This video is part of a Money Personality series where I'm talking about your personality and how that relates to how you handle money. In this video I cover one of the Big Five personality traits: Conscientiousness, which means detailed, dependable, organized and systematic. 

Find your Money Personality Type with this quiz!

Show Transcript:

This video is part of a series where I'm talking about your personality and how that relates to how you handle money.  I've linked to the free money personality quiz in the description below and today I'm talking about conscientiousness, which is a mouthful and also better stated as someone who is detailed, dependable, organized and systematic. 

Hey there! If you're new here, I'm Teri Slater, a financial coach. If you want more videos like this where we talk about money, but it's more about the people part and less about the numbers part, then be sure to subscribe and hit that bell to be notified every time I release a new video.  

When you know more about yourself, it helps you to understand why you are the way you are with money and if you're in a relationship and money is a stressful topic then it also really helps to know a little bit more about the other person and what their personality says about how they handle money.  

When discussing money differences, you both really want to understand each other quite a bit better so that you realize what your different strengths and challenges are when it comes to your personality and money. So you really always want to think about knowing the person really well and understanding that this really is teamwork and you're generally unified and do want the same or similar things in life so you want to make sure that these conversations always come from a place of kindness and compassion. 

I want to start by mentioning that this personality quiz uses a scoring model that is referred to as the Big Five personality traits so essentially once you take a quiz like this you can either score high or low on any one of the given traits, but also understand that nothing is an absolute. You might not associate with everything that's characteristic of someone high or low on that scale and sometimes you might have qualities that actually jump between both back and forth, high and low in a certain personality trait and that's okay! 

Ok, so for those that score high in conscientiousness, let's talk a little bit about what type of person that might be. So typically, these folks are going to be planners and they might keep a good calendar but they also may be rigid when it comes to any kind of change in plans. That's important to note because if you're one of these individuals you might also be missing out on some fun experiences because you're just kind of sticking with only what you've had planned.  Also these folks are generally on time or early. Generally their area is always kept… you know their home their work environment, etc., is kept pretty neat and tight tidy which also means that they're very good at hitting deadlines like paying bills or filing taxes. They probably think about the future before spending, so they're always thinking about what are the longer term consequences of a given purchase; but again if they have trouble spending, which that can be true sometimes, then they're going to have to pay really close attention to being able to actually balance having some fun with also meeting those longer term goals. And this one I think is pretty important to note is that sometimes those who are highly conscientious can also be very critical of other people's mistakes. And with that, that's where I really want to highlight that whenever you are coming into conversations specifically about money you really want to make sure that you're kind of level setting with yourself first. Kind of like keeping your own emotions in check and then always looking at what is the goal? What's the big picture of what I want to have happen?... and don't focus on what you want to stop, right? You always want to look at what's the goal for what we want, instead of who's to blame for where we are right now. So I think that's pretty important to note and I'm saying that because I can recognize that I may have not been so great at this in the past… so noteworthy. 

Ok next let's look at somebody who scores low on conscientiousness. So, these folks are generally going to be more fun and spontaneous, but they may also not really think a whole lot before making bigger purchases and so this is one area where I would recommend a cooling off period might be really good for you. An example of that would be making sure that you wait 24 hours before making like really big purchasing decisions. Instead of getting caught up in whatever the emotions are you know, you can kind of get like dopamine hits right from buying things and so just making sure that you kind of have a cooling off period before you make big purchases. Also, I think this category of individuals can do well by getting rid of temptations. Getting rid of temptations I believe looks like getting off of email lists that are constantly -you know- sending you new sale updates and also getting your credit cards out of your digital wallet. That would be things like Amazon, Paypal, anytime that you go to a website. If you've got that website kind of set up or your browser on your computer is set up to just remember your credit card number and you just fill in the three digit code, that's the kind of thing that you would want to get rid of because… especially like in bed if you're scrolling through on your iPad late at night and you end up buying stuff. In that circumstance having to actually get up and go get your credit card number to enter the information might be enough to kind of slow you down from some of these impulse purchases.  Also, with these folks, having a harder time sticking to a schedule might also mean that you're late. That can be late paying bills, it depends on how you've got your life set up with that. And, these folks might also have sort of messy surroundings, so… might have a harder time like finding important documents and bills and things of that nature.  Again you're probably- if you relate to this low conscientiousness- you're probably better with big picture thinking and less focused on the little details, so we'll talk a little bit about how two individuals together in a relationship can really kind of understand and play off of each other's strengths and weaknesses too.

