Why I Started Looking at the Person Behind the Financial Decision
The Money Story began with one investor's painful realization: knowing what to do with money is not the same as understanding why we do what we do. Prasad Dhopavkar created the MSI Wheel to make the person behind every financial decision visible.
I didn't start The Money Story because I wanted to become a financial expert.
I started it because, at one point, I realized that I didn't fully understand myself as an investor.
And that realization came from experience.
I started investing in the market in 2007. Unfortunately, that meant my early investing experience coincided with one of the worst financial crises of our generation.
The 2008 crash taught me a lot. I lost a meaningful amount of money. But I also experienced something that turned out to be much more valuable than the loss itself — I stayed around long enough to experience the recovery.
Over the years that followed, I went through several shorter bull and bear cycles. I read. I observed. I experimented. I made mistakes. Slowly, I developed my own understanding of what conventional financial knowledge suggested worked — and what didn't.
By around 2019, I felt reasonably confident that I understood the fundamentals. I knew the importance of staying invested. I understood market cycles. I knew that emotional decisions could be expensive. I believed I had learned the lessons that the market had tried to teach me.
Then came COVID.
The market crashed. Like millions of other investors, I watched my portfolio fall rapidly.
But there was something different about my situation. I wasn't unaware of what was happening. I knew, intellectually, that selling during a major panic was probably the wrong thing to do. I knew markets could recover. I had already lived through a major crash and recovery. I had years of investing experience behind me.
And yet, during a particularly challenging period in my career and personal life, my emotional self overpowered my rational self. I sold a sizable part of my portfolio.
The market subsequently experienced the remarkable V-shaped recovery that followed the initial COVID crash. I missed a significant part of that recovery. And the financial loss from that decision was painful.
But something else happened. I became much more interested in why I had made the decision in the first place.
Until then, I had largely approached investing as a problem of knowledge. Learn more. Understand the market. Develop a strategy. Make better decisions.
But the COVID experience forced me to ask a different question: what happens when you know what you should do, but still do something else?
That question stayed with me. I started looking more closely at my own behavior. Then I started observing the people around me.
I noticed that financial decisions were often about much more than spreadsheets, interest rates, returns or financial knowledge. People behaved differently with money. Some were driven by fear. Some by the need for security. Some by impatience. Some by overconfidence. Some avoided financial decisions altogether. Some repeatedly made decisions they themselves knew were probably not in their best interest.
And yet, from inside their own perspective, those decisions often made perfect sense. That fascinated me.
That was the point at which my interest shifted. I started exploring the behavioral side of finance more seriously. I became interested in the psychological patterns behind financial decisions: why do we make the financial decisions we make? Why do we sometimes behave differently from what we know? Why can the same financial advice work beautifully for one person and fail completely for another?
And perhaps most importantly: can we understand our own patterns well enough to make better decisions?
I began working on these questions systematically. My engineering background naturally pushed me toward looking for relationships, patterns and a framework rather than isolated observations. That work eventually led to the development of what I call the MSI Wheel.
The MSI Wheel is my attempt to look at financial behavior from a broader perspective. Rather than simply asking whether someone is a “saver” or a “spender,” I wanted to understand the different forces that can influence financial decisions and how those forces interact.
Because human behavior is rarely that simple. Two people may make the same financial decision for completely different reasons. And the same person can make completely different decisions depending on circumstances.
The MSI Wheel became the framework I used to explore those patterns. The Money Story Quiz is one way of making that framework practical.
Because I believe our relationship with money is shaped by a story. That story is built over time. It can include our childhood experiences, family environment, successes, failures, fears, aspirations, habits and the meaning we attach to money.
Some parts of that story are conscious. Others may operate quietly in the background. And sometimes the story influences our decisions without us realizing it.
I became interested in what happens when we stop simply asking “What should I do with my money?” and start asking “Why do I behave the way I do with my money?”
That is the space The Money Story explores.
One of the things I became increasingly interested in while developing the framework was that our financial behavior isn't necessarily fixed.
We may have a natural or familiar way of responding to money. But life doesn't always allow us to remain in our comfort zone. Major changes in our lives can alter the way we think, feel and make decisions. A career setback. A major financial loss. A change in family circumstances. A period of uncertainty. A health or personal challenge. A sudden opportunity. Even a prolonged period of stress.
