Wired for Wealth

**Author:** Brad Klontz

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- Why your financial problems are not really about money - How childhood experiences silently control your adult financial decisions - The specific beliefs that keep smart people poor - A proven five-step process for rewiring your financial brain - How to resolve money conflicts in relationships - How to raise children who will be financially healthy adults

**Who This Book Is For:**

This book is for anyone who has ever wondered why they keep making the same financial mistakes despite knowing better. It is for people who earn good money but feel perpetually broke. It is for couples who fight about spending and saving. It is for parents who want their children to have a healthier relationship with money than they did. It is for anyone who suspects that their struggles with money are about something deeper than math.

Most financial advice assumes a simple premise: if you give people the right information, they will make better decisions. Teach someone how to budget, and they will budget. Show someone how compound interest works, and they will start saving. Explain the dangers of credit card debt, and they will pay off their balances. This premise is wrong. Every day, intelligent, well-educated people make financial decisions that contradict everything they know. A financial planner who understands diversification panics and sells all her stocks during a market dip. A doctor who earns $400,000 a year lives paycheck to paycheck. A couple that loves each other deeply fights viciously every time the credit card bill arrives. The problem is not a lack of information. The problem is that financial behavior is not driven primarily by rational analysis. It is driven by something much deeper and much older: the unconscious beliefs about money that we absorbed long before we ever opened a bank account. Brad Klontz, a financial psychologist and certified financial planner, calls these beliefs "money scripts." They are the thoughts, feelings, and attitudes about money that we learned in childhood. They operate below the level of conscious awareness, shaping our financial decisions in ways we rarely recognize. They determine whether we save or spend, whether we invest or hoard, whether we feel worthy of wealth or sabotage ourselves at every turn. The concept of money scripts emerged from Klontz's clinical work with clients who were, by any objective measure, financially successful. These were attorneys, executives, entrepreneurs, and professionals who earned substantial incomes. Yet many of them were miserable. Some were deeply in debt despite high salaries. Others had substantial assets but lived in constant fear of losing everything. Still others had plenty of money but could not enjoy it. Traditional financial…