Please don’t be a money avoider
“Al Pacino says he went from $50 million to broke.” This was the headline. Of course I had to read it.
His story isn’t unusual. The list of high-profile actors and sportsman who make a truckload of money and then lose it, is long,
The article appeared in Business Insider and was written by Theron Mohamed.
Here’s a section from the article, that was taken from Al’s autobiography, “Sonny Boy.”
“I was broke,” Pacino wrote. “I had $50 million, and then I had nothing. I had property, but I didn’t have any money.”
He added: “There’s almost nothing worse for a famous person — there’s being dead, and then there’s being broke.”
Pacino said he’d been far too loose with the purse strings: “The kind of money I was spending and where it was going was just a crazy montage of loss. The door was wide open, and people who I didn’t know were living off me. It was ‘Come one, come all! Al’s got it and he doesn’t care!'”
“Even though I only had two cars, I was somehow paying for 16, along with 23 cell phones I didn’t know about,” he added. “The landscaper was getting $400,000 a year and, mind you, that was for landscaping at a house I didn’t even live in.”
“It was all about: let’s keep this dumb actor happy, just keep him working, and we will reap.”
Pacino said he ignored his finances because he thought they’d be too hard to understand and felt he was too old and lacked the time to understand them”.
Just to top it all off, the person that Pacino put his faith in early in his career, his accountant, was later arrested and jailed for running a Ponzi scheme!
This is a classic example of the Avoider money personality style in action.
A money avoider doesn’t want to know about their money, either because it’s just too hard, they are too busy, or they have so much money they don’t need to worry about it. Pacino feel into all of these categories at one time or another.
They are very good at trusting others to look after their money for them, and sadly, too often that doesn’t end well. Abdication by delegating all responsibility isn’t a great way to manage your finances. It might be kinda OK when the truckloads are rolling in, but when the trucks stop rolling the problems come to light fairly quickly.
The Avoider personality also shows up in personal relationships as well. One partner has no interest in the household finances, leaving all responsibility to the more ‘sensible’ partner who is ‘good with money’ and I’m not. They will quite happily spend the money and implicitly trust their partner to make sure they stay afloat. The extreme avoider won’t even engage in any financial conversations with their partner.
I met with a couple in this very situation, it was only when the money avoider realised how much stress her partner was under trying to keep things afloat, with no support or engagement from her. This was enough to jolt the avoider into starting to engage in money conversations and decision making.
The money avoider personality also shows up in the business world as well. It’s often not intentional, the business owner is busy doing everything else and is happy to be able to have a trusted employee look after the finances for them.
However, there are more and more stories coming through the media about those trusted employees, who have been stealing from their employers for years. Trust is an essential in an employee relationship when someone is looking after your money. But so are systems and processes to make sure you can pick it up quickly if that trust is breached.
In a perfect world, we could hire someone good at the job, who we like and trust and happily leave them alone to get on with it and not worry about them stealing from you. But, human nature, and the economy, being what it is, we are not living in a perfect world.
Of the five money personalities, I call the Money Avoider the problem child. Money is something that you need to know about. It’s fine to trust others to help you manage it, but there is some baseline information that you do need to know, and conversations that you need to take part in.
I have heard too many conversations go like this. “But I trusted you honey, to look after our money. Where’s it all gone?” When it has gone, it’s too late to have the conversation.
If you recognise that you have Money Avoider tendencies, please address them, not just for your own sake, bur for your relationship as well. You may be putting more stress on your partner than you realise as they take the lion’s share of making the decisions that impact you both (and your family).
If you are a Money Avoider business owner, you need to have more than one person looking after the finances, while you worth through moving out of this behaviour style
You don’t have to suddenly change overnight, start small, be aware of how much you spend at the supermarket for example. Ask some questions. Start to look at your online banking transactions. Take the small steps you need to, so you can start to feel more competent and confident to take more control over you own financial future.