Why You Need To Understand Your Money Attitudes

Each of us bring our own special mix of attitudes about the acquisition, use and management of money to the table. Many people call this mix your ‘Money Personality’ and purport to be able to identify what yours is with just a really quick quiz.

In reality, gaining an understanding of your sub-conscious attitudes towards money is more complex. Most of us don’t specifically recognize our behaviors and feelings about money. Like many other parts of our lives, it is just the way we are.

There are ways you can dig around in your past, your memories and your mind to bring these attitudes out in the open, buy why should you?

How Our Family Explored Money Attitudes
Our family started having 3 generation family meetings about 3 years ago. At the very first meeting, we tried to start pulling out our individual and family unit money attitudes. We used the question list from the book Estate Planning for the Healthy Wealthy Family – How to Promote Family Harmony, Affirm Your Values, and Protect your Assets to get us started.

We first individually wrote answers to (some) of the questions. Then we spent a few minutes talking together as family units. After that we came together to share what we wanted to share with the entire group.

It was hard! We needed way more time. Our goal was to introduce the idea of learning about each others’ money attitudes and to break through taboos on talking about money. We did accomplish those goals, but we didn’t come close to digging through all of our individual, couple and family unit money attitudes.

Have You Explored Money Attitudes?
Have you had experiences in learning about each others’ money attitudes and personalities? How did you go about doing it?