If genetic and other characteristics can be passed down through generations, why not one’s financial habits? And how does your position in the family and in society affect your relationship with money?
These were some of the questions that motivated Mpumalanga-born Vangile Makwakwa to write her new book, What’s Your Money Personality? Changing the Way Black Families Manage their Finances. Makwakwa’s first book, Heart, Mind and Money, published in 2014, looked at the link between emotions and money. What’s your Money Personality? comes from hundreds of coaching sessions that Makwakwa, a money trauma coach, had with clients.
“My work looks at the link between ancestral trauma and money,” she says. “I look at how money trauma is passed down from one generation to the next. But it has nothing to do with money, it has to do with how we are taught to think, how we are treated within systems of oppression, how our families interact and how that then shapes our identity, and how we then play out these identities with money because we learn to respond to trauma in a particular manner.
“The way we respond to trauma starts to influence the way we respond to money, or any incident, and because money is tied to so much in this world it starts to impact our finances. My work entails looking at family dynamics around money, systemic trauma, and understanding black tax.”
The book looks at the effects colonisation and apartheid, as well as how racism, daily micro-aggressions and the frustration of being paid low wages affect the nervous system, and therefore our ability to process information and financial issues.
Makwakwa did not come to her work via the traditional psychology route. It was her own experience with financial insecurity that drove her to dig more deeply into the root causes. She relates how, after completing a finance degree with honours at the University of Cape Town and an MBA from the Simmons School of Management in Boston, US, she began to develop intense anxiety over financial issues.
“I would have panic attacks whenever I would withdraw money, touch money, or even talk about money. Added to that, after graduating, I was $60,000 in debt (that’s about R1m today), and all I could do was think about money, worry about money.”
The usual recommended therapies for anxiety did not help. She says on her website, wealthy-money.com: “I tried affirmations, visualisations, I tried going back to what I had learnt at school about finances: I knew about budgeting, I knew how to talk about economics and inflation, supply and demand, but I couldn’t translate any of that into my finances, into my personal finances, which is how I started to do this work.”
Delving into her own money history, Makwakwa realised the effect various family members had on her: especially her mother, who helped support the extended family and ended up burnt out and resentful, and an uncle who returned from exile in the 1990s and secured a high-paying job at Transnet. He was able to buy a big stand and the family went to stay with him.
But the youngster noticed that as soon as he got paid, her uncle would splurge his large salary on parties and treating friends, with little left a few days into the month to pay for essentials. When she later encountered the same behaviour in herself, she realised it for what it was: rather than a worry about not having enough money it was an anxiety, a discomfort, with having money.
She writes in her book that in her own case, the realisation came that “what I felt was an intense fear that, as a woman, it was not safe to have money or be powerful”. She experienced panic “at the very thought of having money and attracting unwanted attention from men — a feeling of ‘unsafety’ that had been passed down to me from generations of women who came before me.
“I realised that this fear of visibility and safety had a direct correlation to our finances and survival. Back in the day, our foremothers worried about what others would say ... which affected the men they could attract and marry, and thus their very financial survival.”
Today Makwakwa is a nomad entrepreneur who runs a coaching academy with clients all over the world, and her financial fears are in the past. She has found that by helping people understand their family dynamics and how these dynamics affect their personal behaviour and financial choices, they can improve their finances.
“I noticed that a lot of personal finance education really only focuses on finances from a very Western standpoint, which looks at money and wealth creation from an individualistic standpoint,” she says.
Though she has a diversity of coaching clients, she decided to focus on black female clients for some of her retreats and workshops. “The truth is ... for most of us as black and brown people, money isn’t just an individual thing, it’s very much a collective thing. How much money I make impacts my family dynamics. It impacts how I’m treated within my family.”
Makwakwa’s research with her clients led her to create five money archetypes that illustrate our core financial behaviours and how we developed them as children. These are:
• The Sweet One, who pretends everything is good, but ends up numbing themselves “because their nervous system is too overwhelmed to process what’s happening around them”. If they are not able to break the pattern, as adults they can become people pleasers who are scared to set boundaries.
• The Destroyer: Acts out the family trauma by mirroring the dirty laundry and going into fight mode. “I was this child,” she confides, “foul-mouthed, angry, rude, depressed and in pain.” These children make us to pay attention to the things we want to hide. As adults, they are often misunderstood and can become the black sheep of the family.
• The Runaway leaves home and never looks back. They daydream, party and exhibit avoidant behaviour. Having disconnected from their family, they may in later life have a hard time committing to projects and relationships, and quit when the going gets tough.
• The Fixer will try to keep everything together; they even parent their parents and siblings. However, they feel powerless as children and so have learnt to take back power by controlling everything, in effect sacrificing their childhood. As adults they are perfectionist and come across as overbearing and rigid.
• The Eternal Child: This type is stuck in their childhood or teens, they never grow up and need to be financially supported. “These are the adults who are held captive by their childhood or teen trauma, so their core trauma response is to freeze. If they don’t break this pattern, they can become adults who have a hard time taking responsibility for their actions, their lives and their finances.”
She says healing our archetypal patterns “requires us to go into our shadows and dark spaces to do uncomfortable work so that we can start to change our behavioural patterns. While this may not seem directly related to money, it lies at the core of the work I do around money. By observing how parents behave with money, I can often guess the money stories their children will develop”.
Nomveliso Mbanga, a coach with 30 years’ experience working with indigenous approaches to human development, is a client of Makwakwa’s. “I’m a Fixer,” she says. “I’m the first female in my family and have built a habit of coming to the rescue of everyone. This always impacted my own money and landed me in debt, until I learnt some of the principles Vangile teaches in her academy.”
Mbanga believes that though consulting a coach comes at a cost, it is a worthwhile investment. “I started working with Vangile about five years ago when my business was new. I was self-sabotaging a lot and I wasn’t sure what the root cause was. I was also battling with my pricing.
“Being a Fixer means we tend to feel for other people and can undercharge to fix their issues. This led to a slack in my business and frustration as I was working hard yet not seeing tangible results. Vangile was the only person I had heard talk about ‘your relationship with money’. It was the first time I heard that how one relates to money determines how they manage their day-to-day activities, inclusive of the root cause of the self-sabotage, which was largely linked to my own family and how I had witnessed my family handle and interact with money.
“Coaching is an investment in money and time, but not investing in a coach is expensive in its own right as you make costly mistakes that could have been prevented. We are not always aware of our blind spots and a coach helps to shine light in areas we do not see.”
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