Emotional Currency Book Review

Emotional Currency: A Woman's Guide to Building a Healthy Relationship with Money by Kate Levinson is a book about dealing with your relationship with money. 

The book is broken into three parts.  The first talking about understanding money and how it is an emotional currency by writing a money memoir.  The second part was about exploring your emotions around money- fear, confidence, shame, pride and love.  The third part was about transforming your relationship with money by healing your relationship to money and making a money action plan. 

At the end of each chapter, the author poses questions.  These questions would make great discussion points to talk over the book with others.  In addition, they are supposed to help you write your money memoir.  They are certainly thought provoking questions.  Here are some examples from the end of the Love chapter:

• Was money used in your family growing up to express love, approval, or disapproval?
• Have you felt loved through gifts of money?
• If so, when and how?
• Was money ever used in an attempt to "buy" your love?
• If so, was it successful?
• Have you ever used money as a means of maintaining a relationship?
• Was anyone in your family given more than others were?
• Did you ever feel jealous of displays of love between other family members that involved money?

Did any of these questions make you think back and wonder?  I promise that all of the questions at the end of chapters stopped me to think about what they were asking.  I hope that if you stopped to think about these questions, that you are also going to stop and think about reading this book :)

It has some great insights into how everyone reacts to money differently.  Two people grow up in the same environment and one decides that they should live frugally and one decides to live extravagantly.  Growing up poor makes one child grow up and live frugally because they don't want to end up in the same situation.  The other child spends every cent that they get to enjoy life.  Dealing with the emotions around money is important because it has little to do with the money and more to do with the feelings associated with it.  Both ways of living aren't healthy and we need to deal with the emotions in order to deal with the way we manage our money.  Easy to understand and hard to fix :)

There is an story of a daughter getting an inheritance from her father after he passed away and the mother didn't get as much.  In response, issues came between the mother and daughter and the mother was suing the daughter for the money she feels like she deserves.  At a time when a family should be pulling together, money gets in the middle and then the emotion that they should be feeling turns towards the money instead of towards the loss.

There was another story about a daughter who was going to private school and her mother told her that she couldn't go there anymore because she was naughty.  She had friends and loved her school so it was a tough change in her life and the additional burden that it was her fault was very hard.  She overcame it and ended up going to college.  Her mother told her that her parents were no longer going to support her going to school because they heard that she had tried alcohol.  She continued through college and graduated.  Years later after a very strained relationship with her parents, she talked to her father who said that both issues were because the family didn't have the money to pay for the schooling anymore.  He didn't tell her this because the father felt his job was to provide for the family and he was embarrassed that he couldn't.  The father's issues with money affected his daughters whole life.  This made a big difference in her resolving the issue and coming to peace with the fact that she didn't think that she was worth spending money on.

After reading the whole book, I thought it was a little slow starting but a valuable book.  I thought that it was directed at women that have found themselves in debt but it never really talks about debt.  Then there was a section that I thought it was dealing with inheritance.  Another section discussing dealing with money after divorce.  I think that the book covered so many topics and life changes that cause people (women in particular) issues with money.  I think that this is a valuable tool for all women to read.  Regardless of your financial status, life status, or feelings towards money, I think that this book can lead you to think more clearly about money. 

Please pick up this book at your local library or bookstore.  Let me know what you think and if you learned anything!!