- There are 5 major financial personality types: big spenders, savers, shoppers, debtors, and investors.
- Your money personality explains why you spend (and save) money the way you do in your day-to-day life.
- Knowing your money personality can help you understand how to make your money work for you, how to save more, and overall how to make smarter financial choices.
The 5 Money Personalities
Which money personality are you?
Image by Sira Anamwong on Shutterstock
As human beings, we have a lot of things in common. You don't have to look further than your family or friend group to know that how we spend (or save) money is not one of them. According to Investopedia, there are generally 5 money personality types, each with its own outlook on finances and way of doing things. Because of these differences, there is no real one-size-fits-all approach for making better financial decisions. Luckily the experts have shared tips for each of the unique group. But first, here are the classifications:
The Big Spender
Big Spenders like to make a statement with their purchases. They are not necessarily materialistic, but they do place a high value in their possessions, often wanting the latest and greatest releases - the latest smartphone, brand-name clothing, high-end vehicles.
Big Spenders are comfortable spending money and would take a big risk on investment if there was a chance it could make them more money. In fact, the act of spending the money that they work hard to earn is one of the things that they enjoy doing the most, even if it adds to their debt.
The Saver
Savers are the exact opposite of Big Spenders. Spending money makes them feel uncomfortable, they always shop for bargains, and they try to save money wherever they can. Savers may very rarely use credit cards to make purchases (or they may not even have a credit card).
Savers are often viewed as "cheap", but this isn't always the case. Savers are generally conservative with the things they purchase and don't tend to take big risks on investments just in case they don't pan out.
The Shopper
Shoppers often develop emotional ties to spending and receiving money. Their mood often dips and increases with their bank account. Shoppers find it particularly difficult to resist spending their money, even if they are buying items they don't need.
Shoppers aren't totally clueless about their debt, they may even be aware of the debt they are incurring but can't seem to separate their emotions from their spending habits.
The Debtor
Debtors don't seem to have emotional ties to their finances. They don't spend to feel better or feel low when they see a low bank balance, they simply don't spend much time thinking about their financial situation.
Debtors may be aware they have debt but may not keep track of what/who they owe. Debtors usually spend more than they earn on a consistent basis, meaning they are constantly at a level of debt even when they feel they are "cutting back."
The Investor
Investors are extremely future-orientated and are consciously aware of their finances, often taking advantage of investment opportunities after carefully weighing their options. Investors typically pay their bills on time, and their spending actions are driven by choices they have given quite a bit of thought to.
Any investment the Investor takes is with the end-goal in mind of earning more money, having better credit, or some other future goal.
How to save more money, according to your financial personality
With every money personality comes a different way you can save!
Photo by Myimagine on Shutterstock
Big Spenders: Some of the best things in life are (close to) free.
If you enjoy spending money and have an income that can support your spending habits, you may be missing out on some of the finer things in life by constantly chasing the finer things in life.
Consider some fun alternatives to the high-end purchases or splurges you typically make every month. Find a balance between a spending a lot on things you may not need and spending a little on something that will bring real quality and happiness into your life.
An example of this would be choosing to spend $2000 on a jacuzzi for your back yard instead of spending $300 per month visiting a spa where you use their jacuzzi. It doesn't necessarily have to be about saving money, but it can be about spending less where you can. You may be surprised just how much savings this will lead to in the future.
Savers: Consider quality of life compared to your savings accounts.
Savers are unlikely to fall into financial ruin because they are usually prepared for the unexpected. However, savers tend to put off purchasing things that can make their lives easier (or, in the long run, save them money) because of the price tag.
An example of this could be splurging on a new dishwasher, replacing the old one (which you had to run multiple times to get the dishes clean) with a new one that can save you money on your electric and water bills.
Shoppers: Attach emotion to saving money instead of spending it.
People who consider themselves as shoppers should consider trying to find a balance between the things they enjoy doing and things that will serve their best interests in the future.
