joined by Morgan Housel, best-selling author of The Psychology of Money, along with his latest The Art of Spending Money. This is the second and final episode where we're taking your questions on all things, money, saving, spending, and everything in between. Anyways, if you'd like to submit a question for next time, you can send a voice recording to Office Hours of Proptechimedia.com.

Again, that's Office Hours of Proptechimedia.com, or post your question on the Scott Galloway subbrow at Morgan. you're ready to chop some wood here? Let's do it. Our first question comes from user Delicious Coffee 993 on Reddit. They say, at what liquid net worth should people consider just slowing down

and enjoy time over continuing to build via paychecks? Unless you start your own business, it is unlikely most people will hit Scott's level of wealth. So at what point should people consider it enough or put another way, at what point is another one million

just not worth the loss of time with kids, parents, etc.? The difficulty of this question is how easy it is to tell yourself, once I have a million, that will feel like it's enough, or $5 million, or $10 million, whatever it might be. And you genuinely tell yourself that. You genuinely believe it, that once you have that much, then you won't feel any desire for more. And if you are like 99.9% of people, if you're fortunate enough to get to $1,000, $5 million, $10 million, whatever it is, then the right amount is going to be roughly double that.

There's so much evidence from the research that shows that no matter how much money you have how much money you earn, the amount that you think is enough is double of what you have right now. People who have $100, say the right amount is $200. People who have $100 million say the right amount is $200 million. It tends to be that. It's always just this perpetual moving of the goalpost to do that. Now, there is a thing where if you are satisfied with your relationships, you're satisfied with the work that you do, you have a good marriage, your kids admire you. You're the city and the town that you live in really admires you. Then your desire to say, I need so much more, tends to be much less than it otherwise would be. So I think if you are

very confident in other aspects of your life, then your desire to associate your net worth with your self-worth really diminishes. And so I guess to answer the question, there is no right amount for that. I know people who have lived very good, amazing lives pretty much in some form of retirement with half a million dollars. There are also deck of billionaires who wake up every single morning saying it's not enough. It is not enough. This is the classic Chris Rock joke where he said if Bill Gates woke up with Oprah's money, he'd jump out the window. And so there's always a level at which it's never going to feel like it's enough. Understanding your propensity to move the goalpost and your desire to find value in your life outside of your net worth is one of the most important

topics with money. Yeah, I think about this a lot. So you say something more than really resonated with me and that is rich is the stuff you see wealth are the things you don't see right the real wealth is a piece of mind you know you're bulletproof you don't need a flashy car and so i used to think of i no longer say this is what rich is i say this is what wealth is and that is figure out how much money what your burn is say you need a hundred thousand dollars to live your life what wealth is is you don't have to do anything you don't have to get up whatever you do you choose to do for money because your passive income is $100,000 a year. And generally speaking, a general benchmark is to say, okay, if that number is $100,000, times it by 25, that assumes that

4% post-tax return, you're pretty bulletproof, which means that once you've managed to save $2.5 million, which isn't easy, you're done or you're technically wealthy. So the question then becomes, well, what is that number? And for me, that number has gone up a hundredfold. And I'm exaggerating. I thought, when I was in college, I thought, if I ever have a base of a million bucks of liquid net worth, I'm kind of done. And that is, I'll be working just to work. Then as I got older and I thought about a family and a house, it went to 10 million. And then when I got to 10 million, I decided I'd really like to have a plane. I'd really like to give money away. I'd really like to feel like I'm relevant. And unfortunately, and I hate to say this

in my age. Relevance for me is still strongly attached not only to my professional relevance, but how much money I make. And I can't snap out of it. And I've said openly, I think everyone has certain addictions, and that is what is an addiction, something you engage in, despite it having negative ramifications in other parts of your life. I'm addicted to the affirmation of others. If someone comes on on YouTube and says, Morgan's amazing, but Scott's an awful human being, it will bum me out, and maybe take me away from my kids for a few minutes. That's an addiction. I'm also addicted to money. I got lucky again, and I'm done. Theoretically, I'm done. If I have a bad day in the market, it upsets me. And it makes no difference in my life.

