Money conversation
starters guide
A practical guide to talking about what money really means to you
Co-created by Money:Mindshift, a financial wellbeing campaign backed by Aegon, and Go Fund Yourself, the honest finance community making money less awkward and more accessible.
First, make sure you feel ready
There’s no rush – exploring your feelings about money can bring up a lot, and it’s important to do this on your own terms and in your own time. If now doesn’t feel right, that’s okay.
Start small
Choose one emotion and one prompt that feels relevant to how you’re feeling about money at this point in your life.
Give yourself permission to be vulnerable
These conversations don't have to be perfect, they just have to be honest.
Come back to it
Your emotional relationship with money will shift over time. This guide can grow with you.
Share it
If you found this useful, pass it on to someone who might need it too.
Why emotions matter when we talk about money
We often feel like money should be all about logic and numbers but for most of us, it’s deeply emotional.
While traditional economics paints a picture of people making perfectly rational choices, real life is much messier. We’re told to weigh every cost and benefit, always act in our own best interest, and make decisions based on facts alone.
But that’s not how we experience money. Time and again, behavioural economics reveals that our feelings, ones of fear, pride, guilt, and more, can shape our financial decisions. For example:
- We value things we own more highly than identical things we don’t – research by Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard H. Thaler showed this 'endowment effect' means we’ll hold onto losing investments far longer than we should.
- Studies by psychologists Kahneman and Tversky found we experience loss roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains, so we’ll avoid financial decisions that might involve loss, even when the potential gain is much larger.
- We tend to consistently overvalue immediate rewards and undervalue future ones, which is why saving for retirement can feel so much harder than buying something today.
The truth is, money is so much more than maths. It’s wrapped up in our emotions, how we were raised, what we value, and how we feel about ourselves and our place in the world.
This guide starts by helping you identify the emotion that shows up most often when you think about money.
From there, you’ll find conversation prompts – think of them as inspiration and a starting point, not scripts to read word for word – that can help you steer difficult conversations with clarity and honesty, or simply help you to understand yourself better when thinking things through on your own.
Why does this matter? Because talking openly about money – whether with a partner, a friend, or even just yourself – is one of the most powerful steps you could take towards feeling more in control of your finances and less alone in how you feel about them.