Your emotions drive your spending habits, but they can also motivate you to save money.
Consider what emotional value you're able to place on saving money for the future. Saving money for your children's education, your dream home, a nice vacation with your spouse – use the positive emotions that come from these future goals to channel your energy into saving money instead of spending money.
Debtors: Make saving your money as simple as possible.
The tricky thing about having this financial personality is that, if you have a good income and steady work, you may be "fine" for a long time. Your debt may not catch up with you for years, but when it does, it can create a financial crisis. Not to mention any big unexpected expense can put you in financial crisis mode because you haven't prepared for it.
Debtors should consider simple actions that allow you to save money with very little effort, such as setting up automatic deposits from your spending account to your savings account on the day you get paid.
Investors: Balance the "right now" with the future.
Taking risks on big investments that will pay off in the future can be a rush. It's also a good way to make your money work for you instead of simply working for your money, as most others do. Investor personalities should consider how to best balance savings that you can use to make nice purchases today, with investments that lock you in for a certain number of years.
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Dinosaur tracks in the ceiling of Castelbouc Cave in France.
French scientists found gigantic dinosaur footprints on the roof of the Castelbouc cave the Lozère region of southern France. A new paper outlines the discovery approximately 1640 feet under ground by the paleontologist Jean-David Moreau from the University of Burgundy–Franche-Comté and his colleagues.
The footprints likely belonged to an unknown species of titanosaur and were made 166 to 168 million years ago, in the Middle Jurassic Period. Titanosaurs, a group of long-necked, lizard-like sauropods, could be found all over the world in present day Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Australia. Among titanosaurs were the largest land animals to have ever existed, like the Patagotitan, which stretched 121 feet long and weighed 138,000 pounds.
The titanosaur Alamosaurus.
Credit: Bogdanov, 2006. Creative Commons.
Some of the 38 tracks found in France were as large as 4 feet long. They were likely made by three dinosaurs at the time when the area was on the surface, making up a muddy shoreline along which the giant creatures traveled. Over time, the site was buried by geological processes, with the tracks becoming moldings in the roof of a cave that's half a kilometer underground.
They were spotted as part of a caving expedition in December 2015 by the paper's authors. To find them, the scientists had to go down a narrow labyrinth of crawl spaces that often get flooded. The tracks were in a space about 260 feet long, 66 feet wide and 33 feet high.
Dinosaur tracks in the ceiling of Castelbouc Cave in France.
Credit: Jean-David Moreau et al./J. Vertebr. Paleontol.
Speaking to the French science magazine Sciences et Avenir, Jean-David Moreau explained that a caver "who was ahead of me turned to me and with the lamp of his helmet projected a grazing lighting on the ceiling which allowed to bring out the marks."
You can read the paper "Middle Jurassic tracks of sauropod dinosaurs in a deep karst cave in France," published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Excerpt from a 19th century map of the Paris Catacombs, showing the labyrinthine layout underground (in color) beneath the straight-lined structures on the surface (in grey).
Ancient mining areas below Paris for limestone (red) and gypsum (green).Credit: Émile Gérards (1859–1920) / Public domain
"If you're brave enough to try, you might be able to catch a train from UnLondon to Parisn't, or No York, or Helsunki, or Lost Angeles, or Sans Francisco, or Hong Gone, or Romeless."
China Miéville's fantasy novel Un Lun Dun is set in an eerie mirror version of London. In it, he hints that other cities have similar doubles. On the list that he offhandedly rattles off, Paris stands out. Because the City of Light really does have a twisted sister. Below Paris Overground is Paris Underground, the City of Darkness.
Most people will have heard of the Catacombs of Paris: subterranean charnel houses for the bones of around six million dead Parisians. They are one of the French capital's most famous tourist attractions – and undoubtedly its grisliest.