So my number went up a hundredfold. When I hit finally did hit that number, I have consciously tried to have a practice of saying, okay, get off the hamster wheel. Money is the ink in your pen. it can write new chapters. It can make certain chapters burn brighter, but it's not who you are. What is your purpose? Like, what are you trying to achieve here? Because my whole life, my only purpose was economic security. My mom got very sick and we didn't have money. And when I had kids, as I told you, I wasn't in the place I wanted to be. So it is just hardwired into me. And it's something I've always had, I've never been able to fully snap out of it. But I do think what Morgan's talking about, evaluate your relationships, evaluate, you know,

evaluate your health. And once you have a point where you know you can you can survive an economic shock, take your kids on a vacation, have health care, you know, they say that that is around, they used to say that was 75,000 a year. I think that's bullshit. I don't think anyone can be economically stressed for it 75. I think that's more like two or 300 grand a year. And I don't know if you've read any Daniel Conneman, but his research was once you get to that certain point, incremental money is no happiness, which says to me, and I want to put this to you, this goes back to public policy, I don't, I believe that. So for me, pick a big number, $2, $3 million a year. I don't understand why we wouldn't have tax rates of 60, 70, or 80

percent, because it's not making anyone any happier, whereas if you can redistribute that money to universal, you know, child care or health care subsidies or schools or after school programs, things that really make a difference in people's lives. And it's not going to make any difference in uber wealthy households if they have if they make four million a year instead of four and a half why wouldn't we have incredibly aggressive incremental tax rates above a certain amount i realize this is a bit of a off ramp here a diversion but i'm just curious to get your thoughts on this morgan yeah i mean that's effectively what we did in the 1950s and in some aspects it did work out in many aspects it didn't one little quirk on this that i think is important is what

some of the research shows is that if you are already a sad, depressed, glum person, the evidence is that earning more money. It's not going to change. It's not going to do anything for you. And you can put a face on that and really imagine someone who is earning tons of money. Their income is doubling every year. They're promoted. They get huge bonuses. They're making millions of dollars a year. But their marriage is shot. Their kids don't talk to them. They're overweight. They smoke. They don't sleep at night. They have a dirty conscience. Like, go on down the list. course that person's not happy. But if you are starting out as a happy, content, smiling person, then earning more money is like an amazing thing. Like it leverages who you are in either direction.

And that's what's really important. But it's too easy to tell yourself, if only I earn twice as much money, then these problems would go away. If only I earn more money, then my spouse would love me more. My kids would talk to me more. I would be in better health. I think around the edges that actually can be true to some extent, but dramatically less than we assume that it will be. Let's go on to question two. Question number two comes from user to put it frankly on Reddit. They say, is it okay to hold a higher cash balance? For example, 35% of total portfolio at 4% yield just to help me sleep at night.

I'm 31 years old, but I worry with all the layoffs in the tech scene, I may be unemployed for one to two years and want to have that cash for peace of mind, even though I should probably invest it. Morgan? Not only is it okay, it's what I do. And I'm not recommending necessarily that everybody does that. But the biggest risk in your personal life and throughout the economy are things that you are not talking about and nobody sees coming. The biggest economic stories in the last 25 years were 9-11, Lehman Brothers going bankrupt and COVID. And the common denominator of all three of those is nobody saw them coming until the moment that they happened.

