Discover 13 New Personal Finance Words To Increase Your Financial Well-Being

Have you ever had that experience of awe when you learn a new word?

There is liberation in language. Having words to describe your experiences gives you the needed freedom to make meaning from your experiences. New words can set new directions in your life.  This week let’s open up and define some words that can help you on the journey of financial well-being and foster increased financial intimacy. 

13  New Money Words To Help You Flourish Financially

Each word has a link to take you further into the meaning of the word and how it can apply in your life.  

1. Financial Therapy - The process of working on your personal relationship with money. Specifically when you have had painful experiences with money and relationships that are impacting your patterns of thoughts, emotions, behaviors, sense of self, and sense of others. 

2. Financial Intimacy - The experience of feeling increasing vulnerability, safety, and openness with trusted others where you can share your hopes, dreams, and aspirations along with fears, worries, anxieties, and places of shame related to money. 

3. Financial Well-Being - The combination of both functional and psychological aspects of money being in alignment and leaving you with a general sense of wellness. You are open to looking at all elements of your financial life and your different thoughts, feelings, behaviors, sense of self, and sense of others. 

4. Money Story - The way you talk about your experiences with money. The stories you pull together based on personal experiences with money and cultural narratives about money that create a larger story about the role and meaning of money in your life. 

5. Money History - Your money history creates your money story. We all have had a vast set of different experiences related to money and family, friends, community, culture, politics, financial institutions, and professionals that have left us with different impressions about the role of money in life. 

6. Financial Trauma - Can be experienced in both big and small ways. Commonly referred to as Big T and little t traumas and specifically related to experiences of both one-off and repeated violation financially. Financial trauma can be connected to actual money experiences or how you relate to money.  

7. Family Financial Socialization - The conscious and unconscious ways that our families shape our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, attitudes, sense of self, and sense of others as it relates to money. Children are developmentally dependent on parents and family for financial information and are actively trying to make sense of all aspects of their world, including money. 

8. Financial Physiology - This is our heart, gut, and instinctual responses to all money topics. Our bodies react with varying degrees of pleasure and discomfort to all money topics. Our financial physiology becomes encoded in our autonomic nervous system. 

9. Emotional Money - Every money topic and experience we experience can evoke the full range of emotions available to humans. Tuning into emotional patterns of reaction to money creates new opportunities to use emotional information to guide productive responses to life and money issues. 

10. Family Financial Interdependence - Families form complex constellations with each other navigating a myriad of different direct and indirect impacts on the family's overall financial functioning. The family functions as a financial system, and what happens in one part of the system impacts other parts of the family system. 

11. Financial Psychology - The study of how our minds, brains, and bodies organize around navigating our personal financial lives. Financial psychology explores, defines, and tests universal and unique patterns of thoughts, feelings, behaviors, beliefs, sense of self, and sense of others as it relates to money. 

12. Financial Empathy - The ability to accurately imagine yourself in the shoes of another person's financial experience. It does not mean that you agree or disagree with their view, but you can express with kindness, care, and humility that you understand the other person from their point of view. 

13. Therapy Informed Financial Planning - The active and relational process of working with a Fee-Only Financial Planner that is also trained in therapy and financial therpay and is willing and able to help you work with the combination of the psychological, relational, and functional aspects of your financial life. 

As you take time to reflect on these words:

Which words are new to you?

Which new words stand out to you and why? 

Which new words help you and how?

Taking the time to learn new words and explore what they mean to you is like doing a wonderful deepening stretch that restores and gives you a new range of motion you once could not do. Your journey with money, yourself, your partner, family and society in impacted by your personal relationship with money.

Taking the time to tend to your relationship with money will continue to pay dividends for years to come and provide the highest return on investment.

If you're ready for help navigating your personal relationship with money, I invite you to join me on a 30-minute discovery call about Therapy Informed Financial Planning.  

Wishing You Healing and Delight With These New Words,

Ed Coambs - Therapy Informed Financial Planner

MBA, MA, MS, CFP®, CFT-I™, LMFT