The Five Money Personalities

So, sometimes you read books with titles that promise you simple steps or kitschy personality profiles and they suck. Occasionally you read one that changes your life. (The Five Love Languages, anyone?) Every once in a while, you get one like The Five Money Personalities - it may not actually teach you anything you didn't know, but it gives you the language you've been lacking to talk articulately about something you've known but couldn't explain.

Everybody knows that money is personal. We know how we handle it, and we're very aware of how our spouses/friends/family handle it when they make choices we never would. But considering that more than 50% of marriages end in divorce, and 70% of those divorces are attributed to money, it's pretty clear that very few of us know how to talk about money in anything close to a constructive fashion.

Enter The Money Couple... authors of the Five Money Personalities. They wrote with much more humor than I expected, and had a very engaging style. The basic message was clear: when we fight about money, we're not actually fighting about money - we're fighting about what that money represents to us. Dreams, fears, respect. If we don't learn how to talk about money in a way that acknowledges (respectfully) our different approaches and the whys behind the choices we make, we're left with our assumptions, inferences and frustrations - never a good thing.

The types are straight forward, and the quiz is short and easy. The book is written in an easy-to-read style that gets you from cover to cover fast, but gives you plenty of meat to chew on when you're done. It's also designed in such a way that you can read bites at a time for twelve weeks (90 days) and work through the material as a challenge to improve your money relationship.

I give these authors tons of points for Website and book integration - you can use either one without needing access to the other, which is a huge bonus. I will definitely be adding this to the list of books I recommend to people!