Your Emotional Relationship With Money

Deep-seated, typically unconscious beliefs individuals hold about money — the scripts they adhere to in their attitudes toward and interactions with it — which research shows drive real financial behavior.

Financial psychologists Bradley Klontz and Sonya Britt, along with colleagues, published foundational research on money scripts and developed the Klontz Money Script Inventory.

A validated assessment tool, developed in 2011 by Klontz, Britt, Mentzer, and Klontz, designed to identify and measure different types of money-related beliefs and behaviors.

Categories studied include Money Avoidance, Money Worship, Money Status, and Money Vigilance, each reflecting a different underlying belief pattern about money's role and meaning.

Yes — published research found a significant positive association between the Compulsive Buying Disorder scale and the Money Avoidance, Money Worship, and Money Status scales, and a significant negative association with Money Vigilance.

A pattern reflecting beliefs that money is somehow bad, undeserved, or something to distance oneself from, which research links to specific financial behavior patterns.

A pattern reflecting the belief that more money will solve most problems or bring happiness, which research links to specific compulsive financial behaviors.

Yes — those scoring high on a Workaholism subscale in this research tended to be males who earn high incomes and carry revolving credit card debt, a specific, documented pattern.

Typically unconscious — part of what makes this framework useful is surfacing beliefs that quietly drive behavior without being consciously examined.

Consistent with how psychological scripts generally form, they're typically absorbed early, often from family environment and early experiences with money, well before conscious financial decision-making begins.

Yes — financial therapists, financial planners, and related practitioners use tools like the Klontz Money Script Inventory to identify client money scripts, educate on their impact, and refer to financial therapy when appropriate.

Money scripts research addresses the underlying emotional and psychological beliefs driving financial behavior, which is distinct from — and can undermine — financial knowledge or skill alone.

Yes — the inventory measures multiple distinct scales, and research indicates people can show patterns across more than one category simultaneously.

Yes — simply identifying which patterns resonate can be a useful starting point, though addressing deeply rooted patterns often benefits from working with a financial therapist or counselor.

Through embodied self-worth work that addresses the underlying beliefs and life scripts this research identifies as foundational, complementing financial education and financial therapy.