Are you a Spender or a Saver?

My parents approached spending from opposite ends of the financial spectrum. They held completely conflicting opinions on how to teach their four daughters to handle money. My sisters and I were paid a tiny allowance every week. Mom believed we should get the whole amount and be able to spend it any way we wanted. She believed it would teach us to accept the responsibilities of either having or not having. Dad believed we should be forced to put every dime into the bank so we would learn to be savers.

The odd thing here is that Dad was a spender by nature. He was much freer with money than Mom. Mom was a natural tightwad. She was raised poor and never learned to enjoy money or how to be generous with it. They both agree with the concept of saving. They both believe in saving for a rainy day. But they had polar opposite ideas of how to teach us how to do it. I can’t remember which parent got their way the most often. There were times we were allowed to go to the store and spend our allowance however we wanted. There were other times Dad insisted we put our money straight into the bank. He encouraged us to save from an early age by setting up individual bank accounts with our own passbooks and trying to explain the concept of compound interest and how banks served a purpose by using the money I gave them to lend to others. Imagine trying to wrap your eight-year-old brain around that.

I mentioned there were four of us girls. Two of us grew up to be savers. The other two are spenders. I still don’t know how much of Mom and Dad’s conflicting views on money influenced us to develop the way we did. Or were we predetermined to become savers or spenders?

There are positives and negatives on both sides of the personality coin. A saver isn’t as often taken by surprise by an unexpected need. Yet they struggle with a tendency toward stinginess. I struggled with this much of my life. The Bible says: The love of money is the root of all evil.” I believe both savers and spenders can battle this. When a saver becomes stingy with money the way I did, we become hesitant to loosen our grasp on a dollar lest we never get another one. A spender can love the experiences and possessions money provides & continually strive for more, often at the detriment of their own peace and relationships.

The Lord has helped me get past the stingy side of my character. As he is gracious and generous with me, I have learned to be generous with the blessings he’s given me. I strive to live generously and graciously, giving grace as it was given to me. I’ve also seen and experienced the stress and fear caused by not saving for an emergency or future necessity. We’ve all been in situations where we needed money, but there was absolutely none & no way to get it in time to meet our needs.

I still don’t know if I was influenced to become a saver or if I would’ve turned out this way, regardless of my upbringing. I don’t know if one of my spender sisters would’ve been better or worse off if Mom and Dad had been able to agree on the way they taught us how to deal with money. I tried to strike a happy medium when teaching my son about money. He’s grown now with a home of his own and he never asks me for money. Maybe I influenced him, or maybe he's afraid to ask for it.

What about you? Are you a saver or a spender? What lessons did your parents teach you about money, and which ones are you passing onto your children? And if you ever figure out which of my parents influenced me more with their conflicting ideals and contrasts in handling money, please let me know.

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