If money doesn’t make you happy, you’re probably not spending it right. Of course, money on its own will never satisfy, and it will never fill the deep well reserved for God and people. But spent thoughtfully, within a budget, and according to your values, I believe your purchases can and should make you happier. (After all, even the quotidian stocking up of paper towels still gives me a brief buzz of adulting joy!) But, looking back over my decade-plus career as the manager of my own purse strings, there are certain items that I still look back on, years later, and think to myself, “I am SO GLAD I spent money on that.” Here are ten of them. I hope my list encourages renewed gratitude for your own favorite purchases, and with your list in front of you, see if you can find any common threads in what you value most highly – and then let those threads guide your future purchases! In no particular order… 1. Our tan sofa. We bought our sofa from Macy’s in 2011 for $700 delivered, about a year after John got his job. Before that, our living room contained one seating option – our white loveseat from Ikea, purchased midway through college. This purchase represented one of our first big leaps into adulthood, and we saved for months and months to afford it. It is incredibly comfortable, the velvet fabric is impervious to stains, and the practical color hides the dust of daily life effectively. It still looks fantastic after eight years; we hope to have it for many more. I chuckle when I think about a sweet reader’s comment I got many years ago – something along the lines of, “wait until you get rid of that brown couch – then your