When is enough enough? The real purpose of financial planning

Wealth can provide security, freedom and choice. But it cannot tell you when accumulation has done its job. New behavioural research commissioned by Y TREE finds that the most driven wealthy people report the highest life satisfaction, and the highest anxiety. Knowing what money is for, it suggests, matters just as much as growing it.

John Bogle, the late index fund pioneer and founder of Vanguard, liked to tell a story about the authors Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

As Bogle recalled it, Vonnegut pointed out that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from Catch-22 over its entire history.

Heller replied: 'Yes, but I have something he will never have… enough.'

Bogle thought that answer contained a small philosophy of money, business and life. He used it as the title and opening idea of Enough, his book about what happens when finance becomes too absorbed in quantity and loses sight of purpose.

Towards the end of Bogle's life, I was privileged enough to interview him twice at Vanguard's headquarters in Pennsylvania. After the second interview, he gave me a signed copy of that book. It remains one of my most cherished possessions.

Bogle is rightly remembered for forcing the investment industry to confront costs, conflicts and the mathematical difficulty of beating the market after fees. But Enough asked a more awkward question than how investors could keep more of their returns: What were the returns for?

That question matters for people who have already done well. A portfolio can be diversified, low-cost and sensibly managed. It can compound for decades and reach a figure that once seemed absurdly ambitious. Yet none of that tells its owner what to do next.

The wealth-management industry is well equipped to help people accumulate and invest. It is less well equipped to address the deeper purpose of financial planning, deciding when further accumulation should stop being the main objective.' Which is why a new study commissioned by the financial planning firm Y TREE, The Deliberate Edge, deserves attention.

Why this research matters

Behavioural research on the very wealthy is thin. Wellbeing studies of general populations are plentiful, but people with seven- or eight-figure portfolios are hard to recruit, protective of their privacy and rarely available in the numbers a serious study requires. Much of what we think we know about the psychology of the rich rests on anecdote.

The Deliberate Edge is an attempt to do better. Its academic team is led by Paul Dolan, Professor of Behavioural Science at LSE and one of Britain's best-known researchers on happiness and wellbeing, working with Dr George Melios and Dr Cahal Moran. The research firm NewtonX recruited 200 UK adults with at least £1 million in investable assets, and the researchers conducted eight in-depth interviews with a separate group. For this population, that is a substantial evidence base.

The sample was 87.5 per cent male, and 92 per cent of respondents were classified as self-made. That makes it unrepresentative of wealthy Britain as a whole. But it is also a sharp portrait of a particular type: the self-made, for whom the habits of accumulation run deepest. If anyone should know when enough is enough, it is them.

The findings suggest otherwise.

Plenty of wealth, no settled sense of enough

When respondents rated their satisfaction across five areas of life, wealth ranked fourth, behind relationships, career and health. Leisure came last.

Anxiety complicates the picture further. Respondents reported an average score of 4.10 out of ten when asked how anxious they had felt the previous day, against an Office for National Statistics average of 3.23 on the same zero-to-ten scale. The comparison is indicative rather than conclusive, but it sits awkwardly with the assumption that money buys peace of mind.

The interviews point in the same direction. Work pressure, responsibility and memories of earlier financial insecurity can coexist with considerable wealth.

Stuart Cash, founder and chief executive of Y TREE, who explores these themes further in the firm's Deliberate Edge podcast series, puts the problem plainly: 'When people make more money, we have this expanding lifestyle and expanding expenditure profile, whereby you feel like you always need more. It's a human trait. We always feel we should be progressing, that we should be doing better.'

The study's most useful contribution is to segment respondents into three distinct profiles, based on their motivations and wellbeing. The most revealing is the group the researchers call Restless Maximisers: 44 of the 200 respondents, or 22 per cent of the sample. They reported both the highest average life satisfaction and the highest average anxiety.

That combination is the study in miniature. Drive delivers achievement, purpose and pressure at the same time. The urge for more is not necessarily greed. It may be ambition, duty, fear, habit or some mixture of them.

Wealth is rarely just a number. It becomes tied to identity, family, status and fear. By the time someone asks, 'How much is enough?', they are not asking a mathematical question alone.

Why the target keeps moving

Success has a habit of rewriting its own finish line.

Dolan explored this long before The Deliberate Edge. In his book Happy Ever After, he challenged familiar social narratives about what a successful and fulfilling life is supposed to look like. One of them is the pressure to keep reaching: to move forward, achieve more and avoid standing still.

The problem is that reaching has no natural endpoint. Hit one target and another appears. What looked like abundance from a distance can start to feel, from the inside, like the new minimum.

For someone who has built a business, risen through a demanding profession or spent years taking financial risk, that pattern may become part of their identity. Slowing down may not feel like success. It may feel like surrender.

The pressure is rarely personal alone. There may be children to support, ageing parents to help, employees who depend on the business or a family lifestyle with high fixed costs. Add uncertainty about markets, tax, inflation and longevity, and the desire for a margin of safety can be entirely rational. The difficulty comes when no margin ever feels wide enough.

These are the forces the interviews in The Deliberate Edge bring to the surface, and they help explain how someone can hold the highest life satisfaction and the highest anxiety in the same pair of hands.

More money can help, but it does not answer the question

Money can improve life. It can remove material worries, widen choice and provide protection when things go wrong. What it cannot do is define enough on your behalf.

