Everyone has a different system when it comes to saving for emergencies, and it turns out, some money personalities tend to have better systems than others.
A story recently published on Marketplace, “Life Without a Financial Safety Net,” asked people how they would handle an unexpected $1,000 expense and 59% of those people said it would be somewhat or very difficult. That’s a lot of people. That’s too many people.
We began thinking about factors that contribute to how a person prepares — or doesn’t prepare — for life’s unexpected hiccups, and we focused specifically on how each of the 10 money personalities approaches saving for emergencies.
Lucky for us, we’ve got a Science Team devoted to discovering as much about each money personality as possible.
Let’s look at what their data tells us.
The Highest-Saving Money Personalities
The Rock, The Storyteller and The Architect tend to have the highest savings.
The Architect is organized and thrives when working with a plan. If anyone has a brain built for saving and planning for the future, it’s the Architects of the world.
The Rock is stable and calm and excels in long-term thinking and planning. Their focus on the bigger picture means they usually don’t make rash decisions.
The Storyteller may seem out of place in this group. They can be prone to social spending — dinners, concerts, trips, etc. — but they also tend to make more money than the rest of the personalities, which gives them a greater ability to save.
The Lowest-Saving Money Personalities
The Spark, The Oasis and The Free Spirit tend to have the lowest savings.
The Spark thinks more in terms of fight or flight. They are very engaged in the moment. This emotional reactivity can cause them to have more difficulty when it comes to thinking about long-term plans.
The Oasis is the quiet, deep-thinking type, more focused on day-to-day issues. Being so engaged in contemplating the “right now” can lead them to not think too far down the road.
The Free Spirit is an explorer and likes a certain amount of chaos in their lives. So the structure required for building savings can be kind of boring and uninteresting to them.
The other four money personalities — The Ambassador, The Contrarian, The Guardian and The Adventurer — showed no significant difference in their savings, high or low. But if you’re hungry for more money personality insights, see how each personality compares to each other with our Money Personality Comparison Guide.
Of the 10 types, Payoff’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Galen Buckwalter, says, “While this is the first effort to validate explicit money personality, the distinctive patterns of behaviors and the differentiated patterns of financial behavior that we observe across the 10 types is entirely consistent with what we expect based on the OCEAN and the Big 5.”
What’s that mean? It means there’s a whole lot of real, time-tested science behind Joy and the 10 different money personalities identified by the Payoff Science Team.
