You Will Always Regret Sacrificing Love For Money

Money is great. Money provides freedom. But you will always regret sacrificing love for money. When you get older, you will realize how true this statement really is if you haven’t found someone.

Life is simply not as fun if you don’t have someone to share it with. Further, finding “the one” might also want you to start a family. Not that everybody should have kids. Just know finding love is a huge catalyst for wanting to bring life on Earth.

Here’s a story from my friend about her regrets sacrificing love for money and career. Before you make any decision, go through a regret minimization exercise to help you make better choices.

You Will Always Regret Sacrificing Love For Money

My old boss, let’s call her Lana, who is now my friend, invited me to her house party. It wasn’t her house, but her new boyfriend’s house. I was thrilled for her because, at 54, she had gone most of her post-college life without a steady boyfriend.

She graduated with honors from Columbia University and then received her MBA from Dartmouth. For the next 30 years, she worked 60+ hours a week to climb the ranks at Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and then Morgan Stanley.

In 2002, at age 37, she made Managing Director and continues to be a big wig on Wall Street today. I wouldn’t be surprised if she regularly clears at least $1.25 million dollars a year.

When I first met Lana, she was the most focused and intense woman I had ever met.

Even after going through 50+ interviews with various people on the floor and interviewing with her twice, she still wanted to interview me one last time over coffee. She was meticulous. She also correctly suspected I was a misfit who might not fit the firm’s culture.

Although she grilled me like a wagyu burger, we became friends. I think our common heritage helped us connect.

Never Could Quite Find Love Early

She would tell me about her ski trips to Whistler or to the Swiss Alps where she randomly met some guy. She always beamed with joy when she talked about her encounters.

Every time she told me of her adventures, she’d shed her image of the hard-charging Vice President and become like a school girl falling in love for the first time.

After one trip, I remember her telling me she’d met a Tunisian gentleman, whom I immediately started referring to him as “The Tasmanian,” an ode to the Tasmanian Devil who had swept her off her feet. She was thrilled.

Unfortunately, that relationship lasted for only six months because it was too hard to maintain a long-distance relationship.

Finally Found Someone To Love

When I caught up with Lana at her new boyfriend’s house party, she told me she was finally happy. I asked her if she could rewind time back to when we first met in 1999 what would she do differently.

She responded, “I would have absolutely focused as hard on my love life as I did on my career. I was so focused on making Managing Director as a female person of color that I overly sacrificed my personal life. Once I made Managing Director, I felt like I had to work even harder to prove my worth. As you know, the higher you go in finance, the more at risk you are of being cut.“

Lana went on, “I have all the money I will ever need. But for about 20 years, I didn’t have anybody close to share it with. It felt pointless working so much. Yes, I was able to spoil my mother by taking her out to the nicest restaurants and bring her on amazing vacations, but it’s different you know?

I would be willing to give up all of my wealth just to have found someone like my current boyfriend 20 years ago.”

Spent Too Much Time Working Too

I told Lana that I empathized with her situation. I, too, was overly focused on my career in my 20s and early 30s. To get promoted and paid I sacrificed my happiness and health. At least with Lana, she made Managing Director. I did not.

Because of my career focus, I didn’t propose to my girlfriend until 10 years after I met her. I couldn’t propose without feeling like I was on the right career path or had enough money to provide for a family. It is expensive living in San Francisco or Honolulu.

Given I proposed so late, we only had our first child in 2017, 19 years after our first meeting! Talk about taking the scenic route to starting a family. Having children late is one of my biggest regrets given I love them more than anything. If I had them earlier, I would be able to spend a greater percentage of my remaining life with them.

If I had more balance, I wouldn’t have felt such a great need to retire ASAP. However, life was a little different back then. Instead of being able to play pickleball for three hours during the middle of a weekday, I had to be in the office and grind.

In retrospect, I regret focusing so much on money and career. If I hadn’t, I would have had the courage to start a family my early 30s instead of at 39.

As an older parent, I’m now doing my best to spend as much time with my kids to make up for starting late. This explains why I’ve been willing to be a stay-at-home dad for the past seven years.

The Entrepreneur Who Married Late And Can’t Have Children

I was recently conversing with someone who openly admitted to regretting prioritizing money and prestige over finding a life partner.

Coming from a culture that highly emphasized wealth and status, he attended a prestigious private university. In pursuit of financial success, he chose a path of talking about making money soon after college. He authored books, launched a website, sold courses, and appeared on TV, achieving all his goals.

