The Difference Between Feeling Rich and Being Secure

You can feel rich on a Tuesday and terrified on a Friday. Feeling rich is eating at the expensive restaurant without checking the prices. Feeling terrified is realizing you don’t know if you could handle three months without income.

These aren’t the same thing. One is a mood. The other is a structure. Most financial advice conflates them, which is why people who feel rich often aren’t secure, and people who are secure often don’t feel rich.

The Problem

Feeling rich is emotional and immediate. It’s the satisfaction of buying the thing you want without the mental calculation. It’s the relief of not having to worry about the bill when it arrives. It’s the pleasure of treating friends to dinner, upgrading your flight, choosing the nicer option because you can. This feeling is real and meaningful—there’s nothing wrong with wanting to experience it.

Being secure is structural and long-term. It’s knowing you could lose your job and be okay for six months. It’s having insurance that would actually cover the disaster. It’s being able to say no to income opportunities that would damage your health or relationships. It’s the absence of background financial terror, even when nothing is actively going wrong.

The problem is that most people optimize their financial lives to feel rich in moments rather than be secure over time. They allocate money toward the things that create the emotional hit of feeling wealthy—nice dinners, nice clothes, nice gadgets—while underinvesting in the boring structural things that create actual security. The restaurant makes you feel rich tonight. The emergency fund doesn’t make you feel anything until you need it.

This creates a specific kind of fragility. You have the lifestyle of someone who’s financially comfortable, but the resilience of someone who’s one crisis away from disaster. From the outside, you look like you have it together. From the inside, you’re aware of exactly how thin the margin is, how quickly it could all unravel if something went wrong.

The cultural messaging doesn’t help. Financial success is signaled through consumption—the car, the apartment, the vacation photos. Nobody signals their financial health through their insurance coverage or their emergency fund. So people spend their money on the visible markers of wealth while neglecting the invisible infrastructure of security. They’re performing financial success while lacking financial resilience.

Why this happens to freelancers

When your income is variable, feeling rich is especially seductive and especially dangerous. Research suggests that irregular income creates a feast-or-famine mentality—when money comes in, it feels abundant, and you spend accordingly. When it doesn’t, you feel broke, even if your average income is fine.

Many people find that the high-income months create a false sense of security. You make $15K in a good month and feel like you’ve made it. You spend like someone who makes $15K monthly. Then you make $4K the next month and panic. The problem isn’t your average income—it’s that you’re basing your lifestyle on your peaks instead of your valleys.

Freelance work also means you’re constantly aware of the transience of your income. You don’t have a salary—you have clients who could disappear, projects that could end, markets that could shift. This awareness should drive you toward security, but often it does the opposite. If it all feels precarious anyway, why not enjoy it while you can? The insecurity becomes justification for present-focused spending rather than motivation for future-focused protection.

The lack of employer-provided benefits means you’re responsible for building your own safety net—health insurance, retirement, disability coverage, emergency savings. These are expensive and boring. They don’t make you feel rich. They make you feel like you’re spending thousands of dollars on things you hope never to use. So people underfund them and overspend on things that create the feeling of success right now.

What Most People Try

The standard approach is to pursue both simultaneously. Try to feel rich and be secure at the same time. Save aggressively while also spending on the lifestyle you want. This works if your income is high enough that you can fund both. For most people, it doesn’t work—they’re trying to optimize for contradictory goals with limited resources.

So they compromise in ways that satisfy neither goal. They save a little, spend a little, and end up feeling neither rich nor secure. The modest savings doesn’t create real security—it’s not enough to actually protect them. The modest spending doesn’t create the feeling of abundance—it’s just normal life with occasional treats. They’re stuck in the middle, getting neither the emotional satisfaction nor the structural protection.

Some people fully commit to feeling rich. They spend everything they make on current lifestyle. They assume the income will continue, or that they’ll figure it out later, or that experiences matter more than security anyway. This works beautifully until it doesn’t—until the job loss, the health crisis, the market crash, the thing they told themselves wouldn’t happen to them.

Others fully commit to security. They save aggressively, minimize spending, build a fortress of emergency funds and insurance. They are objectively secure. They also feel deprived. They’re earning good money and living like they’re broke, deferring gratification indefinitely, never quite letting themselves relax and enjoy what they’ve built. The security is real but joyless.

Many people cycle between the extremes. A crisis scares them into security mode—they cut spending, build up savings, get serious about protection. The crisis passes. The security starts feeling less urgent. They gradually drift back toward feeling-rich spending until the next crisis resets the cycle. They’re reactive instead of intentional, lurching between fear-driven restriction and relief-driven spending.

The underlying issue: treating “feeling rich” and “being secure” as compatible goals that can be balanced, when they’re actually different orientations that require different decisions about what your money is for.

What Actually Helps

1. Choose your primary orientation, then build the other around it

You can’t equally optimize for both feeling rich and being secure—they require different resource allocation and different mindsets. Many people find that choosing one as primary and treating the other as secondary creates more clarity than trying to balance them equally.

If security is primary: you build the structural foundation first, then spend what’s left on feeling rich. This means emergency fund, insurance, retirement contributions happen automatically, off the top. Whatever remains after security is funded is guilt-free spending money. You might not feel rich often, but when you do, it’s backed by actual stability.

