What Is Your Money Personality?
What money means to you matters more than how much you have
Two people with the same income can have completely different relationships with money, and the difference shows up in everything from how they argue with a partner to whether they sleep before payday. Researchers who looked at this in 1982 found that money is not one attitude but several: it can stand for status, for safety, for suspicion, or for worry, and each of those runs on its own. Knowing which one is yours explains a surprising number of decisions that never felt like decisions.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Sixteen questions, four per attitude. Answer about how you actually behave with money, not about how you would like to.
What it measures
The four attitudes from the original scale. Status is money as a way of being seen. Security is money as a cushion against the future. Suspicion is money as something people use against you. Worry is money as a constant background hum. They are independent - it is common to be high on two that seem contradictory.
Based on: Money Attitude Scale (Yamauchi & Templer, 1982)
Possible results
Status
Money as a way of being seen.
Security
Money as a cushion against the future.
Suspicion
Money as something people use against you.
Worry
Money as a constant background hum.
Common questions
Does more money reduce money worry?
Less than you would expect, and the research on this attitude is fairly clear about why: the worry is only loosely tied to income. Below a certain floor, more money genuinely helps, because the problem is arithmetic. Above it, the worry tends to stay and simply attach to larger numbers, because it was never really about the amount. People who worried at one salary usually worry at double it. The thing that reduces it is not the balance but the looking - a regular, unflinching read of the actual figures, which are almost always less frightening than the ones running in the background.
Why do couples fight about money so much?
Because they are usually not fighting about money. Two people with different high bars are fighting about what money means - safety against status, or worry against ease - and every specific purchase becomes a proxy for that. The argument about the holiday is really about whether the future is safe, and the argument about the cheap sofa is really about whether you are being seen. Taking this separately and comparing the shapes tends to shorten those arguments considerably, because it names the actual disagreement.
Sources
- Yamauchi, K. T., & Templer, D. J. (1982). The development of a Money Attitude Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment.
An honest note This is a short adaptation of a scale built in 1982, and its four-factor structure has since been tested in several countries with reasonable but not perfect agreement - the security and worry factors hold up best, the status factor is stable, and the suspicion factor is the least consistent across samples. Two things this cannot do. It cannot tell you anything about your actual finances, since it measures attitude rather than arithmetic, and a high worry score can be a sensible response to a genuinely precarious situation rather than a trait - the research finds the link between worry and income is loose, not absent. And it says nothing about the beliefs behind the attitudes, which is where most people's money story actually lives. Read it as a description of how money feels to you, and check it against the numbers.
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