Money Obedience

There are many free budget planners offered on the internet that cater to almost any type of individual personality. Even more budget tools are offered for a small fee. Yet, even if some of us may be in financial difficulties, many of us don’t take advantage of such offers.

I wonder why we don’t take advantage of free or low cost help, especially when it is so easily available. I can think of a number of reasons, but I don’t really want to get into the details of such behavior. I’d rather focus on the bigger picture.

We all have our own individual personalities. Scientists have been grappling with this topic for a long time, and not one scientific discipline has come up with an answer that explains how we end up with the one personality each person has.

But the fact of the matter is that we all do have distinct personalities. Our personalities are at the core of who we are as people. We have feelings, and we have thoughts; we process our feelings and thoughts in different ways; and we each make different decisions in response to our feelings and thoughts.

Things would be a lot easier if we made perfectly “rational” decisions all the time. But in that case, we’d be more like robots than human beings. Then again, if we only had feelings and not rational thought, all of that decision making would be unnecessary. We wouldn’t have to worry at all about what comes next. Instead, we might just live happily enough in our ignorance about cause and effect, and we all know that “ignorance is bliss.”

What does our personality have to do at with money, budgeting, debt, and so forth? The answer to this question is, well, a matter of our own personalities, so to speak. To move toward the point, let me throw out some more questions that can only be answered individually. How do you feel about money? How secret do you keep your financial life from others, even from your own family members? How much time do you spend on deciding what to do with your hard-earned money? How much joy do you get spending money, on trips to the mall for example?

Each individual to whom these questions are posed would answer each of these questions quite differently. Why? Well, most of these questions have answers that require thinking and feeling. To answer them, you would have to dig deep to see how your individual thinking and feeling intertwines with your financial life. “Rationality” is not all in personal finance, no matter what the experts might think. Some of our money decisions make sense (rationally speaking), while others don’t. That is just the way it goes.

But just for kicks, maybe you should try our free budget planner, and see how it feels to you! Maybe you end up thinking, “Hey, this is just what I needed!” If it doesn’t work for you, no worries. At least you gave it a whirl.