'Being rich' is an empty goal, says the founder of a popular finance website - and too many people are completely missing the point of building wealth

Courtesy of Chelsea Fagan

Chelsea Fagan of The Financial Diet.

• "Being rich" is an empty goal, according to The Financial Diet.
• Money shouldn't be seen as a material to be hoarded, but as a way to live a good life, says co-founder Chelsea Fagan.
• If society views wealth accumulation as an achievement, it will continue to repeat a cycle of wealth-hoarding that produces wealth inequality and lack of meaning.
• Visit BusinessInsider.com for more stories.

What it takes to "be rich" is subjective - but for many people looking to grow wealth, establishing a target number and saving and investing until they hit it is one way of getting there.

But that practice defeats the purpose of building wealth, according to a recent tweet by personal finance site The Financial Diet.

"'Being rich' is among the most empty goals a person can have," the tweet reads. "Accumulating money for the sake of a number misses the point entirely - life should be treated as a story you are writing, and money should be the ink that helps you write, not the story itself."

In short, building wealth shouldn't be about having a certain amount in the bank - it should be about living a life you love. 

"Essentially, I think in this country we put an enormous premium on the accumulation of wealth as an isolated achievement - the lists ranking the X wealthiest people, the constant focus on celebrities' net worth, the obsession with displaying personal wealth on social media - and this creates a perception that the number itself is in some way a goal," Chelsea Fagan, co-founder of The Financial Diet, told Business Insider.

She added: "The money becomes a competition or a statement of personal value, and as we accumulate more of it, we are increasingly in social circles of similar wealth which only reinforce[s] this feedback loop of net-worth-as-achievement."

Read more: A self-made millionaire who retired early at 37 says there's a difference between 'living rich' and 'being rich'

Money, according to Fagan, should be viewed as a way to facilitate a good life that provides things like security, comfort, freedom, options, and, occasionally, risks - not as a material to be hoarded.

"This is not only because doing the latter does not make us any happier or improve our lives in any way, but also because a societal focus on wealth-hoarding inherently creates a society which is more imbalanced and precarious, with wealth increasingly collecting and stagnating at the very top," she said.

She continued: "But so long as we continue to view the accumulation of massive wealth as any kind of achievement (and not the reflection of a meaningfully broken economic system), this system will continue to reproduce itself, with deep systemic inequalities on the societal level and profound lack of meaning at the personal level."