MONEY TALKS: How to embrace your money personality

One way to embrace your personality is to see the good your money can do in your life. PHOTO | FOTOSEARCH

What you need to know:

  • I believe in money personalities more than I do temperaments.
  • Money is simpler to categorise: either you have money or you don’t; either you spend it or you don’t. It’s really that simple.

Remember when people harped on about temperaments? About introverts, extroverts and emotional stability, and how it impacted on your temperament?

I looked up the temperaments again as I was writing this. Allow me to refresh your memory.

A choleric is the impulsive, excitable and aggressive one (the loudest one in a party). A sanguine is outgoing and carefree (most of my friends are like this). A melancholic is moody, reserved and unsociable (as many millennials are, ahem). A phlegmatic is careful, thoughtful and reliable. I was told I’m a phlegmatic.

To be honest I never believed in temperaments. Temperaments are far too simplistic for the diversity of human beings. It’s like saying there are only four colours in the colour wheel.

I believe in money personalities more than I do temperaments. Money is simpler to categorise: either you have money or you don’t; either you spend it or you don’t. It’s really that simple.

Here are the four personality types and how to embrace a relationship with yours:

You are a saver, some say you are a hoarder, few others a miser (ouch): You get an odd thrill seeing the balance on your savings accounts grow. Your purpose for your money is to save it. You save for the sake of saving. If someone were to ask you what you’re saving for, you’d probably shrug your shoulder and mumble something opaque like: “It’s good to save your money.”

Well, it is good to save your money – what’s not good is getting an anxiety attack when you have to spend the money.

One way to embrace your saver personality is to save for high-investment necessities, like a home or land. Maybe build property for rentals. A car maybe?

Another way is to save for things that you love to do; experiences that build memories and leave you with a lifetime of feel-good emotions, such as travelling, backpacking and going on road trips. 

You are a spender... A clotheshorse, a foodie, a shoe junkie, a product junkie, techno junkie, wanderlust, binger... name any excess and you’re likely into it. You make money so you can spend it.

You spend and spend some more, it makes you happy and it feels so darn good to spend it. There’s no harm in that. The harm is in not having anything for tomorrow because you’ve splashed it all today.

What will you do next Thursday if, say, one of your people is taken ill and needs immediate financial aid? Would you give them the fancy phone you bought only last week? What are they supposed to do with it anyway, swallow it as if it’s a painkiller?

One way to embrace your spender personality is to spend what’s left after you’ve made your savings and investments. No questions asked. If there’s little left to spend after your savings and investments, then it means you aren’t earning enough to satisfy your personality. So find a new stream of income or a better-paying job.

You are an avoider, others say you are a financial blonde: You avoid taking your time to understand how money works. You imagine that money is this complex, ugly maze that you’re unable to navigate – you’re like a mouse in an experimental lab who’s been put in a maze and made to look for the cheese. The thought of it tires you before you even begin.

One way to embrace your personality is to accept that yes, you can’t make sense of your shillings and cents. And that yes, you must make sense of it, because money is the fuel of your day-to-day living (ha!).

So sign up for a course in personal finance. Or read about it extensively and sponge as much as you can, applying what you’ve learned bit by bit to your everyday money life. Maybe have a sit-down with a friend (like me) who understands how money works, to teach you what they know.

You are a money monk, on some days... I don’t know, a party pooper: You associate money to all that’s bad in our world today. Money to you is a dirty thing. A dirty word. A dirty thought. Money has no place on the table of your pious value system.

If you were out at sea and money were the weather, you think of yourself as a flimsy canoe caught in a sea storm. What you should be thinking of instead is you lying on a sandy beach and money being a sunny and blue sky.

One way to embrace your personality is to see the good your money can do in your life and in other people’s lives, especially the people you care about –  spruce up your parents’ retirement home, or invest in their retirement activities (mine love their cows and dairy farming).

You can also find an orphanage to support monthly, put some needy children through school, and more of such opportunities.