So, if you have not taken the quiz yet are you able to self-identify based on what you've heard here so far? I would love it if you would type into the comments if you think that you would score high or low on the conscientiousness scale! 

Okay, now let's talk for a minute about when you're in a relationship with somebody and you both handle money very differently. There's going to be some ground rules as far as how you come into that conversation. I also want to mention that if you both are NOT having deep connecting conversations on a regular basis about a lot of different topics, then it might feel like an ambush if you do just kind of come to this person out of the blue and say “We need to have a talk about money”. So be mindful that you're also having like deep, insightful, connecting conversations with each other throughout your relationship, not just only when tough things come up. Okay, so- one thing that I want to mention is being really aware of how you come to the table whenever you have a conversation like this. So I mentioned earlier that folks who are high on conscientiousness might be critical of other people's mistakes and so this is a part where I want you to make sure that, if that's you, you really focus on “...what is my intention for the conversation that we're about to have?” and again you want to focus on the positive, right?  So it might be: if you feel like the other person's spending is kind of derailing your progress towards the future then let's make sure that we talk first about like the future and always come into the conversation with a spirit of curiosity, right? 

So it could just be you know “I'm really curious, like what do you see our lives like 5, 10, 20 years from now? Do you want to still be working? Do we want to be able to take more frequent vacations, Do we want to move overseas? You know and just kind of let that conversation flow and just be open and then don't jump right into the details of: “well, if you want to do that, we have to stop spending so much money”. You know, you want to make sure not to do something like that. You really just want to kind of like slow that conversation and say okay, so you you know maybe the situation is that you want to move and live overseas or be able to travel more, you know, 20 years from now. Ask more questions. That sounds really awesome, like what do you envision that would look like, or why does that seem important to you? Or, you know how do you see the two of us doing these things together? you know any kind of question that's open-ended and keeps the conversation going. You really just want to keep the curiosity going as long as possible so that you both can just kind of have like some open dialogue. 

And, maybe if you're the person who is you know really kind of like strict with your schedule and things like that too maybe you can open up and just say you know that's that seems really incredible, I also feel like I struggle with how to just keep the big picture in mind. I think about the day-to-day maybe, you know in order to make sure that we can save enough to meet those goals. Right? So be willing to self-identify what you know are your own challenges as well as your own strengths. You both want to be able to play to each other's strengths so if you're the person that's maybe not so organized in the relationship then maybe the other person would be better suited to handle kind of the bill paying and and the you know more um, ongoing tracking of how you're spending your money and things of that nature, too. 

However, I'm going to caution you that in a lot of relationships one person does the money I think that's fine if that's how you both agree that it should be. But if you're the person who does not handle the money I'm gonna say I want to strongly advocate that you fully understand what is happening so whether you want all those details or not I think that it's really important that you do at least keep a finger on the pulse so that you also understand what's happening things happen in relationships sometimes sometimes things don't work out and I just feel like it is really important for both individuals to really understand what has been happening with the financial situation you know so that it's not just like all of a sudden one day you look up and you're surprised by what your situation is.

Okay, I think that just scratches the surface a little bit on having the conversations but hopefully this has given you a little bit more insight on what it's like when you score high or score low on the conscientiousness personality trait. So, if you would like to hear more about some of the other personality traits I do have a really great playlist that you can check out as well with more videos there too. Alright, I hope this was fun for you and I will talk to you next time. bye!

Use the share buttons below if you want to pass it on to anybody else that you think might also enjoy this information too!

Want to learn more?  Check out this video.