However, despite reaching these milestones, he finds himself unsatisfied, because his wife is unsatisfied. She wanted to have kids two years after they married in 2018, but he didn’t want to because he was focused on accumulating even more wealth.

Now, at 39 years old, his wife faces biological challenges in fulfilling her wish for children. Meanwhile, he contemplates whether his career-centric decisions will lead to lasting regret. He’s 42 years old and thinking more about his legacy.

The Different Types Of Love

Love is complicated because there are so many different types of love. I think there are six types of love we feel.

The first type of love is the love you feel for your parents and siblings. This is a default love because y’all are forced together. Some of us develop incredibly tight relationships with our parents and siblings.

The second type of love is the love that you feel for your friends. You love hanging out with them. Sometimes you tease them because you care. You wish them all the success in the world because their wins feel like your wins.

The third type of love is the love you feel for your first boyfriend or girlfriend. Some might call it lust or passion. This type of love is thrilling and sometimes addicting. We all know people who have fallen in love with falling in love.

The fourth type of love is an extremely deep love once you’ve found your soulmate. This is the person you share all your secrets with at pillow time. You not only trust this person with your life, but you’re also willing to sacrifice yourself for him or her.

The fifth type of love is the joyous love you have for your children. Your children give you more pride than anything else in the world. Your children motivate you to become a better person. As a parent, you constantly think about teachable moments and their future well-being. Children bring about a love you never knew existed.

The final type of love is spiritual love. It is an undefined love in something more powerful that provides hope, purpose, and comfort.

So Many Types Of Love To Feel!

With at least six different types of love, it makes absolute sense to focus at least an equal amount of time on love as we do on our careers and our pursuit of wealth. Sacrificing love for money is suboptimal as you get older.

Yes, there is also a love for prestige, money and status. But if we focus too much on career and money, we become unbalanced. We start feeling empty because we start wondering what is the damn point of working so much? Such feelings revolving around how society views us is temporary.

Although I realize this, I’ve also found it extremely hard to quit the money. Once you have a family to provide for, there is an inherent desire to earn and accumulate more to protect them.

If hard work is no longer enough to get ahead, having a lot of money can sure help cushion the frustrations.

Sometimes You’ll Waste Your Time Too

Everlasting love is not guaranteed. Divorces happen all the time. It takes constant work because we tend to take the people we love for granted. We’ll also sometimes make a mistake and end up in a terrible relationship. But the search is worth it.

Just because you are alone now does not mean you will be alone forever. Like anything worth doing, you’ve got to put in the effort to combat loneliness. You can’t just expect love to serendipitously find you. It’s worth guarding against a lonely existence.

Relationships Take Time To Nurture

Establishing meaningful relationships doesn’t happen by chance. Often, it requires intentional effort, involving potential rejections and breakups along the way. Once a connection is found, building a lasting relationship may demand years of dedication and work.

Regrettably, as we age, the quest for love becomes more challenging. Our physical appearance changes, and many of those we might be interested in have already found a partner. Initiating the search early, akin to investing, can often enhance the likelihood of finding a compatible partner.

As I come to the end of this post, I realize I need to spend more time improving my relationships with my mother, my sister, a couple of friends, and with myself. Working on my relationship with my wife and two children is a given.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve spent way too much time focusing on building wealth for my family and my readers. I need to redirect some of my energy to my loved ones while they are still around.

It’s never too late to find someone special. So, if you’re still looking for love, I believe you’ll find it by redoubling your efforts in the search.

Related post about sacrificing love for money:

The Curse Of Making Too Much Money And Not Pursuing Your Dreams

If You Love Your Spouse, You’d Make them Financially Independent

Reader Questions And Suggestions

Readers, did you overly focus on your career and money to the detriment of your love life and the love you have for others? Do you know someone sacrificing love for money? How do you go about balancing love and money? How have you been able to find ways to love yourself and your life more?

Check out Empower, the best free tool to help you become a better investor. With Personal Capital, you can track your investments, see your asset allocation, x-ray your portfolios for excessive fees, and more. Staying on top of your investments during volatile times is a must. 

Pick up a copy of Buy This, Not That, my instant Wall Street Journal bestseller. The book helps you make more optimal investment decisions so you can live a better, more fulfilling life. 

For more nuanced personal finance content, join 60,000+ others and sign up for the free Financial Samurai newsletter and posts via e-mail. Financial Samurai is one of the largest independently-owned personal finance sites that started in 2009.