"I'm just bad with money"

People with this habit often hold a settled belief about themselves, and they say it lightly, as a joke. "I'm hopeless with money." "I've never had a head for figures." "My partner deals with all that, I'd only mess it up." The belief explains the avoidance and excuses it. If you're simply not a money person, then of course you leave it alone, as you'd leave the wiring to an electrician.

I'd like to question this, because I think it mistakes what being good with money consists of.

Managing household money doesn't take mathematics. The arithmetic is addition and subtraction, and your phone will do it. You don't need financial knowledge in any deep sense either. It's possible to run a household's money perfectly well without knowing what a bond is. People who are "good with money", in the everyday sense, mostly have one habit in common. They look at it. They open things when they arrive. They know roughly what's in the account because they saw it on Tuesday. When something's wrong they notice it early, when it's small. Most of what passes for financial competence in daily life follows from that habit.

This is my own view and I can't cite a study for it. But consider who, among the people you know, you'd call good with money. I doubt it's the cleverest or the best paid. I'd guess it's someone a bit dull about it. They have a folder, and they mention in passing that they rang up about their renewal.

Now consider what "bad with money" tends to mean in practice. It rarely means that someone can't add up. It means a history of unpleasant surprises, such as going overdrawn, being caught out by bills and paying penalties. Each surprise felt like proof of being hopeless. But every one of those surprises is a product of not looking. They're what happens to anybody, however numerate, who steers by a rough idea. The belief and the habit feed each other. You don't look because you're bad with money, and you're bad with money because you don't look.

Avoiders are often perfectly numerate, and more than that. I'd guess that a fair number of accountants have a drawer at home. Skill has never been the obstacle. What gets in the way is a feeling, the one described in chapter 6. You can be excellent with a client's figures and unable to open your own bank statement, because the client's figures carry no verdict on you.

So I'd suggest dropping the label. It doesn't describe a fact about your abilities. It describes the results of a habit, and the results will change when the habit does. You don't have to become a money person. There's no need to develop an interest in personal finance, read the money pages or start a spreadsheet. The entire requirement is to open envelopes on the day they arrive and glance at a number every morning. Those take almost no skill. If you do them for three months, I'd expect you to find that you've become, without trying, one of those slightly dull people who are good with money.

One caution in the other direction. If you really do struggle with numbers or forms, as some people do for good reasons, that's a separate matter and nothing to be ashamed of. Looking still helps, and so does asking someone you trust to go through things with you. The free advice services in chapter 7 are used to helping people who find paperwork hard.