The key ideas

Mind over Money

Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz, 2009

Why do we save, spend and hide money nothing like the way we meant to? Psychotherapists Brad and Ted Klontz, son and father, believe the culprit is not laziness or stupidity but money scripts: conclusions a child once drew from powerful childhood events. The book shows how these scripts rule the adult and gives exercises to see them and rewrite them.

Who it is for

For those who know how to handle money properly and still do otherwise. And for those to whom money brings anxiety, fights or shame, even when there's enough of it.

I know better, why can't I do better?

The checks that never got mailed

Ted Klontz began saving for retirement at fifty-three. An accountant helped him work out how much to send him every month to invest. Ted mailed the first check and was very proud of himself. He wrote the second one and didn't mail it. Six months went by like that: the checks lay on his desk, and Ted told the accountant they were right there, just not mailed yet.

Ted is a psychotherapist, and he understood perfectly well what he was doing. He wrote the book with his son Brad, also a psychotherapist, and both say honestly that they learned from their own mistakes with money.

They begin with an idea they themselves call the Big Lie. It is the belief that money troubles come from being lazy, stupid, greedy or crazy. In the authors' experience, self-destructive money habits come not from reason but from forces a person doesn't notice, forces whose roots reach into the past.

There is no advice here on where to invest. The basics are simple: save, and spend less than you earn. Repeating them for the hundredth time, the authors believe, is like trying to treat a brain tumor with aspirin. What lies ahead is something else: where the brakes in our relationship with money come from and how to release them.

The childhood savings that vanished in a day

As a child, Leslie was paid for chores, and her parents told her to put part of the money into a bank account. One day, when she was twelve or thirteen, the teller said the account was empty: her dad had withdrawn it all. He just laughed: “That's my money.”

From that day on, Leslie never saved again. Everything that came into her hands she spent at once, before anyone could take it away. As an adult she lived paycheck to paycheck and ran up debts, though her father had long since had nothing to do with it.

The authors have a name for a moment like this: a financial flashpoint. It is a childhood event connected with money so powerful that it leaves a mark for life. The child draws a conclusion from it, and that is how a money script appears: a belief about what money is and how it works. It holds not because it is true but because it once made sense to a child's mind.

The brain in general is quick to connect things that aren't connected. Ted worked with a wealthy couple who had small children and their own plane. The husband flatly refused to buy life insurance. It turned out his grandfather had gone without insurance for decades, took out a policy when he was in his sixties, and died less than a year later. As a boy, the husband overheard the adults talking and linked one thing to the other.

Ted put it into words for him: “Does that mean if I never buy life insurance, I'll never die?” Both spouses laughed, and a few days later they bought life insurance.

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About the author

Brad Klontz and his father Ted Klontz are psychotherapists. Together with a financial planner they created an intensive program about money and published a study of its results in a journal of the American Psychological Association.

All books by this author: Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz

Terms from the book

  • Paul
  • Leslie
  • Jim
  • Aaron
  • Lewis
  • Big Lie: The authors' term: the belief that money troubles come from being lazy, stupid, greedy or crazy. The authors consider it false.
  • Financial flashpoint: The authors' term: a childhood event connected with money so powerful that it leaves a mark on adult life. It is their concept, not a scientific term.
  • Money script: The authors' term: a belief about what money is and how it works that a person took away from childhood. It often operates without the person noticing.
  • MacLean: Paul MacLean was an American neuroscientist. In the 1950s he proposed a model of the brain in three parts; later research showed the brain is more complex.
  • Animal brain: The authors' image: the ancient parts of the brain responsible for survival and feelings. In the book they are pictured as a crocodile and a monkey.
  • Rational brain: The authors' image: the part of the brain that thinks, plans and holds back impulses. In the book it is pictured as a scientist.
  • Possum: A small American animal. In danger it freezes and plays dead.
  • Junior: The nickname of the old pickup truck given to Ted Klontz. The neighbors in his town gave names to their trucks.
  • Financial comfort zone: The authors' concept: the level of wealth and the money rules a person has been used to since childhood and among which they feel they belong.
  • Crab barrel: An image from the book: crabs in a barrel pull down those trying to climb out. In the same way, the people around you sometimes drag back someone who has begun to live more prosperously.
  • Money disorder: The authors' term: a persistent pattern of handling money that harms a person and repeats despite their wish to change. It is not a medical diagnosis.
  • Lynne: A client of the authors. She inherited 750,000 dollars and gave it all away over six years, afraid of becoming one of the “evil rich.”
  • Apple Tree: The authors' exercise: write down your parents' words and phrases about money and find which of them live on in you.
  • Thunderbird: The Ford Thunderbird, an American car model. The doctor drove up in one.
  • Money mantra: The authors' technique: a short phrase with a new, more accurate view of money. You carry it with you and repeat it when the old script returns.

All terms

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