And same with Pearl Harbor. Same with like all the big events are the ones that are unforeseeable. And in your personal life, your individual life, nobody gets married thinking they're going to be divorced. No 25-year-old thinks they're going to die of cancer in the next 10 years. on down that list, the biggest risk in your personal life are things that you are not thinking about today. Because of that, the only thing that you can really do financially to guard yourself and protect yourself in that world is have a level of savings that seems like it's too much. Like if you are only saving for the events that you can foresee, then by definition, you're not

prepared for the surprise. And the surprise is always the biggest risk. And so when I save money, or if a financial advisor were to look at my asset allocation, they might say, what are you saving for? you're saving for a house, you're saying for a new car? And my answer would always be like, no, I'm saving for a world in which the biggest risk is always what I don't see coming. I have no idea what the next COVID is going to be, what the next 9-11 is going to be. And if I only have enough cash for the risks that I can foresee in front of me, I'm going to be caught off guard. And so the other thing about that is that if you have a higher cash balance, it gives you a fighting chance to keep invested in the stocks that you own.

the only thing that's going to matter for the investments that you own over the course of your life is whether you can remain invested when shit gets real, when shit hits the fan. That's all that matters. And if having 35% cash means that when the stock market falls 50%, you're able to leave it alone because it's not that big a deal and you have this cash, this liquid savings, then actually the return on that cash is much, much higher than the 3% you're getting in your savings account. If it prevents you from selling and having this unbelievable financial scar from dumping your stocks at the the bottom, then the actual return, the implied return, it's a hidden return that you earn on your cash, might be 10 or 20 percent. And so that hidden return on cash from letting you sleep at night, from being there when you need it, and preventing you from dumping your stock to the worst possible time can be enormous. Yeah, I love that. Like, money helps you do wonderful things, but money isn't just about the additional things that gets you. It's about freeing you from an absence of things, an absence of stress that you can't afford health care. It's about taking things away.

It's about knowing that if someone in your life, God forbid, is diagnosed with lung cancer. It doesn't mean you're going to go bankrupt. So it removes certain stressors. And everybody at the end of the day has a different level of emotional susceptibility to stress. Now, theoretically people will say, always be invested in the market, just diversify, that that's usually the way to go. there's also people that say always have six months of kind of emergency funding because to your point Morgan what you never want to be well one you don't ever want to be stressed but two you never want to be a forced seller because if you're a forced seller I can guarantee you basically when you get divorced

you're a forced seller and that is you've got to sell a house you've got to sell stocks you've got to divide stuff and I can guarantee you I don't care when you get divorced it will be at exactly the moment for the assets you have. The four-seller, if you're a four-seller, it usually means other people are four-sellers and buyers are swooping in with, they smell fear, they're swooping in with ridiculous below-market offers. So the great financial recession where, you know, the market's got cut in half or more, they rip back, what, in 14 months? So you want to talk about emotional stress. If you had a burn and not enough savings to cover your burn and you were a for-seller of stocks, and then you saw them rip back. Imagine the anxiety you registered then. So I 100% agree

with more, and you don't want to be a forced seller. A lot of it is kind of up to you around where you get emotional comfort. What I do is I don't have 35% in cash. What I have tried to do is make myself somewhat bulletproof by a massive amount of diversification. That is, I don't have 35% in cash. What I have is no more other than real estate where I'm overinvested, but outside of that, I never have more than 3 or 4% of my net worth in any one thing. Because now, everything's sort of correlated now, but it's unlikely. You know, it's unlikely. I'm an investor in a Chinese fast fashion company in Japanese bonds and in a European aerospace company and in tech stocks. It's unlikely they're all going to go down together. They might. I also own some Bitcoin, which I never thought I would own.

I also own some pound sterling in case the dollar crashes. Because to be clear, cash in the U.S. dollar right now is riskier than it's ever been. It itself is a decision. It's an investment decision. So, you know, we have a traditional sort of comfort, false coal comfort, that if I have savings and dollars, I'm fine. Well, there's a scenario where those dollars are not worth nearly as much. So I get comfort, and everyone has to find their own levels of comfort, and there's best practices, but I get comfort, the same comfort that, to put it frankly, on Reddit gets. I get that comfort from massive diversification. Any final thoughts here, Morgan? No, I think that's good. I mean, all the stocks that I own is basically mostly the Vanguard total stock market index.

