What your wallet says about you

Sometimes that lack of respect is subconscious, Astre says.

"Very often people sabotage themselves because they think they don't deserve money. It's a thing where, 'My parents worked hard all their lives, and now I'm making $150,000, and I don't deserve it.' So subconsciously, they sabotage themselves," Astre says.

The key to changing this behavior is recognizing the buying power of the money you've been discarding. Try adding up all of the miscellaneous bills and coins on a regular basis. You might amass enough money to start giving your "spare change" a little respect.

Unruly receipts

Your wallet is stuffed with receipts, but there's no sense of order to them, and you never really do anything with them. This is a person who is trying, says Thakor.

"You want to know how to keep tabs on your money; otherwise you would have thrown the receipts away. But you just can't take it to the next step to get them all organized and do something with them. You are like the person that buys all the latest exercise equipment but doesn't get around to using it," Thakor says.

In order to change this behavior, you've got to get organized. Take a day to come up with a filing system for your receipts so you know what to do with them. If you're never going to use the receipts to track your spending, what's the point of keeping them?

File-folder funds

All of the bills in your wallet are lined up from largest denomination to smallest (or vice versa). You have an idea of how much money you have at all times, and you know what's available to spend.

"These are the people who have a firm grasp on how much they are spending and how much they are saving," Thakor says. If you exhibit this behavior, you probably have good financial habits. However, there still may be some potential for financial missteps.

Taken to the extreme -- having all the dead presidents right-side up and facing the same way in order of date, for example -- might mean you "could have a problem allocating enough money toward fun," Thakor says.

Identifying what your behavior is telling you about your beliefs about money is only the first step. Continuing to monitor your financial habits is key, says Kessel. Note the changes you make to your behavior as well as the times you fall short.

"One of the biggest mistakes people make is they think, 'Now I have this new wisdom about my money life, and therefore my problems are solved,'" author Kessel says. Change takes time, Kessel says, "but the moment you have a new awareness about what was driving your money behavior, your thinking begins to shift."

This article was reported and written by Tamara E. Holmes for Bankrate.com.

Updated April 9, 2009

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