Home Budget Planning and MBTI Money Personality Types

Spending in a way that fits what we see as important actually helps us save money and live more frugally. Money management for frugal living does not have to involve depriving yourself of the things that matter to you.

Think of people of ample financial means who will not buy something, even though their personal budget could absorb it quite comfortably. They say "I can't afford that," as if it were true. In actuality, though, they're saying that they don't see the purchase as an important priority in their life.

On the flip side, too, many people buy things on credit and then have problems paying for them. Why is that? Hopefully, it's because they made a decision that the purchase was important to them, even if it means they have to sacrifice something else that's important in order to pay off their credit card.

As long as we are willing to sacrifice something else to make room for the new expenditure, then nearly everything within reason is affordable.

Can my budget afford it? It is not that we have to live on the cheap. It is clear, though, that the answer for a good many of us is something like, "Yes, if I think it's important."

It is really a matter of prioritizing according to what we see as important, and remembering to take the long view to ensure our financial well-being.

This does take some careful consideration, however. When faced with a purchase decision, the answer might take a while to come to us. We might even have to sleep on it before we arrive at a satisfying answer. The key though is how we decide its importance, and therefore its priority.

So just how do we decide whether a purchase is important enough to be prioritized into our money management plan or scheme?

There is a way that is better than a flipping a coin. Prioritize spending in a way that fits your money personality.

When we make financial decisions or do financial planning and our type of "money personality" is not considered, we often struggle with dissatisfaction. What is actually in conflict is not so much the particular item under consideration for purchase. Rather, it is the differences in our money spending views that are inherent in each person's personality type.

The following articles discuss each of four money personalities in more detail. Can you identify with one more than another? I encourage you to check them out.

Here are the terms we will use to look at our "money personality." The terms are those most commonly associated with the model of personality development created by Isabel Briggs Myers, the author of the world's most widely used personality inventory—the MBTI, or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator^®.

Myers explains that the following four groupings (of her 16 personality types) differ vastly from each other in their attitudes and actions.

These four primary ways people differ in personality from one another are grouped according to defined attitudes and behaviors. These differences are sometimes labeled "temperaments."

It is these four temperaments that form the basis of what is called the four money personalities. They are represented by the MBTI two-letter codes SJ, SP, NF and NT. Do you know which temperament you tend to prefer?