Comments on: 1. From Lady Gaga to Charles R. Kesler

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Wed, 06 Jan 2010 01:26:48 +0000

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By: Susan Tiner

Susan Tiner — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:02:29 +0000

@Len I agree that it’s a tricky business to find correlations, but you can say the same thing about parenting. No one has the secret recipe for how to raise a child, but we try to be good parents anyway, and that involves making judgments. I think we can take a look at factors that influence our money values and draw some conclusions about which ones tend to support or undermine competence with personal finances.

By: Len Penzo

Len Penzo — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 04:42:13 +0000

It is an interesting question, but I do not think you can accurately find a way to correlate how and/or why people form their money values.

For example, there are fiscal conservatives who are unable to control their own household spending, just as their are free-spending libs who are very good at controlling their own personal finances.

Even more to the point, surely there are siblings from the same family that have wildly disparate behaviors with respect to how they handle their finances. I am already watching this with my own two kids; their current behavior is such that my 10-year-old daughter is a saver and attentive to her income/outgo while my 12 year-old son exhibits 0.0 interest in saving even a dime.

I’ve actually read articles in science magazines that suggest the way we handle our finances is actually more a factor of how our brains our wired at birth. Maybe so. Then again, I’m sure there is also a “secret sauce” that plays a bit of a role too – an amalgam of life experience that also helps shape our money values over time.

That being said, Susan, I think this will be a very interesting series and I look forward to reading more on the subject!

Best,

Len
Len Penzo dot Com

By: Susan Tiner

Susan Tiner — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 19:13:14 +0000

@Little House I agree, but what I find interesting in my experience is that certain groups, mostly at middle to upper class levels, are fundamentally comfortable with money, i.e., how money works, how to manage it, how to gradually accumulate wealth. These same groups aspire to wealth or the American Dream as you call it, but do so deliberately according to a solid plan.

By: Little House

Little House — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:58:52 +0000

A very thought provoking post. I love it! It does boil down to how and where one was brought up, basically ethnicity and social class. If your culture holds savings and frugality as a high standard, then you may be more likely to save and be frugal. *Note I said may – every individual within a group can vary. If you’re raised where you must keep up with the Jones’s and obtain that American Dream no matter how much debt you accrue, then one (or many) within that group may end up deep in debt and no one but them knows.

And this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with “American’s or people are bad at math.” I saw this stated in a recent article on MSN and the interviewer used this as a scapegoat for our country’s debt problems. Not a good excuse!

By: Susan Tiner

Susan Tiner — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:57:44 +0000

@abdpbt that was my experience too attending college in 1976-1983. A pro-intellectual attitude in and of itself doesn’t indicate whether one is comfortable with how money works and with the idea of accumulating wealth. You need to know the political preference of said intellectual. In my experience, academics leaned toward socialism. What’s interesting is that this is an example of using intellectualism instead of anti-intellectualism to avoid learning about and managing one’s money!

By: abdpbt

abdpbt — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 18:39:46 +0000

This is a really meaty post! I do think all of these things feed into how your money values are formed, and I find the intellectual question the most intriguing because it is something that really comes up in academia. There is a kind of chicness to being poor in academia, like you lose street cred if you have any money. I remember one of my classmates was married to a wealthy developer, but I didn’t find this out until years later, because she hid it and would park her very expensive car far away from everyone else, so they wouldn’t see what she was driving.

This is totally random, but your post made me think of it.