Are you a duck, a cat or a squirrel with your cash?

Your personality could be linked to how you spend money

Just as research has shown that we are born with a dominant personality, studies have also shown that you could be born with a dominant money personality. Knowing how your money personality shows up in your life may give you an understanding of why and how you and others handle money.

To explain six of the different money personalities I will use animals as a comparison to help get this point across. This can be a fun exercise to do with the whole family, friends and work colleagues to guess what money personality you think they could be.

The Aristocrat – Cathy the Cat. Cathy thinks money isn’t important and can’t be bothered worrying about it. She has far too many other important things to do.

The Saver – Silbo the Squirrel. Silbo loves to save for both things he wants to buy and in case he needs money for something unexpected.

The Hoarder – Harry the Hamster. Harry hates to spend money and finds it very hard to share what he has. He often goes without something important just to avoid spending his money.

The Spender – Mike the Monkey. Mike is so busy having a good time that he often spends more than he earns and is usually broke before next payday.

The Avoider – Dizzy the Duck. Dizzy Duck dives for cover the minute the bills arrive. She is always late making payments and often ends up in court for bad debts.

The Safety Player: Timid Thomas. Thomas is so afraid of making a mistake that he avoids making any financial decisions – even small ones.

Two other money personalities which I haven’t mentioned are the “Victim” type and the “rescuer” type. These two types of money personalities are at the opposite ends of the scale. Surprisingly enough they are often found together in relationships which work for a while until the person playing “victim” or the person playing “rescuer” decides they don’t want to play this game anymore.

The victim tends to blame others, live in the past, is financially irresponsible, wants to be rescued, is addictive, and feels powerless. For the victim’s mentality to change he or she must learn to understand and heal past wounds from financial mistakes.

Whereas the “rescuer” loves to rescue, go guarantor, bails others out as they somehow feel responsible for their mates lack of financial intelligence. The rescuer needs to come to a place where they recognise that they are really hindering the victim from realising that they are responsible for their own good and bad financial decisions.

So which money personality do you most closely identify with? You could be a mixture of more than one. Be careful about saying “I was born like that so there isn’t anything I can do about it. You have a choice to be financially well or financially sick.

Silbo Systems, conduct money lessons for parents together with their children in small groups. For information contact us