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Take Control of Your Financial Future
Advice from Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz
Leave the financial fairy tales behind and learn to effectively manage your money.
The idea that women shouldn’t worry about money, or that it’s not ladylike to be good with money, is thankfully going the way of the eight-track tape and the 56K modem. Still, many women who are adults today grew up with some version of that lesson… that it is a man’s job to provide financial security, or what we call the “Prince Charming” money scripts. These include “Money is the man’s territory,” “Someone else will always take care of me financially,” and “Money equals love.” Scripts like these encourage the woman to wait for someone to come and sweep her off her feet and into a glorious new life. They place her in a position of financial dependence, both before she marries and after. Financially dependent women may lack even the most basic financial know-how, such as balancing a checkbook or reading a bank statement, leaving all that to her husband. This passivity is very unwise. About half of all marriages end in divorce and even in long-lasting marriages, women outlive their husbands by an average of seven years; chances are a woman will be on her own at some point in her adult life. Financial dependence won’t serve her well during those periods…
Without examining our past and working through unfinished business, we’re often compelled to re-create the same situation, or its mirror image, over and over again.
Boys struggle with the specific gender-related money lessons they receive, too. Scripts like “A man has to be the breadwinner in the family,” “You’re a failure if you can’t take care of your family,” and “Money is the only measure of your worth” can become harmful and limiting, and often lead men to place disproportionate value on their workplace identity and income status. And indeed, it’s difficult not to, because our culture values material success—especially for men—so highly. Men, no less than women, need close personal relationships to be emotionally healthy; yet if they devote all their energy to their careers, they’ll never develop satisfying connections to other people. If they build their entire sense of self around their professional identity and achievements, then once they lose that, through retirement or unemployment, they’re very likely to become anxious or depressed…
Just as a child finds comfort and security in having the same story read and re-read, our unconscious minds keep replaying our money scripts—which, like fairy tales, help us understand, simplify, and bring order to the complexities of the adult world. At the subconscious, animal-brain level, we organize our emotions and financial thinking and behavior around these money scripts, hoping they’ll bring us the “happily ever after” we desire. And what do we do when real life fails to match the fantasy? Often, instead of questioning our underlying assumptions, we just try harder to make them fit.
Remember that money scripts can be damaging because, unless examined and challenged, they never change. Even with awareness and insight, the prospect of giving up our money scripts can fill us with fear; we’re terrified of returning to the confusion and chaos we experienced before we developed those survival beliefs. Even though we are now adults, and have control, perspective, and reasoning that we didn’t have as children, our animal brains cling to these scripts—or fairy tales we tell ourselves—just as they do to any other meaningful narrative.
In our work, we’ve learned that transforming a dysfunctional financial life just cannot happen without identifying the underlying money scripts, examining where they came from and how they have helped us and hurt us. The deliberate, thoughtful consideration of money scripts and their influence on our behavior grounds the changes we want to make. Our ability to live to our highest financial potential in our lives is determined to a large degree by our ability to identify our scripts when they creep into our minds. By shedding light on them, they lose their power to control our emotions and actions. Awareness opens us up to limitless possibilities. We can catch ourselves, stop, and start over. The first step to changing our self-defeating behaviors is changing our thinking. Thus we can become conscious and purposeful creators of our lives.
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Copyright © 2009 by Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz From the book MIND OVER MONEY published by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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