But they constitute only a small fragment of what the locals themselves call les carrières de Paris ("the mines of Paris"), a collection of tunnels and galleries up to 300 km (185 miles) long, most of which are off-limits to the public, yet eagerly explored by so-called cataphiles.
The Grand Réseau Sud ("Great Southern Network") takes up around 200 km beneath the 5th, 6th, 14th, and 15th arrondissements (administrative districts), all south of the river Seine. Smaller networks run beneath the 12th, 13th, and 16th arrondissements. How did they get there?
Paris stone and plaster of Paris
It all starts with geology. Sediments left behind by ancient seas created large deposits of limestone in the south of the city, mostly south of the Seine; and gypsum in the north, particularly in the hills of Montmartre and Ménilmontant. Highly sought after as building materials, both have been mined since Roman times.
The limestone is also known as Lutetian limestone (Lutetia is the Latin name for ancient Paris) or simply "Paris stone." It has been used for many famous Paris landmarks, including the Louvre and the grand buildings erected during Georges-Eugène Haussmann's large-scale remodelling of the city in the mid-19th century. The stone's warm, yellowish color provides visual unity and a bright elegance to the city.
The fine-powdered gypsum of northern Paris, used for making quick-setting plaster, was so famed for its quality that "plaster of Paris" is still used as a term of distinction. However, as gypsum is very soluble in water, the underground cavities left by its extraction were extremely vulnerable to collapse.
Like living on top of a rotting tooth: subsidence starts far below the surface, but it can destroy your house.Credit : Delavanne Avocats
In previous centuries, a road would occasionally open up to swallow a chariot, or even a whole house would disappear down a sinkhole. In 1778, a catastrophic subsidence in Ménilmontant killed seven. That's why the Montmartre gypsum quarries were dynamited rather than just left as they were. The remaining gypsum caves were to be filled up with concrete.
The official body governing Paris down below is the Inspection Générale des Carrières (IGC), founded in the late 1770s by King Louis XVI. The IGC was tasked with mapping and, where needed, propping up the current and ancient (and sometimes forgotten) mining corridors and galleries hiding beneath Paris.
A delightful hiding place
Also around that time, the dead of Paris were getting in the way of the living. At the end of the 18th century, their final destination consisted of about 200 small cemeteries, scattered throughout the city — all bursting at the seams, so to speak. There was no room to bury the newly dead, and the previously departed were fouling up both the water and air around their respective churchyards.
Something radical had to happen. And it did. From 1785 until 1814, the smaller cemeteries were emptied of their bones, which were transported with full funerary pomp to their final resting place in the ancient limestone quarries at Tombe-Issoire. Three large and modern cemeteries were opened to receive the remains of subsequent generations of Parisians: Montparnasse, Père-Lachaise, and Passy.
Who says stacking skulls and bones can't be fun?Credit: Rijin via Wikimedia and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
The six million dead Parisians in the Catacombs, from all corners of the capital and across many centuries, together form the world's largest necropolis — their now anonymized skulls and bones methodically stacked, occasionally into whimsical patterns. The Catacombs are fashioned into a memorial to the brevity of life. The message above the entrance reads: Arrête! C'est ici l'empire de la Mort. ("Halt! This is the empire of Death.")
That has not stopped the Catacombs, accessible via a side door to a classicist building on the Avenue du Colonel Henri Rol-Tanguy, making just about every Top 20 list of things to see in Paris.
An underground economy
However, while the Catacombs certainly are the most famous part of the centuries-old network beneath Paris, and in non-pandemic times draw thousands of tourists each day, they constitute just 1.7 km (1 mile) of the 300-km (185-mile) tunneling total.
Subterranean Paris wasn't just used for mining and storing dead people. In the 17th century, Carthusian monks converted the ancient quarries under their monastery into distilleries for the green or yellow liqueur that still carries their name, chartreuse.
