What's Your Money Story
The Hidden Scripts Behind Our Financial Choices: How your past shapes your spending, saving, and beliefs about money.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.” -Carl Jung
I find this to be one of Jung’s more powerful insights into the human psyche. We are not nearly as in control as we would like to believe we are. And that can be true when it comes to the way we handle or think about money and our finances.
When we discover that who we are or how we behave is largely not a result of conscious choice, but of the beliefs and patterns we’ve absorbed from our environment in childhood, we begin to understand ourselves more clearly. Some of what feels like instinct or personality may actually be shaped by conditioning.
The good news: realization opens the door to change.
What a Money Story Looks Like
Your money story, often called a money script, is the set of beliefs, attitudes, and habits you have about money that are often developed in childhood.
However, these patterns aren’t limited only to childhood as they can also form later in life in response to major emotional or painful experiences, called financial flashpoints. A significant event in adulthood like divorce, job loss, receiving an inheritance, or making serious financial mistakes can reshape or create new subconscious money beliefs that strongly influence financial decisions.
While these scripts are not inherently “good” or “bad,” they can become problematic when they are inflexible or unexamined. They can influence emotional reactions like guilt, fear, anxiety, or shame around money and lead to behavioral patterns like overspending, financial anxiety, or avoidance of financial planning.
For example, the beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, and identity you’ve developed around money could look something like this:
Beliefs accepted as fact: “I’m bad with money” or “money is stressful”
Emotional reactions: feeling “bad” for wanting or enjoying money, “numbing out” when money topics come up, shame around earning less (or more) than others, constantly worrying you don’t have enough, regardless of actual savings
Habits and patterns: letting financial status strongly affect self-worth, impulse buying to regulate stress or emotions, overworking to feel financially secure, repeating the same financial conflicts in relationships
The identity you hold around money: spender, saver, struggler, avoider, worrier
The good news is that in many cases, these aren’t fixed truths. They were learned which means they can be unlearned or reshaped.
The Four Popularized Money Scripts
The term “money scripts” was a cross-disciplinary collaboration between psychologists Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz and financial planner Rick Kahler. The term was popularized in the 2009 book Mind Over Money: Overcoming the Money Disorders That Threaten Our Financial Health.
Rick Kahler has said the work he and Dr. Ted Klontz did in 2005 and 2009 showed that the average person had 50-200 money scripts, but what has been widely popularized in financial media is that there are only four main money scripts that are ever really discussed.
In 2011, The Journal of Financial Therapy published an article in which the authors presented four core money belief patterns: money avoidance, money worship, money status, and money vigilance. The research found that while people can hold a large number of very personal money scripts, they tend to cluster into the four broader categories of:
Money Avoidance: Believing money is bad or that you don’t deserve it.
Money Worship: Believing money solves all problems & buys happiness.
Money Status: Equating self-worth & social value with net worth.
Money Vigilance: Excessive frugality & being overly cautious w/ finances.
Many financial decisions are driven more by psychology than logic. Your beliefs about money often matter just as much as your income and your level of financial literacy.
Where Money Stories Typically Come From
As very young children, we don’t yet have the awareness to question what we observe, and so we tend to adopt those observations as truth or even as part of who we are. Acceptance with limited critical reflection. When we aren’t able to evaluate financial behaviors we may internalize them instead.
The strongest influence on our money stories typically comes from caregivers. Growing up, we watch how they handle financial decisions, respond to stress, recover from mistakes, or celebrate successes. These observations shape our understanding of what money means and how it should be managed. Often those behaviors and beliefs are passed down generation to generation within families and cultures creating an inherited financial worldview, helping to shape the reality of the family system.
This is called financial socialization, how people learn money attitudes and behaviors through family, culture, and experience.
Childhood and Caregivers: Witnessing events like arguments over bills, attitudes toward spending, or messages about money being scarce or plentiful.
Cultural and Societal Beliefs: Society, media, religion, and culture influence whether one views money as bad, a tool for security, or a sign of status.
