Dollars and Sense: Is it worth seeing a therapist for my attitude towards money?

Sunday, 12 July 2026

Senior business reporter Rob Stock answers your money questions. Got a question for Sunday magazine? Email it to sundaymagazine@stuff.co.nz

QUESTION: Is it worth seeing a therapist for my attitude towards money? How closely is personal finance connected to psychological behaviour, eg family background?

ANSWER: On my bike on my way home I pass a hoarder house.

It invariably makes me feel regretful for the soul trapped into amassing valueless junk around them, isolating them from the people around them.

I am not a registered psychologist (though I did study psychology in university a thousand or so years’ ago), so treat my thoughts on trauma as no more informed than yours. But even my brain comprehends that unresolved trauma can manifest in some profoundly unhelpful ways.

Like you, I am sure, I have read my share of popular psychology books, including The Body Keeps the Score by psychiatrist and trauma researcher Bessel van der Kolk.

“Being traumatized means continuing to organize your life as if the trauma were still going on,” he writes.

Read more:

• Dollars and Sense: Should I be preparing for an increased retirement age?

• Dollars and Sense: The new Kiwi dream is to retire early, but can you really?

• Dollars and Sense: Should you be charging board to grown-up children still living at home?

It is my belief that most of us could do with a bit of therapy, but that does not mean we qualify for it on the state ticket, or can afford it out of our private resources.

Some behaviours like that which is termed colloquially a “shopping addiction” can be ruinous, and behaviours associated with what’s known popularly as “bag lady syndrome” can suck joy from life, and in a perfect society, people would get the chance to address them with qualified professionals.

It is not hard to find estimates by interested parties that there is a high “return on investment” for money spent on therapy, though these are high level estimates, based on assumptions, and every person’s ROI would be different, ranging from positive to negative.

And, I would suggest, that focusing on the potential monetary benefits of therapy distracts from its core purpose: helping people be well.

I am on much firmer grounds when I say that we have developed systems that are designed exactly to overcome erratic human behaviour with money.

These systems are called KiwiSaver, mortgages, financial mentors, and financial advisers.

While these cannot help people deal with trauma, they can help them set up systems, and build savings.

The National Party has announced it will make KiwiSaver contributions compulsory, if it wins power again in the election.

That enforced savings would, to a certain extent, take money out of people’s power to spend, and apply them to long-term savings.

To a certain extent, having a mortgage does that too. It is (used well) a form of long-term saving.

National is attempting to regulate savings habits mirrored on Australia’s system, which did genuinely leave the country with a much larger pool of money to invest (boosting its productivity and financial resilience).

That regulation would cover the traumatised and untraumatised alike.

And financial mentors, and financial advisers, can be thought of as coaches to help people put in place evidence-backed plans and systems for their clients to produce the financial outcomes they need and want.

Advisers also challenge unconscious assumptions and behaviours people bring to money, and encourage and cajole their clients to keep on plan.

Disclaimer: The information in this column is provided for general information only and is not intended as financial advice. If you require expert advice we encourage you to seek assistance from a professional adviser.