Your Attitude Towards Money

We all have our different attitudes towards money. Whether being careful with it or careless, people look at money and handle it in completely different ways. At first, you might think that the attitude originates from the circumstances around us, but it is very common to find people living in the same household, going through the same conditions and still act completely different around money. But although the external factors around you do affect the way you handle money and look at it, the major factor controlling it all is your own subconscious. Your own ideas and thoughts are what push you to make certain spending decisions, or control your shopping sprees or make sure that you save enough out of your paycheck every month.

So now that you know that aside from your financial status, and your short-term financial plans, the key to controlling your attitude towards money is inside your head, you need to understand your motivation, the ideas that govern your every financial decision, the situations that make you start stressing about money and others that make you feel relaxed. Understanding yourself will help you alter your spending, saving and investment behavior to the better, in order to stop repeating the bad financial decisions that you make.

Many writers have discussed what motivates and moves people when it comes to making money-related decisions and they have all come up with the same conclusion; each of us has his own money personality. Money personalities explain a person’s attitude towards spending, saving and investing money and they have been written in a way so that each one of us can identify with the major traits of at least one of the personalities. Each writer has different names for the different personalities, but the descriptions are the same. They explain how each personality reacts to making risky decisions regarding money, whether spending or saving it, whether making risky investments or settling for less risky, low-yield investments. Also, when you find out what your money personality is, you can read more about the financial advice for that personality, how you can turn your bad financial decisions into more beneficial ones and how you can avoid those decisions altogether in the future. Discovering your money personality is one thing, but investing some time in making changes and improving your money-related decision making is what is going to count in the end.

Several money personality tests are available online along with the advice for healthier financial decisions for each one. Here are some useful links:

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/Investing/StockInvestingTrading/WhatsYourMoneyPersonality.aspx#pageTopAchor, http://www.moneyharmony.com/MHQuiz.html, http://financialtip.blogspot.com/2007/03/what-is-your-money-personality.html and http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/07/money-personality.asp.

By answering simple money-related questions, you can discover what your money personality is and start learning different ways to face your money decision-making flaws in order to make way for a more financially-aware you.