If feeling rich is primary: you spend on quality of life first, then save what’s left for security. This means consciously choosing current experience over future protection. You might not be maximally secure, but you’re honest about the trade-off. You’re choosing to feel abundant now rather than someday, with clear eyes about the risk you’re accepting.

Most people muddle through without choosing, trying to do both halfway. This creates neither outcome effectively. The partial security doesn’t feel secure—you know it’s not enough. The partial spending doesn’t feel rich—you’re always aware of the opportunity cost. Choose which one you’re actually optimizing for, then build the other into what remains.

This isn’t a permanent decision. Your orientation might shift with life stage, income changes, or what you’ve already built. Early career with low income might mean feeling-rich primary because you have time to build security later. Mid-career with dependents might mean security primary because the stakes are higher. Late career with solid foundation might swing back to feeling-rich because you’ve earned the structural base. The key is being explicit about what you’re doing right now.

2. Separate security spending from lifestyle spending

Security and lifestyle compete for the same dollars, which is why people underinvest in security—it feels like you’re depriving yourself of the lifestyle you want. Research suggests that mental accounting—treating different categories of money as separate—can help with this tension.

Many people find that treating security spending as a non-negotiable cost, like rent or taxes, makes it easier to fund adequately. It’s not “savings versus spending”—it’s “structural cost versus discretionary spending.” You don’t deliberate about whether to pay rent. Similarly, you don’t deliberate about whether to fund your emergency account or buy adequate insurance. It’s just the cost of operating your financial life.

This reframing changes the emotional experience. You’re not sacrificing the nice dinner to save money. You’re covering your structural costs first, then deciding what lifestyle you can afford with what remains. The lifestyle might be smaller than you want, but it’s not in conflict with security—it’s what’s possible after security is handled.

The practical implementation: separate accounts for security and lifestyle. The security account is for emergency fund, insurance premiums, retirement contributions—things that create resilience. The lifestyle account is for everything that creates quality of life right now. They don’t mix. When you want to spend on lifestyle, you check the lifestyle account, not your total bank balance. This prevents the feeling of deprivation that comes from seeing a large balance but knowing most of it is allocated to security.

Start with a small percentage to security if that’s all you can afford. Even 5% to structural protection is better than zero. The goal isn’t achieving perfect security immediately—it’s establishing the habit of treating security as a distinct category that gets funded before lifestyle optimization happens.

3. Make security visible and tangible

Part of why people underinvest in security is that security doesn’t feel like anything—it’s the absence of disaster, which is invisible until disaster strikes. Feeling rich has immediate feedback: you make the purchase, you feel the satisfaction. Security has no feedback loop until you need it, which you hope never happens.

Many people find that making security concrete and visible helps. Not just “I have an emergency fund” but “I could handle losing all income for seven months.” Not just “I have insurance” but “A $15,000 medical emergency wouldn’t destroy me.” Not just “I’m saving for retirement” but “I’m on track to maintain my lifestyle at 65.”

Try this: write down your current security infrastructure in specific, scenario-based terms. What could you handle that would have destroyed you three years ago? What disasters are you protected from? What freedom do you have now that you didn’t have before? Security becomes real when you can name the specific bad things that wouldn’t ruin you anymore.

This also means occasionally appreciating security in the moment, not just in retrospect. When something breaks and you can fix it without stress—that’s security. When you turn down work that would pay well but destroy your mental health—that’s security. When you don’t have to check your balance before buying groceries—that’s security. These moments count, even if they don’t feel as exciting as the expensive restaurant.

4. Recognize that feeling rich is rented, security is owned

The feeling of being rich is pleasurable but temporary and needs to be constantly renewed. You feel rich when you buy the thing, then the feeling fades, then you need another purchase to recreate it. Research suggests this is hedonic adaptation—the pleasure of consumption decreases over time, requiring increasing input to maintain the same emotional return.

Many people find that chasing the feeling of richness is expensive precisely because it’s ephemeral. You’re renting the emotional state through consumption. When you stop consuming, the feeling stops. This creates a treadmill where you need continuous spending to maintain the feeling of wealth, which means you never build actual security.

Security, by contrast, is cumulative. Once you’ve built it, you own it. The emergency fund you saved three years ago is still protecting you today without additional input. The insurance you bought continues covering you. The retirement account continues growing. You did the work once; the benefit persists.

This doesn’t mean never spending on feeling rich—those moments matter. It means recognizing the difference between renting an emotional state and building actual infrastructure. One requires continuous input. The other compounds over time. Your financial life needs both, but if you only have resources for one, the one that compounds is usually the better bet.

The goal is reaching the point where security creates the feeling of richness. When your emergency fund is solid enough that you don’t think about money in the moment—that’s when you feel genuinely rich. When you can make choices based on what you want rather than what you can afford—that’s when security transforms into the subjective experience of abundance. But this only happens if you build the security first.

The Takeaway

Feeling rich is about moments and consumption. Being secure is about structure and resilience. They’re not the same goal, and trying to achieve both equally often means achieving neither. Choose your primary orientation, separate security from lifestyle spending, make your safety net visible and specific, and recognize that security compounds while the feeling of richness must be continuously purchased. The peace you’re looking for is in the structure, not the spending.