Financial Freedom: Is your personality making you poor?

Instead of taking the steps needed to get financial freedom, you over analyze, procrastinate or completely ignore your financial situation.

If you did not grow up in a house hold where stock markets, saving bonds or mutual funds were discussed around the table, chances are you don’t know how to accurately incorporate them into your lifestyle and may feel embarrassed about seeking financial advice.

On the other extreme end, you may over save without enjoyment. You understand that you have to take steps to find financial freedom but you aren’t exploring all your options, you may even have a fear of money.

Whatever your symptoms, the disease is the same--you are financially unhealthy. You have poor money habits and are quietly disrupting your financial growth. According to Boyce D. Watkins, a PhD professor of finance, “when it comes to managing your money, 80 percent of it has to do with your psychological makeup and personality rather than your actual financial know how.”

But what exactly are those emotional roots? Well, it could be a number of different reasons but for many, they stem from childhood. Women who watched their fathers handle the bills don’t think of themselves as financial decision makers. Then there are those who feel hopeless about their financial situation improving. They feel that they will never have enough money to live “comfortably” so they just end up spending it. And then there are the pleasers. They deprive themselves in favor of taking care of others. They end up using hard earned savings and good credit to help family members or friends.

In order to achieve financial freedom you need to get to those subconscious urges that drive your decisions.

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