Because the mines generally keep a constant cool temperature of around 15° C (60° F), they were also ideal for brewing beer, as happened on a large scale from the end of the 17th century until well into the 20th century. Several caves were dug especially for establishing breweries, and not just because of the ambient temperature: going underground allowed brewers to remain close to their customers without having to pay a premium for real estate up top.
Overview of the Paris Catacombs.Credit: Inspection Générale des Carrières, 1857 / Public domain.
At the end of the 19th century, the underground breweries of the 14th arrondissement alone produced more than a million hectoliters (22 million gallons) per year. One of the most famous of Paris' underground breweries, Dumesnil, stayed in operation until the late 1960s.
In that decade, the network of corridors and galleries south of the Seine, long since abandoned by miners, became the unofficial playground for the young people of Paris. They explored the fantastical world beneath their feet, in some cases via entry points located in their very schools. Fascinated, these cataphiles ("catacomb lovers") read up on old books, explored the subterranean labyrinth, and drew up schematics that were passed around among fellow initiates as reverently as treasure maps.
As Robert Macfarlane writes in Underland, Paris-beneath-their-feet became "a place where people might slip into different identities, assume new ways of being and relating, become fluid and wild in ways that are constrained on the surface."
Some larger caves turned into notorious party zones: a 7-meter-tall gallery below the Val-de-Grâce hospital is widely known as "Salle Z." Over the last few decades, various other locations in subterranean Paris have hosted jazz and rock concerts and rave parties — like no other city, Paris really has an "underground music scene."
Hokusai's Great Wave as the backdrop to the "beach" under Paris.Credit: Reddit
Cataphiles vs. cataphobes
With popularity came increased reports of nuisance and crime — the tunnels provided easy access to telephone cables, which were stolen for the resale value of their copper.
The general public's "discovery" of the underground network led the city of Paris to officially interdict all access by non-authorized persons. That decree dates back to 1955, but the "underground police" have an understanding with seasoned cataphiles. Their main targets are so-called tourists, who by their lack of knowledge expose themselves to risk of injuries or worse, and degrade their surroundings, often leaving loads of litter in their wake.
The understanding does not extend to the IGC. Unlike in the 19th century, when weak cavities were shored up by purpose-built pillars, the policy now is to inject concrete to fill up endangered spaces — thus progressively blocking off parts of the network. That procedure has also been used to separate the Catacombs to prevent "infiltration" of the site by cataphiles.
Many subterranean streets have their own names, signs and all. This is the Rue des Bourguignons (Street of the Burgundians) below the Champs des Capucins (Capuchin Field), neither of which exists on the surface.Credit: Jean-François Gornet via Wikimedia and licensed under
The cataphiles, however, are fighting back. In a game of cat and mouse with the authorities, they are reopening blocked passages and creating chatières ("cat flaps") through which they can squeeze into chambers no longer accessible via other underground corridors.
Catacomb climate control
Alone against the unstoppable tide of concrete, the amateurs of Underground Paris would be helpless. But the fight against climate change may turn the subterranean labyrinths from a liability into an asset — and the City of Paris into an ally.
The UN's 2015 Climate Plan — concluded in Paris, by the way — requires the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 75 percent by 2050. And Paris itself wants to be Europe's greenest city by 2030. More sustainable climate control of our living spaces would be a great help toward both targets. A lot of energy is spent heating houses in winter and cooling them in summer.
This is where the constant temperature of the Parisian tunnels comes in. It's not just good for brewing beer; it's a source of geothermal energy, says Fieldwork, an architectural firm based in Paris. It can be used to temper temperatures, helping to cool houses in summer and warming them in winter.
One catch for the cataphiles: it also works when the underground cavities are filled up with concrete. So perhaps one day, Paris Underground, fully filled up with concrete, will completely fall off the map, reducing the city's formerly real doppelgänger into an air conditioning unit.
Cool in summer, warm in winter: Paris Underground could become Paris A/C.Credit: Fieldwork
Strange Maps #1083
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