The First Simple Truth About Money

Do You Know You Have a Money Personality?

Here’s a related question for you. Ever wonder why you procrastinate about financial matters? It may be due to your deep-seated money personality. We’ve all developed money habitudes and attitudes over the years – learned from our parents, our teachers and our peers.

Some of the information we absorbed about money may not be serving us so well now. For example, if you were raised in an atmosphere of scarcity, you may spend your whole life craving things you can’t afford and you now overspend to get them. On the other hand, if you grew up with abundance, you may expect things will always come easily to you. If your mom was a spendthrift, you may become one too or, you may overcompensate by becoming a miser.  If your dad procrastinated about important money decisions and took the attitude “things will work themselves out”, you may find yourself taking the same approach.

My Money Story

My mother and father were extremely frugal, especially my father. He didn’t want anything. Buying him a gift was torture because it was impossible to figure out what he would like – except peanuts, he loved peanuts.  So my siblings and I would end up buying him canisters of planter’s nuts for any occasion that required a gift.  His frugality rubbed off on my mom. Going out to eat with her is challenging. She’ll look at a menu and always order the cheapest thing on it – or a side salad.  Not a comfortable experience when you’ve just ordered filet mignon.

We kids would only get the “necessities” – food, clothing (thankfully we wore school uniforms!) and shelter. So, I learned early on that if I wanted the “extras”, I needed to find a way to buy them myself. This was probably a good thing, as I became self-sufficient at a very early age. But I also rejected the frugality of my parents and have been known to indulge myself on occasion. I’ve worked hard to find a good balance between being frugal and being extravagant.

Can you change your money personality?

Like anything with psychological or emotional roots, it’s possible but it takes work.  Deborah Price is the author of Money Magic, Unleashing Your True Potential For Prosperity and Fulfillment. She is the founder of the Money Coaching Institute based in Petaluma, California and she has developed a money coaching curriculum with the aim to “combine both practical financial guidance with sound psychological principles to help you transform your relationship with money and lead a more purposeful and prosperous life.”

I asked Elizabeth Husserl, a SF Bay Area based money coach, founder of www.innereconomics.com, and a graduate of The Money Coaching Institute, her insights about money personalities.  She said, “If we don’t pay attention to our money personalities they will act out in louder and more extreme ways. For example, the shopping sprees become longer and more expensive because you can’t quite fill the emotional hole you are trying to fill or the anger towards money grows until you blame it for everything wrong in your life.”  Elizabeth offers Inner Economics workshops and private work for individuals, couples and small groups.

Aurora Medina, is also a S.F. Bay Area based money coach. She produces Efecto Mariposa, a Spanish radio show for women that specializes in the psychology of money. One of the ways she does this is through “Mariposa Money Circles” – small groups of six women who explore together the beliefs and patterns associated with money that are holding them back from maximizing their financial potential. When I asked Aurora for her insights she said, “our money personalities relate to the way money is handled mainly in our family environment. We make unconscious contracts about how we will handle money depending on the experiences we encounter that affected us deeply either in a negative or positive way.”

In my own financial planning practice, I find that the more I know about my client’s money type or personality, the better I can serve them. To that end I have each client fill out a money personality questionnaire, which seeks answers to such questions as:

• What messages did your receive about money as a child growing up?
• How did you parents handle money?
• Did you feel like you got an adequate financial education growing up?

Most people are perfectly willing to do this exercise and seem to find the opportunity to explore the emotional and psychological aspects of money cathartic. If I interview a potential client who is in financial trouble and I sense a pattern in his/her life, I will often suggest they work with a money coach first as a precursor to the more technical financial planning work.

If you think that you may be acting in ways that sabotage your chance of financial success and it’s become a pattern  - read, sign up for a workshop, talk to trusted friends or advisors, or engage a money coach. There are resources available to help you.

I’ve listed a few books  just below in addition to the resources I mentioned above:

Books

Your Money or Your Life:  Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin
Money and the Meaning of Life, Jacob Needleman
The Soul of Money, Lynn Twist
Money, Money, Money: The Search for Wealth and the Pursuit of Happiness by Jacob Needleman
Seven Stages of Money Maturity: Understanding the Spirit and Value of Money In Your Life by George Kinder
You Paid How Much For That?: How to Win At Money Without Losing at Love by Natalie Jenkins, Scott Stanley and William C. Bailey

Other Resources:
National Foundation for Credit Counseling
Association of Independent Consumer Credit Counseling Agencies
United Family Services

Ten Simple Truths About Money

In the course of my financial planning practice, I meet many people who share similar attitudes, fears or misconceptions about money management. It turns out that most people make money way more difficult and scary than it needs to be. So in response to all this, I came up with 10 Simple Truths About Money in order to point out and identify some critical financial concepts that are easy to understand and implement. My next 10 blog posts are meant to inspire you to incorporate these truths into your actions around money.

Ready? Let’s go!

Simple Truth #1:   Procrastination is the Cause of Financial Fuzziness
Does any of this sound like you?

There’s 10 months of accumulated mail  – all unopened – that contain your investment account statements and they are all dumped into a drawer you never open.

You have $30,000 sitting in a savings account at the bank earning 0.15 interest.

You refuse to automate your monthly bill paying on-line, even though you often forget to pay your bills and end up with late fees.

You sold all your stock mutual funds in March because you couldn’t stand to watch them go down anymore and now they are sitting in a money market account earning 0.35% interest.

You know you need to do something, but you don’t.  This is called procrastination.  And, it doesn’t feel good. It generates feelings of confusion, guilt and worry – fuzziness!

If it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone.

