Managing money
Thirteen positions about your own money, each with the weight you put on it.
- Questions
- 45
- 11 min
- Thirteen stated positions — no score, no verdict
What this is
There is no scale here and no construct being measured: what is recorded is a position you state about your own money, the weight you put on it, and your reason. Where a question says 'someone' or 'the other person', it means whoever you live with now or would — every one of the thirteen is answerable by one person sitting alone. The topic list is public — Jan Pahl's typology of household money management has described whole-wage, allowance, pooling and independent arrangements since 1980, and the contents of a household budget are nobody's intellectual property — while the instruments that measure in this area are not, and none is reproduced or paraphrased here: not the Financial Infidelity Scale (Garbinsky, Gladstone, Nikolova and Olson, 2020), not the Klontz Money Script Inventory, and not the premarital inventories whose own publishers state that their items are proprietary. Two outside findings are worth carrying while you answer, as somebody else's evidence and not ours. Olson, Rick, Small and Finkel randomly assigned 230 engaged or newly married couples to a joint account, to separate accounts, or to arrange it as they wished, and two years later only the joint-account group had escaped the usual decline in relationship quality (Journal of Consumer Research 50(4), 2023) — one experiment, on newly married American couples, which does not tell you what would happen in your house, and this page will not treat one answer to the first question as the right one. Dew, Britt and Huston found across 4,574 couples that disagreements about money predicted divorce more strongly than any other subject couples argue about; that is a reason to write these answers down rather than a forecast about you. On how many partners keep a money secret there is no solid number at all — commercial polls put it between a third and a half, on definitions that do not match each other, and the spread is the finding. Take Conversations first if you do not yet know whether money has ever been discussed between you; this is where the amounts, the thresholds and the debt get written down, and writing them down is the point. Your answer to the undisclosed-debt question never leaves this device, is never in a share link, and never asks you for an amount.
Where it comes from
written down, not impliedThirteen stated positions — no score, no verdict
The categories for how couples organise money — where it sits, who controls it, who pays for what — come from Jan Pahl's research on money in marriage (1980, 1983, 1989). No item from any published money questionnaire is used.
Written for this app
Nothing here is measured, so reliability and validity do not apply. It records the positions you state, how much each matters to you, and why.
Further reading
- Pahl, J. (1980). Patterns of Money Management within Marriage (opens in a new tab). Journal of Social Policy, 9(3), 313–335original source
- Pahl, J. (1983). The Allocation of Money and the Structuring of Inequality within Marriage (opens in a new tab). The Sociological Review, 31(2), 237–262original source
- Pahl, J. (1989). Money and Marriage (opens in a new tab). Macmillanoriginal source
Read the result as a structured version of what you said, not as a measurement of you.
Why these questions carry no evidence
Every questionnaire in this app writes its own items, because the framework behind an instrument is usually public while the published questionnaire is copyrighted. That is the honest way to build it and it has a cost worth stating plainly: reliability and validity belong to a specific set of questions given to a specific group of people, not to the name of the idea behind them. These questions have never been given to a sample, have no norms, and have no evidence that they measure what they are named after.