Written by: Chris Carnazzo | Your Money Cues
In season one, episode two of Rooster (HBO, 2026), writing teacher Greg Russo walks into college president Walter Mann’s office and runs straight into a colleague who made a pass at him the night before. The exchange is brief and visibly awkward. Once they’re alone, Walter starts grilling Greg about the tension he just witnessed. Before Greg can figure out how to answer, Walter has already pieced it together, accurately. Greg stares at him. “How are you doing this?” Walter shrugs. “It’s all in the microexpressions.”
The scene is played for laughs. But the underlying science is real. Paul Ekman spent decades documenting that human faces leak emotional truth faster than the people feeling those emotions can hide it. The leakage is small, fast, and almost always unconscious.
Now imagine watching for those same leaks when the subject is money. That question came from two happy accidents: choosing financial life planning as the focus of my masters degree, and later taking a course on reading microexpressions.
What Is a Money Cue?
A money cue is a brief, involuntary signal (a flash of expression, a shift in posture, a change in voice) that surfaces whenever we talk about money.
It’s not a nervous habit. It’s a readout of how someone actually feels, showing up before they’ve decided what to say. And money makes them louder.
Why So Awkward?
Money is one of the last true taboos. Most of us avoid discussing it openly, even with people we trust. But the feelings are still there. Financial psychology has been documenting the emotional weight of money for years. The face doesn’t know the topic is supposed to be neutral.
Money cues are the visible evidence of those feelings. And they often contradict what someone just said out loud.
When the topic is money, those signals reveal something deeper. Beneath every financial conversation runs an undercurrent of emotion most people never examine and rarely name. That’s where money scripts come in.
What Is a Money Script?
A money script is an unconscious belief about money, usually formed in childhood, that quietly shapes how you think, feel, and behave around money as an adult. Most people have never examined theirs. Fewer would recognize one if asked.
In a 2011 study published in the Journal of Financial Therapy, Brad Klontz, Sonya Britt, Jennifer Mentzer, and Ted Klontz identified four categories of money scripts.
Money Avoidance. The belief that money is bad, corrupt, or something you don’t deserve. Think: “Rich people are greedy” or “I don’t care about money.”
Money Worship. The belief that more money will solve everything. Think: “If I just had more, I’d finally feel okay.”
Money Status. Tying self-worth to net worth. Think: “The car you drive says everything about who you are.”
Money Vigilance. An anxious, secretive relationship with money, often marked by excessive frugality and a reluctance to spend even when it’s reasonable. Think: “You should never talk about money, and you should always be saving more.”
To help people identify which scripts are shaping their financial life, Klontz and colleagues developed the Klontz Money Script Inventory (KMSI-R), a questionnaire widely used in financial therapy and financial life planning.
The KMSI-R gets you halfway there. It tells you what someone believes. But it can’t tell you what they’re feeling in the room, right now. That’s where cues come in.
What Are Cues?
Behavioral investigator and bestselling author Vanessa Van Edwards has spent over a decade studying the hidden dynamics of human interaction, turning the subtle signals that shape conversations and relationships into practical, learnable frameworks. She defines cues as “the tiny signals we send to others 24/7 through our body language, facial expressions, word choice, and vocal inflection.” Most are involuntary. They happen faster than conscious thought. And they’re almost impossible to fake consistently.
Her book Cues (2022) and her People School courses teach you to read the cues others send and to control the ones you send yourself. Apply that lens to money, and something interesting happens.
Money Scripts + Cues = Money Cues
Money scripts live in the head. Cues live on the face.
My working theory is that cues are clues to the money scripts someone holds, even when they’re completely unaware of them. Learn to decode the signals, and you get a window into someone’s truest, deepest values, beliefs, and emotions around money. Not what they think they believe. Not what they wrote on a questionnaire. What they actually feel.
That’s the space where Your Money Cues lives. Klontz built the script framework. Van Edwards built the cue framework, and her People School is where I learned to read it. What I want to explore is where the two connect.
Your Money Cues is not a clinical tool. It’s a way of noticing. For advisors, that means a richer read on what’s happening in a discovery conversation. For anyone curious about their own money life, it’s a vocabulary for something you’ve probably felt but never quite had words for.
Next in this series: Klontz’s four categories of money scripts, what they are, and how to recognize them. After that, the cues that map to each.
Related: What You Need To Know About a Health Savings Account (HSA)
References and Further Reading
Klontz, B. T., Britt, S. L., Mentzer, J., and Klontz, P. T. (2011). Money beliefs and financial behaviors: Development of the Klontz Money Script Inventory. Journal of Financial Therapy, 2(1).
Van Edwards, V. (2022). Cues: Master the Secret Language of Charismatic Communication. Portfolio.
Ekman, P., and Friesen, W. V. (1978). Facial Action Coding System: A Technique for the Measurement of Facial Movement. Consulting Psychologists Press.
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Rooster (HBO, 2026), Season 1, Episode 2, “Trousers.”