It's not my fault I'm like this (financially)

Hi y’all —

This October will mark my 10th year living in New York City. And while I can now jaywalk, avoid Times Square and dunk on Eric Adams with the best of them, I’ve come to realize that a lot of my behaviors are actually extremely Floridian.

For instance, I say “sir” and “ma’am” to cab drivers and bodega cashiers. When I go to the beach, I do the Stingray Shuffle without thinking. I love ceiling fans and thunderstorms, and if I see key lime pie on a restaurant menu, I always order it — even though I’ll inevitably be dissatisfied.

My Florida background is like a current running through my life in NYC, and it makes me wonder what else I’m being unwittingly influenced by. Like, are there non-obvious factors affecting my financial habits?

Ellyce Fulmore, a financial educator and author based in Canada, tells me that the various aspects of my identity impact pretty much everything I do — and “that, of course, includes money,” she says.

“We attempt to put money into a vacuum instead of looking at how it really intersects with every area of our life,” she adds. But in reality, all the pieces of my life, experiences and personality “impact how we think about money, view money, spend money [and] the decisions that we make around money.”

Fulmore likes to describe this as my “money story,” though I’ve also heard it called a “money script.” Basically, my financial beliefs, behaviors and attitudes are formed in accordance with an almost-infinite number of outside factors. These can range from culture, class and trauma to personality, birth order and movies I watch. (Turns out I’m a lot more impressionable than I think.)

Sometimes this cause-and-effect situation is obvious — if I witness a friend get laid off, I might make the intentional decision to beef up my emergency fund. But often it’s instinctual.

Imagine I’m standing in the grocery store, trying to choose between two boxes of cereal. Fulmore says my brain will make a decision based on everything I’ve experienced in my life thus far.

Maybe when I was young, my parents taught me to only buy cereal on sale; maybe I know that one of the cereal manufacturers donates to a politician whose values I don’t support. All of this information is swirling around in my mind, she adds, and “you make those snap decisions without even necessarily consciously thinking about them.”

It's not just nurture, either. Nature, too, can influence my habits. 

For example, research has found there’s a correlation between menstrual cycle phases and how susceptible people are to impulsive spending. Mental health can be a major determinant of how I handle my money, as well.

Fulmore says folks who struggle with executive function may have trouble sticking to a budget, while those who are wired to seek dopamine may be more likely to splurge. My anxiety might lead me to book the first hotel I find while vacation planning, even if it’s more expensive than I’d like, because I have an underlying fear of not being able to get a room later.

The rub is that because these factors are so easy to overlook, they’re often difficult to address. It’s a lot simpler to overcome financial challenges when the solution is black and white.

Fulmore talks about how when she was in college, she was always running late for class, so she ended up buying takeout and coffee most days. But if she’d asked a financial planner for advice on how to remedy the overspending, they’d likely say she should pack lunch and make coffee at home.

That wasn’t the problem, though. “The issue for me was time management stemming from my undiagnosed ADHD, not the finances,” she says.

To give myself the best shot at mitigating the effects of outside factors on my financial behaviors, I first need to take a step back and recognize what’s going on. Then I need to carefully take that into account when designing a plan for my money.

“Block out the noise of what everyone else says you ‘should’ be doing with your money and focus on what's going to make the most sense for where you're at in your life,” Fulmore says.