It's 6,000 companies that's owned in there. You're right that usually in the heat of a crisis, most correlations go to one. And it doesn't matter whether you own small caps, large caps, techs, banking, it doesn't matter. They're all going down indiscriminately. That tends to be the case. And so you can still kind of fool yourself, even with big diversification, particularly for short periods of time when everyone's panicking. But to that point, I love this definition from Napoleon. He said the military genius is the man who can do the average thing when everyone else is losing his mind.

And I think it's the exact same in investing in finance. If you can merely be average when everyone else is panicking, you are top 1%. And so it's less, too, about your financial diversification and more about the behaviors that you can maintain once or twice per decade when everyone's losing their mind. I love that. We'll be right back after a quick break. support for the show comes from neutroful if you're dealing with hair issues including thinning or shedding don't just slap any old product on your head find one that's physician formulated like neutroful neutral is the number one dermatologist recommended hair growth supplement

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and she said that she noticed a discernible difference in her sleep quality. Go to Lisa.com for 25% off mattresses plus get an extra $50 off with promo code PropG exclusive for our listeners. That's L-E-E-E-S-A.com promo code PropG for 25% off mattresses plus an extra $50 off. Support our show and let them know we sent you after checkout. Lisa.com promo code PropG. Welcome back onto our final question. User Bowtender O.C. says, a big fan of Morgan. I'd love to hear some detailed personal spending from him. He's discussed his approach and philosophy, but I'm curious about specifics like where does he skimp and where does he splurge. Is he financially independent? Does he put money and plans for his kids' future education? Private or public schools? Does he fly first class or private ever? Are his friends normal or wealthy? And what about you? Scott. I could just share my screen and pull up my credit card statement or something. I don't know. No, look, my wife and I have been together since we were very young, so we became adults

together. And when we met, we didn't have any money. So we've gone through this together, which has been a good, a good experience. And our financial situation changed very dramatically in the last five years when we had two kids and we had already been married for 10 years, as a big saver. And I still am a very big saver. I don't view. view it as saving money. I view it as purchasing independence. And so what is the biggest expense that I have? It's independence. And that feels like I'm cheating on that question. I get it. But it's the most valuable thing in the world to me to wake up every morning and be like, I can do whatever I want. I can do whatever the heck I want today. And that is, that's my

prize possession by far. People have different personalities on that. But to me, nothing has ever meant more than that. We do spend on actually spending stuff quite a bit more than we did five years ago. We bought a new house a year ago. We've got to take awesome trips. The truth is we buy anything we want. There's no budget. The truth, too, is that that was true 15 years ago when we made 99% less money. And so it's always kind of been like that. What's important to me, always been important, but very important now that we make a little bit more money, is that I'm not beholden to the money, that the money is not commanding my personality. And that I don't say, oh, because we make this much money, we have to drive this car

and I have to own this watch and I have to dress this way even if I don't want to. That is when you are just a victim you're beholden to what money's telling you to do. And so I want to use it as a tool to become the best version of myself, but I don't want it to define who I am.

And so we travel well, we eat well. I love hanging out with my friends. I have one of my best friends in California. I've known him for a quarter of a century. I love paying for his first class ticket to fly up and see me and then we go out to fancy restaurants

and nothing makes me happier than doing that for him. It's the coolest thing in the world. And so I want to use money as a tool to do things like that, rather than being beholden to what I'm supposed to be because I earn X dollars per year. Yeah, we're of the same mind here. I'm older than you. How old are you, Morgan?

41. So you're way ahead of where I was at your age. I'm 60. I got very lucky. There's nothing like $7 trillion in stimulus pumped into the market. to keep people who already have assets wealthy. And so I've basically, vis-a-vis our government, been using the next generation's credit card to see my assets, which I were able to acquire. I'm not humble. I'm a fucking monster. I'm talented. I work hard. But it's better to be lucky than good.

