''What is it that makes someone good with money? blog discussion

Absinthe_Fairy

I am quite good with money and have never been in debt other than my student loan and interest-free student overdraft. When I left uni I worked two jobs in order to clear the OD in 2 months. I think this is because of my personality - I am a BIG worrier and if I was in debt I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Even if it was just a £100 credit card bill! Having said that I can spend money with the best of them when I have it - I love going out for meals and expensive cocktails (though haven't done that for a while) and why not, if I enjoy it & can afford it? You only live once! I do always check this site for eating out deals however, and always check the Grabbit forums for deals if I need something!

My little brother is much more laid back generally, and hasn't always been great with money - he's even had a couple of bank charges for going over his OD limit. He's better now that he's moved out of home and has got a budget app set up on his iPhone!

discodiva123

never been good with money, i guess i wanted a certain lifestyle that i thought i could have on a low wage, the city centre flat, the car, eating out, shopping spending money on store cards, credit cards, then it got to much and at 27 im back living with the parents a harsh reality set in and i realised i just couldnt live the way i was living.

So now i think about things before i buy them and use MSE a lot and know that clearing my debt will take a while but it will be worth it in the end,

Its a long process and maybe its taken me 27 years but now the lightbulb is on and i'm no longer ignoring the problem.

Angela41

The more I think about it the more I think I'd be a good case for Martin especially since considering myself "good with money". Having followed him during the credit crunch and looked more closely at interest rates I actually lost money by moving to a higher interest rate account; my old account paid interest on its closure which meant I had to pay tax on interest, when had I not left it in its lower rate account until the new tax year I'd have avoided tax! Doh.

bigzippy

I think addictive personalities can play a massive role in whether or not someone is a moneysaver at the core. As well the kind of personalities that need to feel instant gratification.

Moneysaving is a long-term thing (which ideally needs to be a lifestyle choice) with long-term, often distant and hard to picture/realise, goals. Those with instant gratification issues (which could be simple things like comfort eating, all the way up to buying big-ticket items on not much more than a whim) don't get the sense of achievement and psuedo-happiness from something they can't visualise, never mind grasp, within the moment.

Addictive personalities have been something I've noticed as a running theme in the less-MSE friends and relatives around me: DH was a smoker for around a decade; MIL for probably 40years; FIL was a smoker and a heavy drinker - all of them terrible with money (DH has now been suitably chastised and retrained ). My in-laws passed on terrible life lessons about money, and not unsubstantial debt, to DH :cool: and I do believe that their inability to control their destructive (non-financial) habits day-to-day is linked to their attitude to money.

Eg. If you can't/won't/don't control whether you're going to chain-smoke until every cigarette in the house is gone and you 'have to' go out an buy more, then it's unlikely that you'll properly portion control/ration/budget/save things/money in other areas of your life - which obviously has a knock on effect financially.:cool:

I'm obviously not saying that every smoker is poor with money, as that isn't the case, but my in-laws are/were the more extreme of smokers anyway - chain-smoking isn't even the word!

Also, if you're in 'need' of instant gratification, that doesn't leave much room for considering the cheapest options/deals/vendors, nor the financial ramifications of each purchase.


...That's my tuppence-worth anyway!:D;)

GreyQueen

I worked in the debt advice sector until a few years ago and what I really loathe about debt is how it robs people of choices. I know one family where the daughter was given a cheque for £1,000 by her grandparents for her 18th birthday. She quickly spent it all and got the spending habit, running consumer debt into adulthood but never paying it off. Eventually there was Mr Right, a house on a mortgage and a managerial job in financial services. By which point the debt was out of control. Bankruptcy would have been the best option but they'd have lost the house and she'd have lost her career. When baby made three, the woman had to go back to work asap to service her Individual Voluntary Arrangement and had to give her baby over to her own mother for 10 hours every working day. I wonder what she bought on those credit cards that could have possibly been worth what it has cost her?

charles_b_2

My sister and I have completely different attitudes to money
She is always 'brassic' (I hate that word), even though she could save money,e.g. she pays for cable TV, I have freeview.

So many people say the same things about their siblings

I remember many sayings from my Grandmother who was an accountant:

1) Look after the pennies, and the pounds will look after themselves
2) It's only a bargain if you need it
3) If you haven't got the money, don't buy it

These essentially boil down to what most people have said already, which is:
only buy what you need
get the best deal you can
don't spend money you don't have.

How people do this is different:

My Modus Operandi is to decide on something I need, research it, make sure it is the right item, then look for the best price, taking into account cashback sites etc.. then buy when I have the money available, ONLY on credit card where I know I can pay it off in full at the end of the month, and get at least 1% cashback from the credit card, plus the protection it affords.

Sometimes it's timing - I just saved a huge amount on flights for our summer holiday by buying just before new year. Last year I paid substantially more (due to circumstance) as we couldn't book any earlier than April.

michaels

Lots of discussion about personalities who suffer because they are too reckless but I think I may suffer from the opposite, too worried about the value of what is on offer to actually get the right balance between enjoyment now and enjoyment at some future date. I look at the Mortgage Free Wanabee board and wonder for how many of them the desire to be mortgage free has made them lose sight of just how much they are giving up now for this future 'nirvana'?

minerva_windsong

Now, I'd say I'm pretty good with money, but even a few years ago I wasn't too great at it. I think what helped me was when I went to university and the attitude my parents drilled into me, which was "now you've got to pay your way, we'll pay for you in term provided you work in the holidays and you understand that once the money's spent it's spent and unless it's real dire straits we won't give you any more". That was what got me into budgeting and things like taking my week's money out in cash so I could see exactly what I had to spend. Additionally, once we had a student house we shopped around to get the best deals on the bills, which introduced me to that side of it. This place helped a lot as well with learning about things like cashback sites.

I think you can learn to be good with money, but I also think you have to want to be good with money to learn how to do it. A large part of mine is that because of issues due to house deposits I ended up with an overdraft after uni that, in comparison to some people I knew, was small, but which I still didn't like having, as I'd always been taught that having debt (apart from for a mortgage or a car if necessary) was a bad thing. So getting rid of that, and never going back to it, has been a big motivator for me.

MSE_Martin

michaels wrote: »

Lots of discussion about personalities who suffer because they are too reckless but I think I may suffer from the opposite, too worried about the value of what is on offer to actually get the right balance between enjoyment now and enjoyment at some future date. I look at the Mortgage Free Wanabee board and wonder for how many of them the desire to be mortgage free has made them lose sight of just how much they are giving up now for this future 'nirvana'?

This is very interesting - it was one of the reasons when I had discussions about presenting 'pay off your mortgage in under two years' I balked slightly as pushing too hard means you curtail your life and for people not in debt its too much (getting mortgage free early is great - but its a balance).

Last year I worked on a big BBC money personality test, due to launch this year. And one of the categories was people so rigidly spend averse that they actually were curtailing their lifestyle unnecessarily.

Martin

Ken68

Looking forward to that Martin, hope its not on too late, darned cold watching it outside Currys.