Previous studies revealed that consuming activities and spending money to meet needs can improve individuals’ happiness. Our study showed that spending money, not for personal needs also has a big impact on individuals’ well-being. We used 26,464 observations of 4th and 5th waves of the Indonesian Family Life Survey (IFLS) to predict the expenditures for non-personal needs (known as prosocial expenditure) on one's subjective well-being. The estimation result of the probit model showed that pro-social expenditure had a positive correlation with subjective well-being. On average, those who spend more on charity are happier than people who spend less. We also found that prosocial expenditure among Muslim and non-Muslim observations had different effects on happiness and life satisfaction.
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