Significant Life Events: Like divorce, bankruptcy, experiencing financial abuse, inheriting wealth, losing a business, or experiencing poverty in formative years.
Generational Behaviors: Beliefs passed down, such as those from elders who experienced extreme human hardship or economic downturns can create habits like extreme frugality.
First Work Experiences: Memories of a first paycheck, allowance, or job provide early lessons on earning and value.
How to Identify Your Money Story
“Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” -Aristotle
Because money scripts operate below conscious awareness as automatic patterns, the first step is simply to notice them. You can usually spot them in recurring moments where money activates something stronger than the situation seems to justify. For example, anxiety when checking your bank account, guilt when spending, or extreme pride tied to a purchase.
From there you can begin to reduce the vagueness of what you’re feeling in that moment by naming or identifying the pattern, “this is money status that I’m feeling.”
Accurately naming your experience creates emotional distance by separating you from the thought and shifting you out of a reactive response and more into observation mode. Instead of “this is how it is” or “this is just how I feel,” it becomes “this is a pattern I’m noticing.”
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” -Viktor Frankl
Rewriting Your Money Story
Money scripts are best judged by the outcomes they produce. Pay attention to how they shape your day-to-day behavior and overall functioning and then decide if you find them to be problematic. It will take intentional practice to notice, disrupt, and reframe these type of thoughts.
You can begin to challenge your thoughts by asking a couple of simple questions,
Is this belief actually true?
Where did I learn this?
You can also try replacing the script with something more flexible and realistic as a way of updating outdated beliefs. For example, “I’m bad with money” might be replaced with “I’m learning how to manage money more effectively,” or “spending is irresponsible” might become “spending can be intentional when it aligns with my values.”
And don’t forget to take action by pairing your new perspectives with new behaviors. Start with small, intentional steps that gently challenge the old pattern. For example, if your habitual response pattern is financial avoidance, a simple action might be checking your account for just a minute without trying to fix anything. If impulsive spending is the pattern, you could try introducing a pause like waiting 24 hours before buying non-essential items.
These kinds of actions matter because they create evidence that challenges the old script. Each time you act differently you’re reinforcing a new belief through experience, not just thought.
“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.” -Amelia Earhart
It is possible to gain the ability to choose new responses and build new habits that align with who you are becoming, not just who you have been. It is my intention that this article empowers you to see that you are not stuck in your current money story. Your financial patterns do not have to define what is possible for you moving forward.
If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading!!!
I hope today you are met with kindness, especially from yourself.
References
Cfp, S. M. (2025, May 26). Investing Beyond the Numbers: Understanding financial flashpoints. MoneySense. https://www.moneysense.ca/columns/a-rich-life/financial-flashpoints/?utm
Halbeisen, G., Walther, E., & Schneider, M. (2016). Evaluative conditioning and the development of attitudes in early childhood. Child Development, 88(5), 1536–1543. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12657
LeBaron, A. B., & Kelley, H. H. (2020). Financial Socialization: A Decade in Review. Journal of Family and Economic Issues, 42(S1), 195–206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-020-09736-2
McNair, K. (2024, August 1). Americans have 4 core beliefs about money—but only one helps you get richer. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/01/financial-psychologist-americans-core-money-beliefs.html
Kahler, R. (2023b, May 26). Correcting the myth of “One money script” [Video]. Kahler Financial | Financial Planners, Rapid City, SD. https://kahlerfinancial.com/financial-awakenings/money-psychology/correcting-the-myth-of-one-money-script?
Klontz, B., Britt, S. L., Mentzer, J., & Klontz, T. (2011). Money Beliefs and Financial Behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory. Journal of Financial Therapy, 2(1). https://doi.org/10.4148/jft.v2i1.451
Union, E. C. (2023, May 24). Understanding money Psychology. Ent Credit Union. https://www.ent.com/education-center/smart-money-management/understanding-money-psychology/?utm
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