Money shame
The sense that one’s money situation shows something wrong with oneself: debt, low pay, arrears or needing help felt as proof of being a failure. It leads to hiding and withdrawing, which can make the money problem worse.
What drives it
Hiding protects against being seen as a failure, at the cost of help and information. Useful for identification because the money problem often matters less than the secrecy around it.
How it shows
Work
Won’t use the hardship fund or the employee assistance line, makes excuses to skip the team lunch, hides a second job, changes the subject when colleagues talk about holidays or house prices.
Relationships
Says it’s fine when it isn’t, stops seeing friends who spend more, lies to a partner about a debt, won’t let family visit the flat. Children may learn to say they aren’t hungry on school trips.
Self
Notice where your face goes hot: a card declined at the till, a question about where you live, a call from an unknown number. Notice what you do next to hide.
What tells it apart
Guilt: Guilt is about a deed (‘I spent the rent money’) and pushes towards repair. Money shame is about the self (‘I’m useless’) and pushes towards hiding, which Gladstone’s studies found does more financial harm.
Money status: Money status ties worth to having more. Money shame may be present in someone who doesn’t care about status at all but feels exposed by being behind.
Ostrich effect: The ostrich effect is not looking at bad news. Money shame is more likely when the avoidance covers other people too, so they stop telling anyone, asking for help or being seen.
A test
Ask who knows the full picture of their money. If no one does and the thought of telling brings a flush or a change of subject, shame may be driving it.
Questions to carry
- When the person last fell behind on a payment, who did they tell, and how long did they wait?
- Which number in my finances would I least want a friend to see, and what do I imagine they would conclude about me?
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
moderate. Gladstone and colleagues (2021, six studies including bank account data) found financial shame led people to withdraw from their finances, which deepened hardship, and that shame did this more than guilt. Walker and colleagues (2013) found shame in the experience of poverty in all seven countries they studied, in qualitative work, but the research comes from few groups and measures vary.
Where it comes from
Robert Walker and colleagues, Poverty in global perspective: is shame a common denominator?, 2013. Gladstone, Jachimowicz, Greenberg and Galinsky, Financial shame spirals, 2021