They say that Money Is The Root Of All Evil and that Money Can’t Make You Happy, and while in many ways this is true, I think that anyone who has a shortage of money would strongly disagree.

There are precious few celebrities or sports stars who seem to have an idyllic life.  While they might live in a mansion, have expensive cars, be able to travel anywhere and to do anything that they want, without a loving partner and true friends who want them for themselves and not for their money, they will never be truly happy. 

So often these abundantly wealthy people end up losing everything, throw their lives away with partying and drugs like Charlie Sheen, or get into trouble with the law like Mel Gibson or Lindsay Lohan.

But it’s not those who have more money than sense that I wanted to write about, it’s those who have enough to live on, but not enough to make them happy.

My wife and I can be counted in that group, since while money is tight, we are able to pay our bills every month, but for reasons I will explain, we are struggling emotionally because we don’t have enough money to be able to see our children, and that is difficult for us both.

To cut a long story short, if that is possible, when I was still living in Florida we tried to get a visa so that my fiancee could spend a year with me, the application got rejected, and it made it very difficult for her to visit the USA at all. 

I also lost my job while we were trying to sort the visa problem out, and we therefore decided that it would be better if I moved back to England, since by then her daughter was going to have her first grandchild.

That meant I would have to leave my two daughters in Florida with my ex wife, and to not see them very often, but I hoped to be able to go back twice a year at least.

A year after returning to England and having got married in the meantime, my wife’s daughter was also having visa problems, this time because she was married to a South African.  Despite their having been married for five years and having a baby as well, it didn’t look like the visa situation would be resolved, and so they moved to South Africa.

With my current income being about the same as I was earning 20 years ago, and my wife taking a 20% cut in income due to the recession, between us we can barely afford one trip a year, either to Florida or South Africa, and this is the root of our misery, not being able to see our kids at all.

The cost of flights just seem to keep going up and up, and with my wife working in the school system, she can only take vacations during the school breaks, which is the most expensive time of year.

So while we do have enough money to live on, we will not be happy unless we find a way to be able to see our children at least once a year.  Seeing them on Skype using the webcam is one thing, but it’s a poor substitute for real hugs and kisses isn’t it.

So just put us in that category of people where having more money would indeed make us happy.  Material things are one thing, but being able to see your loved ones when you want makes you the wealthiest people in the world.