These situations can push us into behaviors that are very different from our normal pattern. And that doesn't necessarily mean our underlying personality has changed. It may simply mean that our circumstances have displaced us from our normal behavioral position.
Imagine someone whose normal financial behavior is relatively confident and calculated. Under normal circumstances, they may be comfortable taking measured risks.
But put that same person through a major career or personal crisis, and suddenly security may become their dominant concern. They may become unusually conservative. They may avoid decisions. They may become more fearful about losing what they have. For a period of time, they may behave like a completely different financial archetype. Once the situation changes, they may gradually return toward their normal pattern.
This is something I experienced myself. My investment experience during the COVID crash made me realize that knowing my normal behavior wasn't enough to understand how I would behave under extreme circumstances. The situation mattered. The emotional state mattered. And the person I became in that situation wasn't necessarily the person I believed myself to be.
A conventional personality assessment might simply tell you “this is your type.” I think real life is more complicated.
The Money Story identifies your primary archetype — the behavioral pattern that most closely represents your normal relationship with money. But the assessment can also identify a secondary archetype. The secondary archetype provides another layer of understanding. It can help illustrate how your behavior may shift when circumstances, emotions or life experiences push you outside your normal comfort zone.
In other words: your primary archetype describes where you normally operate. Your secondary archetype can help explain where you may move when life changes the conditions around you.
That distinction matters. Because sometimes the question isn’t “Why am I behaving like this? This isn’t me.” The better question may be “What is happening in my life that is causing me to behave differently from my normal pattern?”
I don't think the purpose of identifying a secondary archetype is to put another label on you. It is to provide context.
If you understand the conditions that tend to move you away from your normal behavior, you may be better prepared when those conditions appear again. You can recognize: “I am under unusual pressure right now.” “My normal decision-making pattern may not be operating the way it usually does.” “I may be reacting to the situation rather than making a decision consistent with my normal values and goals.”
That awareness can create a small but important pause between what is happening to us and what we choose to do next. And sometimes that pause is exactly what we need.
This is an important part of how I think about behavioral finance. We are not simply one type of person forever. We have tendencies. We have patterns. But we also have experiences. And experiences can temporarily change our behavior.
The objective of The Money Story is therefore not to tell you “this is who you are.” It is to help you understand “this is how you tend to behave — and these are some of the circumstances that may influence how that behavior changes.”
That is a much more useful conversation.
There is one thing I don't want The Money Story to become: another quiz that gives you a label and sends you on your way.
Knowing your financial behavior is interesting. Understanding it is more useful. But the real question is what you do with that understanding.
That is why the broader idea behind The Money Story is: understand the pattern → understand what drives it → recognize where it helps or hurts you → decide what needs to change → take practical action.
This is also why I developed the idea of a Personalized Action Plan. The assessment can provide the starting point. The action plan is intended to help turn that awareness into practical, personal next steps.
I don't present myself as someone who has figured out every aspect of money. My own investing journey is probably proof of that.
I have made mistakes. I have experienced losses. I have made decisions I knew, intellectually, I shouldn't make. And those experiences are part of why I became interested in this subject.
I think there is something valuable in studying our own mistakes rather than pretending we are immune to them. The Money Story is, in many ways, an extension of that curiosity.
There is already an enormous amount of financial information available. You can find advice about saving, investing, debt, retirement and wealth creation almost everywhere.
What I am interested in is the layer underneath that information. The human being making the decision. Because sometimes the problem isn't that we don't know enough. Sometimes we know exactly what we should do. We just don't do it.
And I believe understanding why can be the beginning of changing that pattern.
If The Money Story helps someone recognize a behavior they had never noticed before... if it helps someone understand why they keep repeating a particular financial mistake... if it helps someone become a little more intentional about their financial decisions... then I will consider the work worthwhile.
You don't have to accept everything an assessment tells you. In fact, I would encourage you to question it. If something feels wrong, ask yourself why. If something feels surprisingly accurate, ask yourself why.
The objective isn't to put you into a box. It is to make you think.
Because your financial life isn’t only about the money you earn. It is also about the decisions you make with it. And behind every financial decision, there is a person. Perhaps it is worth understanding that person a little better.