What Will You Do With Your Tax Refund?

What with the government asking for their “fair” share today, we thought we’d talk a little bit about how different personality types handle the money that Uncle Sam lets us manage on our own. To do this, we review the very helpful book What Will I Do With My Money?: How Your Personality Affects Your Financial Behavior, by Ray Linder — a great tome on personality type and money, that also offers universal advice that could help both the 1% and the rest of us.

I happen to know that Ray Linder is a Smart Freedom (NTP) because he was the instructor who helped me learn about personality type. He is a dynamic speaker and this translates well into his writing. He had me at the introduction — usually something I readily skip in a non-fiction work — “Forget everything you’ve learned about money. That’s right. Forget it! … all this well- intentioned traditional advice doesn’t work because it ignores the most important factor in the success of personal financial management — you and your personality.”

Well of course this appeals to our Pixie crusade — how personality affects home life — but he also reinforces my own Organic Freedom (NFP) annoyance with traditional money gurus like Suzy Orman or any other accountant I’ve ever hired, ie. Classic Structures (STJs). There was always something I should be doing that I wasn’t and there was always something hard I had to change about myself, rather than finding a way to deal with my money that might better suit who I am, not who accountants thought I should be. This problem is compounded by the fact that money is so often wrapped up in emotion, personal history, and values that affect and are affected by our personality types in ways that we’re often not aware of.

The first part of his book deals with all this money baggage. And anyone who’s had the wherewithal to buy a book about managing money has some emotional stuff to sort through and Linder does a great job of laying out the issues clearly and helping the reader  go through what trips people up — from the value of money and money memories to our money habits and money myths — he provides a clear path, (with worksheets if your personality type likes that kind of thing,) to help you see where your money issues lie.

THEN he gets into personality type! We’ll have more on that tomorrow.