Everyone has a unique personality, which shapes how we think, act, and interact with the world. Unsurprisingly, this extends to our handling of money as well.
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Just as your personality influences your relationships and career choices, it also plays a significant role in earning, spending, saving, and investing. This can be referred to as your financial personality. Your financial personality is a unique blend of traits, habits, and behaviours that reveal how you approach money.
What is Financial Personality?
Your financial personality refers to how you think about, manage, and emotionally respond to money. It is shaped by a mix of your core personality traits, life experiences, habits, and even unconscious psychological biases. This concept is supported by the field of behavioural finance, which explores how emotions and cognitive patterns influence our financial decisions. Contrary to the traditional belief that money decisions are purely logical, research shows that we are far more emotionally driven than we might assume.
Is Financial Personality Important?
For a long time, people believed they could separate emotions from financial decisions, but studies show otherwise. In fact, a study conducted by Deloitte in 2018 found that 59% of people make financial decisions based more on how they feel than on logic. Additionally, findings from behavioural economists like Kahneman and Tversky reveal that losses have a psychological impact approximately twice as strong as that of gains, making it clear that money is emotional. Financial traits and emotional biases—such as loss aversion, overconfidence, and regret avoidance—can silently shape our financial choices. If you don’t understand your financial personality, you risk making decisions that go against your best interests.
With this insight, we created MoneySign®—an assessment designed to uncover your financial personality.
What is MoneySign®?
MoneySign® is a patented assessment tool that provides insights into your financial identity and the reasons behind your financial decisions. It helps you understand your attitudes, behaviours, and preferences regarding money.
Built on the scientifically validated OCEAN framework (the Five-Factor Model of personality), we conducted extensive research to adapt it to the financial realm. The result is a comprehensive tool that reveals how you spend, invest, and manage your money—allowing you to make better choices confidently and consistently. The assessment works by asking you a series of questions. Based on your responses, it identifies your financial personality, which your MoneySign® represents. There are eight distinct MoneySign® profiles, each with its own name and characteristics.
What does MoneySign® tell you about your finances?
Each MoneySign® profile offers valuable insights into your financial habits and tendencies, helping you to:
- Understand your financial behaviour at a deeper level
- Recognise your blind spots
- Make more aligned and confident money decisions.
Each profile serves as a mirror, reflecting how your personality influences your financial life.
MoneySign® Explained
| Sl.No. | Instruments | Strength | Weakness | Potential Bias |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01. | Persistent Horse | Discipline, Patience, Confidence | Not Adaptive, Quick to Trust, Indecisive | Being overexposed to familiar assets like real estate, gold. Having a preference for convenient, low-risk, and popular instruments. Prone to falling for insurance-cum-investment ploys. |
| 02. | Tactical Tiger | Agility, High risk appetite, Analytical skills | Overconfidence, Quick judgements, Tendency to overcomplicate | Having a preference for high-risk investments. Taking loans to increase returns on real estate or equity. Remaining under-insured and having scattered finances. |
| 03. | Opportunistic Lion | High risk tolerance, Decisiveness, Self-motivation | Procrastination, Stubbornness, Carelessness | Having an inclination towards high-risk, high-reward instruments. Having an overdiversified portfolio with scattered finances. Overlooking the fine print, like fees and expenses, while making financial decisions. |
| 04. | Virtuous Elephant | Discipline, Practicality, Long-term planning | Self-satisfaction, Tendency to stick with poor decisions, Preference for popular investment products | Having adequate insurance cover. Having inadequate exposure to equity funds, debt, gold, and real estate. |
| 05. | Far-Sighted Eagle | Sharp focus, Broad vision, Bold, decision-making | Overconfidence, Hyperactivity, Tendency to stick with poor decisions | Displaying a high appetite for risk. Having an inclination towards short-term investments. Accumulating non-performing assets, resulting in an unbalanced portfolio. |
| 06. | Vigilant Turtle | Consistency, Longevity, Strategic | Low Risk Appetite, Fearful, Lack of Trust | Consistently investing in mutual funds and SIPs. Being overexposed to life and health insurance. Being prone to falling for guaranteed income plan insurance schemes associated with higher premiums. |
| 07. | Enlightened Whale | Calmness, Reason and logic, Problem-solving abilities | Confusion, Complacency, Tendency to overtrust | Possessing a heavily concentrated portfolio. Having a portfolio with non-performing assets. Doubting the value of life insurance, but not health insurance. |
| 08. | Stealthy Shark | Curiosity, Swift action, Intelligence | Greed, Secrecy, Excessive aggressiveness | Leaning towards discounted assets and value buys. Being curious about new products. Being highly independent in terms of decision-making. Having an inclination towards high-risk investments. |
For example, if you are a Persistent Horse, you are likely disciplined and prefer stable, traditional investments. However, you may stick with the same options even when better ones are available. MoneySign® helps by showing you where you might be getting too comfortable and missing out on growth opportunities. From there, you can take practical steps to balance your natural habits with smarter financial moves. It is all about making your personality work for you so that you can make decisions leading to long-term success without fighting against yourself.
How Financial Advisors Use MoneySign®
At 1 Finance, our financial advisors use your MoneySign® to build plans that align with your financial personality. Rather than providing cookie-cutter advice, they tailor their guidance to what resonates with you, based on how you think, act, and feel about money. This personalised approach makes the advice more effective, easier to follow, and less stressful because it is built around who you truly are. The key is to align your financial strategies with your authentic self, allowing you to make decisions with less stress and more confidence—ultimately setting you up for long-term financial success.
TL;DR
Understanding your MoneySign® empowers you to make more aligned financial decisions. It helps you:
– Recognise your behavioural patterns
– Avoid common biases
– Play to your strengths
– Build strategies that work with your natural tendencies—not against them.
For example, if you are a Tactical Tiger, you must recognise that you lean toward bold, fast decisions. This awareness will help you slow down, reflect, and manage risk more effectively. In short, MoneySign® enables you to take control of your financial future—not by changing who you are, but by helping you better understand yourself.