And since 2008, my net worth has absolutely exploded. Because what do you know, we've been in the biggest bull market in the history of any economy anywhere for 17 years. And I'm on the back nine, and that is, I would say the difference between the U.S. and Europe is the U.S. is the best place to make money. Europe's the best place to spend it. I'm in Europe for a reason. I'm in the part of my life where I've decided I want to spend a lot of money. I think in a capitalist society, I can't stand it when people don't know how to spend their money. I know a lot of people, and you just wrote a book on this, who are really, really wealthy, and they have like tacky homes and they don't take nice vacations and they worry about money. I'm like, what's it? I'm of the mind.

You don't really own money. You rent it. But if you rent it out, you can do just amazing shit with it. And so when I kind of hit my number, which is, and this is a story of extreme privilege, very lucky and very talented, and born at the right place, the right time with the right skin color and the right outdoor plumbing, disproportionate advantage as it created to me. I want to do my land acknowledgement. but I spend a shit ton of money and I spend probably 50% of it on what I'll call experiences and that is I do amazing, amazing vacations with friends and family and plan them out and live in beautiful homes and I just don't let, I love what you said about your friend.

I do the same thing. What I've done, what's changed in the last 10 years for me is I don't think of his philanthropy. I think it was consumption. Every year I look at how much money I spent and I try and match it and give it away. And I don't do it out of guilt. I do it because it makes me feel really masculine. It makes me feel very American. And I find these amazing nonprofits, mostly in public education and in teen suicide prevention,

that I just think are outstanding organizations and I can have a real impact. You know, I'm not a billionaire, but I give millions away, and I just, it's one of the most rewarding things that I do. And by the way, I didn't give a dime away until I was like 45. I'm not, I can't pretend to be a philanthropic person. I wasn't born that way. I find it just very rewarding and a lot of fun now. But, I mean, the learning is the following. There's an art to spending money. I imagine you feel this way. One of the most rewarding things in my life. is that when I met my partner, we didn't have any money. She was just out of graduate school.

All she had was student debt, and now we're wealthy. And having built that together and getting to spend it and enjoy it together is so rewarding. It's so much fun. We'll be somewhere extraordinarily beautiful or get to give money away, and we can just look at each other and just high-five each other that, you know, this worked out, and we built this together. It's so, it's so rewarded that, it's like, I've always said, it's not having the money's great, but it was earning it that was fun. And what was remarkable was earning and building it with a partner. That was just so, so much fun. Any closing thoughts here, Morgan?

I mean, what you're really getting at is what you really value right now and what have compounded over time are those experiences and those memories and the experience of doing it together. And so it's less, there's a great Will Smith quote about. about fame, where he said, becoming famous is the most amazing feeling in the world. Being famous is merely okay. And losing fame is one of life's great tragedies. And I think inherent in that is like, what you want is the growth. That's what feels good. And I think for a lot of people, that's true for money. You don't actually want to be rich. What you want is to partake in the process of becoming rich. That's what feels great. And if you're doing that with somebody else along the way, along that journey, a hundred times better.

I love that. Morgan Housel is the best-selling author of The Psychology of Money and a partner at the Collaborative Fund. Market Watch named him one of the 50 most influential people in markets. His new book, The Art of Spending Money, is out now. I absolutely love Morgan and his stuff. I can find a lot of his financial advice in a lot of places. What he's able to do is connected to humanity and happiness. That's his superpower. You just get the sense this guy knows how to take these principles. And once you get there, enjoy it and be happy and have really strong connective tissue with yourself, your health, your relationships. It's as if I don't even, I don't, I think it be more as like a psychology, a psychologist than a financial person. But you've really been able to blend the two.

And you have the best quotes ever. The one I'm going to take away from this one is that the military genius is the person that can just do something at average while everyone else around them loses their minds. Anyways, Morgan very much enjoyed this. Thanks for being with us today. Thanks, Scott. Fun as always. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Janair.

Jouberos is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropGPot from PropG Media.