However, that doesn’t make it better or okay. This type of procrastination can have serious consequences for your finances:  the spending power of your dollars gets eroded by inflation, your credit score gets downgraded, and you have constant fights with your honey about money. Not good, and even more to the point, not necessary.

Being up to date and clear about your finances can relieve so much stress, and really, it’s just a matter of making it a priority.  This is a great time of year to get started. 2009 is almost over, and January 1 is right around the corner.  If you want to call it a New Year’s resolution, go ahead.  If that doesn’t do it for you, get started anyway!

Here are some tips to get started:

Most time management experts will tell you that the best way to tackle a big hairy project is  to do a little each day, or divide the big project up into smaller ones.
So for a great first example, let’s take that pile of mail.

First day:  Take all the statements out of the envelopes and arrange them in date order, the oldest date on top. See! You’re already making progress!

Second day:  Starting with the oldest statements, glance at the first page which summarizes what’s inside.  Pay careful attention to any deposits or withdrawals – if anything looks strange – investigate.  If not, move on to the next statement. Keep going until you have reached the latest statement and set aside.

Third day:  Spend some time on the latest statement, as it should summarize what went on in your account year-to-date: total withdrawals and deposits, investment gains or losses, total interest or dividend interest earned.

By now, you should have a pretty good idea of the activity in your investment account over the time period that the statements covered.

Fourth Day:  Determine whether you need to make any changes to your investments (or find a financial advisor that can help you with this step). For example, if one of your mutual funds is down 50% year-to-date…go to Yahoo Finance and type the symbol in the search box….read up on this dog-of-a-fund and see if there is a good reason to hold on to it, or chuck it at the soonest opportunity!

From now on, when you receive your monthly investment statement in the mail, open it immediately, glance at the afore mentioned items and file it (in date order) with the others.

I suggest keeping a year’s worth of monthly statements, but hold on to your December statements for 3 years.

I can feel that fuzziness clearing up already, can’t you?

So many books, so little time.

Married (happily) With Issues takes the reader along on a fascinating and personal journey in search of a more perfect union. Elizabeth Weil manages to convince her good sport of a husband, that even though their marriage is “good” they might benefit by attempting to make their good marriage better through various counseling and therapy strategies.

In the story, Weil discussed some of her peccadilloes (she doesn’t like French kissing) and his (he’s overly obsessed with cooking gourmet meals every day) that chipped away at their otherwise good marriage.  After I read the article, I remembered that my husband had “suggested” an idea that he thought might lead to a more perfect union between us. I might want to “review my magazine collection” he said, in the hope that some of them could be recycled, “before they took over the house.”

I know my magazine habit is a pet peeve of his…and the article triggered my unconscious and motivated me into action. It’s hard for me to discard my beloved magazines: The New Yorker, More, Gourmet, Sunset, Good, California Home & Design, and Cook’s Illustrated all hold for me hours of pleasurable entertainment.  But, because I knew it would be good for my marriage, I threw out everything but the 2009 issues.

Would I have agreed to purge my magazine collection if I hadn’t read about one couple trying to build a better marriage? Probably not. Could Elizabeth Weil have become a writer or a well-informed, always-trying-to-improve-spouse without reading? Probably not.

Reading is so important. One of the most powerful advantages to being an avid reader – you not only learn so many new and interesting things, (“Hey, let’s try and make our already good marriage better!”) reading has the power to change your behavior in positive ways. Reading can even help you think about, manage and handle money better!

My Personal Finance Reading list
This brings me to my list of favorite personal finance books -  guaranteed to change one or two of your money behaviors the first time you read them and more if you read again and again.  Just give some of these books a try and see if you start gaining money smarts!

1.   I Will Teach You To Be Rich, Ramit Sethi.  Meant for a 20-30’s audience this book is full of tips about how to live within your means but enjoy the things you love, and how to automate your finances so that saving and investing are on auto-pilot.

2.  Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence: Revised and Updated for the 21st Century by Vicki Robin, Joe Dominguez, and Monique Tilford.  Do you ever feel like you are spending money on things you don’t even really care about but buy anyway?  This book really makes you think about the value of your time and money and helps you to align your values with your spending.

3.  Get Financially Naked: How to Talk Money with Your Honey by Manisha Thakor and Sharon Kedar.  An inspiring, practical guide that will help you to talk about money with your partner and create a successful financial life together.

4. Your Complete Retirement Planning Road Map: The Leave-Nothing-to-Chance, Worry-Free, All-Systems-Go Guide, Ed Slott.   Ed Slott is the guru of retirement planning and his books will teach you everything you need to know about 401k’s, IRA’s pensions, etc.

5. Making the Most of Your Money Now – The Classic Bestseller Completely Revised for the New Economy,  Jane Bryant Quinn.  A very comprehensive book covering all stages of your financial life. Discusses the pros and cons of major financial decisions.  (Buy the 2010 version, will be available soon).

Happy Reading!

Twitterize your business at the Sir Frances Drake Hotel / Sept. 23 5:30 pm!

Hi everyone! Public appearance alert. I’m honored to be part of a distinguished panel dishing about all things Twitter at a Women in Consulting event at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel. This is coming up soon and I wanted to make sure you know all the details.

What:   Tips, Tools and Tricks to Make Twitter Work for Your Consulting Business.
Where: Sir Francis Drake Hotel, Second Floor, 450 Powell St. San Francisco, CA.
When:  Wednesday Sept. 23, 2009 5:30 – 7:30pm
Who:    My fellow panelists are Nancy Friedman chief wordworker at Wordworking.com, and Irene Koehler, founder of Almostsavvy.com.

Irene and Nancy are leading lights in the Twitterverse so you really should attend to hear what they have to say.
Eats: Light appetizers.

If you would like to register for this event, please go here>> See you there!