What Is Your Money Personality
Understanding how you approach money will help you manage it better. This is where figuring out your money personality becomes useful, and there are many resources out there to help you do that.
What is a money personality
Money personality is the way we manage our behavioural patterns when it comes to money management, like saving or spending money.
Your money personality forms throughout childhood just like your overall personality does.
Personality is believed to depend on your temperament (something you are born with) and environment.
Money personality is the same, it depends on your temperament and your experiences with and about money from early childhood.
As a child you will witness how the important adults in your life deal with and talk about money. These experiences together with how you react and process the information (your temperament) will form the beliefs and behaviour patterns you’ll have with money later in life.
Different money personality types
The number of different money personality types depends on your source.
The main two categories are savers vs spenders. But like everything in life, it is more nuanced than that!
In general there seems to be 5 to 7 personality types.
For example Ken Honda, the author of Happy Money, a popular money mindset book, categorises personalities into 7:
- The compulsive saver
- The compulsive spender
- The compulsive moneymaker
- The indifferent-to-money
- The saver-splurger
- The gambler
- The worrier
You will be able to read more about each personality type in the link above.
On the other hand, Investopedia lists 5 different personality types:
- Big spender
- Saver
- Shopper
- Debtor
- Investor
You can read more about each type in the link above.
Why does your money personality matter
As already mentioned, your money personality is the way you naturally tend to manage your money when it comes to spending, saving and investing.
Understanding what your default is means that you can see the weaknesses and strengths of your existing approach and build on that, rather than just blindly doing what you have always done.
This can be especially helpful for those personality types who have the tendency to self-sabotage when it comes to their overall financial wellbeing.
There are online quizzes you can take to help determine which category you might fall into, for example this Sorted.nz money personality quiz (I believe it has 5 different results).
Compatibility in relationships
In relationships opposites often attract, and this is true when it comes to our approach to money as well.
Finances often cause tension in relationships and a different approach to money can be the cause.
Understanding each other’s tendency to deal with money is helpful in order to avoid conflict, in addition to openly talking about money matters.
Doing money related personality quizzes together could also work as a light ice breaker to start talking about money.
Reading each others results could lead into more in depth conversations and bring you even closer together as a team.
Having a common goal that you aim towards together can also reel in those unproductive behaviour patterns that affect your finances as a team.
Starting from how to get to a goal and what needs to change in order to reach them is usually a much better way to get on the same page financially than starting from the other person’s behaviour and criticising it (no matter how gently you try to do it).
Do you know your money personality? I did the Sorted.nz quiz and got the result of an Enterpriser!
