Financial enabling
The repeated inability to say no when someone, often an adult child, sibling or parent, keeps asking for money, giving even when it can’t be afforded. The giving keeps the other person from learning to manage, and keeps the giver anxious.
What drives it
Giving buys relief from guilt, conflict or the fear of the other person suffering, and keeps the giver needed. For identification, look at what happens to the giver’s own finances: savings drawn down and debt taken on while the requests continue.
How it shows
Work
Taking extra work or delaying retirement to cover a relative’s rent, lending to a colleague again after the last loan wasn’t repaid, and distraction for the rest of the day after a call asking for money.
Relationships
A partner who learns of transfers to a grown child after the fact, rent paid for a sibling "just this once" for the third year, a relative’s debts cleared and then back again, and arguments where saying no is cast as abandonment.
Self
You feel dread when a certain name lights up your phone, you say yes before checking your balance, and you feel guilty saying no and resentful saying yes.
What tells it apart
Codependency: Codependency is the wider pattern of organising life around another person’s needs. Financial enabling is the money form, and can appear in someone who isn’t codependent elsewhere.
Financial dependence: Enabling is the giver’s side and dependence is the receiver’s. They usually come as a pair, and each keeps the other going.
Self-sacrifice schema: The schema shows in time, attention and care given up everywhere. Enabling may be limited to money and to one person who keeps asking.
A test
Ask what happened the last time they said no to this person, and how their own savings compare with a few years ago. Giving that continues while their own position worsens may be enabling rather than help.
Questions to carry
- When the person last refused a request for money, what happened over the next day, and who gave way?
- What do I fear would happen to them, or to me, if I said no this time?
Go deeper
- Read: Mind over Money, Brad Klontz and Ted Klontz, 2009. Written for readers by a father and son who work in financial psychology. It sets out the money scripts and the money disorders they lead to, among them money avoidance, financial infidelity, enabling and dependence.
- Listen: The Money Scripts That Are Holding Back Your Financial Future, The Art of Manliness podcast, episode 529, 2019. Brad Klontz on how money scripts form in childhood, on money avoidance and money worship, on the pull back to the class you grew up in, and on secrecy, enabling and dependence in families. Free to play, with a full transcript.
How strong the research is
clinical. Defined in financial therapy and measured as one subscale of the Klontz Money Behavior Inventory (Klontz, Britt, Archuleta and Klontz, 2012), developed on an online convenience sample of 422 mostly educated, well-off, white respondents, with no clinical cut-off. Wider research on parental money is mixed: support during college was linked to lower grades but higher graduation rates (Hamilton, 2013).
Where it comes from
Brad Klontz, Rick Kahler and Ted Klontz, 2008 (Facilitating Financial Health). Klontz, Britt, Archuleta and Klontz, 2012 (Klontz Money Behavior Inventory).