What does your relationship with money say about you?

Like nutrition, fitness or K-pop, money is just a language, with its own rules, grammar and vocabulary

- Lavanya Mohan

Your financial status has nothing to do with who you are as a person. And yet, who you are as a person will have a significant impact on your financial status.

Our relationship with money is deeply entrenched with our own personalities. The way we handle money is often a reflection of ourselves—our gender, our upbringing, our childhood, our aspirations, and our trauma. It's so deep that even the words we use to describe other people often have money-laced connotations. Generous, miserly, shrewd, careless.

And that's why we get so affected when people talk to us about money. We don't look at it as a conversation about our finances. We look at it as a conversation about us. If we're asked to save a little more, we don't see it as financial advice. We see it as an accusation and interpret it as callousness. We get defensive. If we're asked to spend differently, or make different buying choices, we go to great lengths to justify our expenses because we see it as a direct attack on our tastes. And God forbid someone questions our investments—that just shows that they think we're dumb.