When you think about money, how do you feel? What physical or emotional reaction happens inside you when the topic of money is brought up? Do you feel happy? Stressed? Worried and anxious? Secure?
How you feel about money in these moments is likely a clue to your financial archetype. Archetype simply means a typical example or a general way to describe a person. When it comes to money psychology and financial planning, your financial archetype likely plays a large role in how you navigate your financial life.
Many people have doubts about themselves and their relationship with money. You may be making financial decisions based not on your actual financial situation, but rather on unconscious feelings or behaviors and reactions learned in your youth.
Is that how you prefer to live? Or would you prefer living more mindfully and without money anxiety? This is where your financial archetype can be transformative.
There are eight major financial archetypes. You may strongly identify with one of them or you may find you contain pieces of many. Your financial archetype can also evolve over time. Whichever one speaks to you, knowing which financial archetype you are can ultimately help you clarify your money values and give you a better sense of your authentic money self.
This understanding can help you plan for the future to achieve your best hopes for your financial life and legacy.
The Research and Development of Financial Archetypes
Abacus co-founder Brent Kessel has long stood at the intersection where money and psychology meet. It was these dual interests that led him to write a book and create the Financial Archetype Quiz.Â
In his book, It’s All About the Money, he recounts how the money stories, experiences, and hurts of his youth were unconsciously affecting his financial decision-making as an adult. He saw that he was basing many of his decisions on insecurities from the past rather than the security of knowing who he was today.
This realization caused him to question just how little we reflect on our foundational experiences, and how those experiences can still play such a prominent role in our adult lives. Often, these experiences create painful emotional states.
Seeking clarity, Brent immersed himself in defining the core tenets of each financial archetype, including how identifying with one archetype can lead to having a strong reaction to another.Â
What he ultimately found was an unspoken world of deeply-seeded thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that were the lush yet tangled inner garden of everyone he met, including himself.
