An Examination of the Reliability and Validity of Money Habitudes: What Does This Mean for Users?

Written By: Axton Betz-Hamilton, PhD, AFC®, CRPC™, AWMA®

Many AFCPE members are familiar with Money Habitudes, which is a tool that consists of 54 items that assess one’s relative dominance across six behavioral-attitudinal domains: status, planning, spontaneous, security, giving, and carefree. Money Habitudes can be purchased as a physical deck of cards that have one statement per card or there is an online version.  While it is not intended to serve as a diagnostic tool, Money Habitudes can be used to facilitate deeper conversations about financial behaviors between clients and professionals.  Despite the popularity of Money Habitudes, no in-depth analysis of its reliability and validity was publicly available until Jeffrey Anvari-Clark and I conducted such an analysis and published it in the Journal of Financial Counseling and Planning in 2024 (note: the journal is available for AFCPE members at no cost in the myAFCPE portal). 

Using a sample of 35,108 individuals who completed the online version of Money Habitudes, we found the statements that measure the security habitude had low dependability, the items that measure the status and carefree habitudes had moderate dependability, and the statements that measure spontaneous, giving, and planning had acceptable dependability.  Dependability refers to measuring the same thing consistently.  When considering all 54 statements together, there is strong dependability.   

Regarding the validity of each item, we found 12 of the 54 items to be problematic.  Eleven of these items had what are statistically known as “poor factor loadings”.  This means the item did not make a meaningful statistical contribution to the particular habitude for which it was assigned.  One item that measures the planning habitude had high “residual” correlations with items that measure the status habitude. 

Further, we found the items that measure the security and planning habitudes and the spontaneous and carefree habitudes were measuring essentially the same things. This means there is too much conceptual overlap between the security and planning habitudes and the spontaneous and carefree habitudes and not enough distinction between them. 

Overall, we found Money Habitudes to be a reliable and valid tool.  The shortcomings noted above are simply areas for enhancement for future versions of the tool.  Our findings were used by Money Habitudes to revise the existing tool which was released in June 2025.  Specific to the security habitude, we reconceptualized it to better reflect one’s emotional relationship with money, including statements that focus on financial agency, emotional safety, and adaptive control.  Users familiar with the original statements may find that their results regarding the security habitude are substantially different in the new version.  This is not cause for alarm; rather the security habitude is now its own separate construct and measuring something fundamentally different from planning.  Further, Money Habitudes users should not ascribe values to their scores—receiving a dominant score in security is not a measure of how financially secure one is, regardless of the Money Habitudes version used.