My grandfather boiled his eggs in a tin can to save the gas.
He turned off light switches behind people mid-sentence. He lived past a hundred and, as far as I know, never once ate a meal in a restaurant. He’d grown up with nothing, and the nothing never fully left him — decades after there was plenty.
Nobody sat me down to teach me about money. I learned it the way everyone does: by watching one person handle it, absorbing a thousand small signals before I was old enough to know I was being taught anything at all. The flinch before a purchase. The pride in not needing. The quiet conviction that security is something you build with your own hands and never quite finish building.
I’ve spent a career noticing how much of that I carried into rooms where I thought I was being purely rational about other people’s money.
The turn
Here’s the thing we rarely say out loud in this work: your client inherited a money story long before they inherited a dime. So did you. So will their children.
Some people spend their whole lives swearing they’ll never be like the parent they watched — and then reproduce that parent’s exact anxieties in the opposite key. Others try to be precisely like them and can’t understand why it doesn’t feel the way it looked. Most of us end up somewhere we didn’t choose and didn’t design, running a script we never read.
And the estate plan gets built right on top of that script. The client who “just wants everything protected,” the client who “doesn’t want the kids to have it too easy,” the client who “can’t bring myself to spend it even though I clearly can” — none of them is making a technical decision. Each is living out a story that was set in motion before they were ten.
The four stories
The researchers who study this — Brad Klontz and colleagues named them money scripts — describe four broad patterns. Once you’ve seen them, you’ll recognize them across your whole book.
There’s avoidance — money is dangerous, or corrupting, or simply too anxiety-provoking to look at. The successful client who won’t open the statements, who dodges the meeting, who has plenty and behaves as though looking directly at it might break something.
There’s worship — the belief that more will finally fix it, whatever “it” is. Enough is always a little further out. This client can’t quite finish the plan, because finishing means admitting the number was never going to deliver what they were chasing.
There’s status — money as the scoreboard of a life, net worth quietly standing in for self-worth. For this client the estate plan is partly a verdict on whether they mattered, which makes every “who gets what” heavier than it looks.
And there’s vigilance — money as a secret to be guarded. Careful, private, often genuinely admirable in their discipline — and won’t tell their own spouse or children what exists, which becomes its own kind of time bomb when they’re gone.
Most people are a blend with one dominant note. And underneath each one is usually a single early moment — a flashpoint. The layoff a child watched land on the dinner table. The relative who lost everything. The parent who used money as love, or as control, or as an apology. The scarcity that ended but never entirely left. Find the flashpoint and the script stops looking like a personality flaw and starts looking like a reasonable response to something real.
Why this is the hidden basis
This is, in a sense, the thing this newsletter is named for. Before any asset moves, an emotional basis has already been transmitted — a way of holding money, handed down as surely as the property, and usually far less consciously.
You can draft around a lot of things. You can’t draft around a money story nobody has noticed is running the room.
The value isn’t to diagnose your clients or play therapist. It’s simpler. When a decision doesn’t make technical sense — when a client resists the obviously-right structure, or insists on protection against a danger that isn’t really there — the script is usually the reason. Naming it gently (“it sounds like being careful with money was a big deal growing up”) unlocks a stuck plan faster than another explanation of the mechanics ever will. And it’s worth asking, once, what the client actually wants their own children to inherit here — because the money story will transmit whether they choose it or not.
Over to You
What’s the money story you inherited — the flinch, the pride, the fear you absorbed from watching one person handle it — and where do you catch it showing up in your own work?
And can you spot the script running in a client before they can see it in themselves?
Originally published on LinkedIn on 2026-08-28. View the LinkedIn version.