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Another psychological approach to understanding people?s involvement with money was offered in
a financial magazine. This article (Sullivan, 1994) presented a classification of money personalities based
on a survey of 2,000 people?s ?inner financial life.? It divided people into seven personality
classifications as follows: 1) Hunters, who are characterized by an aggressive attitude toward the making
spending and investing of money and who tend to have unsettled personal lives and a higher than average
divorce rate; 2) Gatherers, who are the largest segment of the population, tend to be conservative as
investors and who view money as security; 3) Protectors, for whom money is a means of shielding
others; 4) Splurgers, who tend to be self centered and impractical and for whom money is simply a
means of consumption; 5) Strivers, who more than any other group believe that money is power and
leads to happiness, are domineering at home, think of wealth as a matter of luck or connections, have the
lowest mean income and are jealous of those with more; 6) Idealists, for whom money means nothing
more than security, who are likely to share what they have and are more likely than others to believe that
money is the root of all evil, and; 7) Nesters, who are not emotionally involved with their money, are not
materialistic but are possessive of what they do have, believe that one has to look out for oneself , and are
the least likely to leave anything to their heirs. Whether or not this classification holds up, the
characteristics attributed to each group may be useful to psychotherapists for assessment purposes. |
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