This year, Bill Gates will officially stop being actively involved in the business of making money, and throw himself on the business of giving it away.

They will also be looking for a new CEO for the foundation next year.

For the rest of us who think that giving away money trumps in ease compared to earning money, you may need to give that notion a second thought.

I see millions of people who slave away their time to earn more money, and just squander it in useless spending.  I always thought that many people can increase their happiness by spending less time earning money, but a little bit more time in planning how to spend it judiciously.

If there is so much confusion and sufferings in the current US economic downturn, it is not that they were not working hard enough.  It was poor financial decisionmaking, coupled with too much “irrational consumption.”

Gates charity’s head an ‘accidental’ CEO - Yahoo! News

Stonesifer, 51, said she wanted to step down as the foundation’s CEO to find a better balance between work and her personal life, and to go deeper into one project instead of overseeing 500 employees and the distribution of more than $3 billion a year out of the foundation’s $38.7 billion endowment.

She will leave as CEO by Jan. 1, 2009, but will stay with the foundation.