Find Out About Your Money Personality
Last year, we were asked by VISA, USA to help them create a “money personality” quiz that could be accessed through their educational website www.practicalmoneyskills.com. Our initial reaction was a bit sceptical. After all, a number of pages in The Financially Intelligent Parent are devoted to the problem of credit card use and abuse by teens and young adults. We ended up pleasantly surprised. VISA’s website offers excellent tools for anyone interested in learning to budget, becoming a more intelligent consumer and handling credit responsibly.Â
When Eileen was working on her doctoral dissertation in psychology (she was studying the psychological effects of sudden wealth), she became increasingly unhappy with much of the contemporary writing about people’s relationship with money. These tended to put people in little boxes and usually those boxes were pretty negative.  After much thought, Eileen realized that people have a relationship with money in three areas: how they acquire their money; how they use their money (spending vs. saving); and how they manage (or mismanage) their money. After a good deal of tweaking, Eileen introduced the concept of a three dimensional relationship with money to financial professionals through an article in The Journal Of Financial Planning.
Working with VISA, we’ve taken that three dimensional paradigm of money relationships and created an interactive quiz that you can find in the At Home section of Practical Money Skills For Life. There are no right or wrong answers. You identify your own relationship with money in each of the dimensions and the quiz points you to tools on the VISA website that you might find of interest. For example, if you find that you tend to spend a bit too much each month, the quiz will point you to articles on smart shopping. If you have a problem creating a budget, the quiz will take you to tools that make creating a budget a snap.
Add comment August 8th, 2006