For years, the popular account of happiness research was that emotional wellbeing stopped rising once annual household income reached about $75,000, an oversimplification of a 2010 study by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton. Later work by Matthew Killingsworth found no such plateau in his data, and a 2023 collaboration between the two, with Barbara Mellers, found no single pattern that applied to everyone. The defensible conclusion is that there is no agreed income threshold at which every person has enough. Money does not supply its own endpoint. Another million does not tell you whether it will materially change your life or simply enlarge a number you have become accustomed to pursuing.

That is where the standard industry conversation falls short. Wealth is too easily treated as a score to be improved rather than a resource to be deployed.

What a good adviser should help you decide about the purpose of financial planning

Investment management and financial planning are related, but they are not the same job. The purpose of financial planning is to answer questions investment management cannot.

A competent investment process should answer important questions. Is the portfolio well diversified? Are you taking an appropriate amount of risk? Are costs under control? Are the investments suitable for your objectives, time horizon and capacity for loss?

All of that matters. Poor implementation can do real damage.

But investment management alone cannot tell you how much you can sustainably spend, when work has become optional or what the capital is ultimately meant to achieve.

That is where planning should earn its keep. Many firms say they provide financial planning, but the purpose of financial planning is defeated if the process never goes beyond listing ambitions and starts to define sufficiency. Can it distinguish between what must be protected, what can be enjoyed and what appears genuinely surplus?

Bogle's warning is relevant here. Numbers can crowd out values because numbers are easier to measure. Financial services can improve the vehicle, monitor its speed and lower the fuel bill. Someone still has to decide where the journey is meant to lead.

Turning 'enough' into a plan

'Enough' becomes useful only when it is turned into a plan.

Stuart Cash describes how clients often begin to make sense of their wealth: 'Clients tend to break their money into pots. This is my stuff, I know I'm going to be okay. This is the stuff I want to give to the kids. And this is the speculative stuff, what I could afford to give to society, or put towards things I'm interested in. Once you've taken care of yourself, then you think about different levels.'

That strikes me as a useful starting point. For planning purposes, I would divide those pots into four.

The first is core security: the capital that funds essential spending, housing, tax, care and longevity, with a prudent margin for adverse outcomes. This is the money that keeps the plan intact if markets disappoint, inflation is higher than expected or life lasts longer than assumed. The amount required depends on assumptions about spending, returns, inflation, tax, lifespan and the degree of security the client wants.

The second is the chosen life. This covers the things that make wealth worth having: more time, less pressure, travel, family, a career change or a project that matters to you. These things may be discretionary in an accounting sense. They are not peripheral to a good life.

The third is family and legacy: money intended for children, education, lifetime gifts,

philanthropy or other intergenerational commitments. A gift made earlier in a recipient's life may be more useful than a larger inheritance received decades later.

The fourth is surplus and ambition: capital beyond the first three, whether that means further business risk, philanthropy, passion projects or continued accumulation, pursued because the client wants to, not because the first three categories demand it.

Cash-flow modelling can help draw these boundaries, but only if it is used as a decision tool rather than a forecast of what will definitely happen. Its value lies in making assumptions visible, testing different scenarios and helping people ask better questions.

Can you sell the business without putting the family's security at unacceptable risk? Could you work less now? Can you make gifts while your children are in a position to benefit from them? What would another £1 million allow you to do that you cannot already do?

That last question is often revealing.

Taken together, the four pots amount to a stopping rule: a way of knowing, in advance and on your own terms, when accumulation has done its job. Once core security, the chosen life and family and legacy are adequately funded under a range of reasonable assumptions, surplus and ambition can be pursued deliberately rather than by default.

That is the difference between having money and having a plan for it.

The harder question wealthy people need to ask

This is why I keep returning to my signed copy of Enough. Heller's answer in the Shelter Island story sounds almost flippant. Bogle understood that it was anything but.

Enough is not a fixed number handed down by an economist, planner or wealth manager. It is better understood as the point at which money has been given a clear job, important commitments have been funded with a suitable margin for uncertainty, and further accumulation has become a conscious choice rather than an unquestioned reflex.

Numbers still matter. But they are servants, not masters. They cannot tell you how much time with your family is worth. They cannot decide whether the sacrifices required to earn more remain worthwhile. And they are of limited use if forward motion has quietly become the purpose itself.

That is why The Deliberate Edge deserves a wider readership than most industry research. It puts serious behavioural science behind a question the industry rarely asks, and it studies the people best placed to answer it. The report sets out the three profiles in detail, explores where the drive for more comes from and examines the anxieties that persist even among people with substantial resources. Most readers will finish it wondering which profile is theirs. That is rather the point.

The question it leaves you with is not: 'How do I make more?'

It is: 'What is all this money for now?'

That is the conversation Y TREE is trying to have.

A portfolio can be expertly managed and still fall short of its ultimate purpose: helping its owner use wealth to support the life they have decided is enough.

Resources

Bogle, J. C. (2008). Enough: True measures of money, business, and life. John Wiley & Sons.

Dolan, P. (2019). Happy ever after: Escaping the myth of the perfect life. Allen Lane.

Kahneman, D., & Deaton, A. (2010). High income improves evaluation of life but not emotional well-being. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(38), 16489–16493.

Killingsworth, M. A. (2021). Experienced well-being rises with income, even above $75,000 per year. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(4).

Killingsworth, M. A., Kahneman, D., & Mellers, B. A. (2023). Income and emotional well-being: A conflict resolved. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120(10).

Y TREE. (2026). The deliberate edge.

This article was written as part of Robin Powell's ongoing content partnership with Y TREE. He works with the firm because he believes it approaches these questions properly. The analysis and opinions are his own.