‘Financial phobia’ paralyzes and increases debts

Entrepreneur André Dias, 40, has been accumulating a pile of invoices on the kitchen table of his pizzeria, Pizzatopia, in the west of São Paulo for ten days. These are purchase and sale notes for products from the last four months. You need to take pictures of the documents and send them to your accountant. But he just can’t.

“I get nervous, I feel sick, I sweat just having to deal with numbers, I can’t consult statements, check my card statement, make payments. If I have to go to the bank, my day is over. It sucks my energy” , says Dias, who is ready to seek psychiatric help for his problem, at the request of his wife, Ana. A lawyer, she finds herself on a double journey: when she leaves the office, she is forced to keep track of the bills at the pizzeria, which opened a year ago.

Dias suspects he has “financial phobia” – an expression created by the British psychologist Brendan Burchell, professor at the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, to identify those who are repulsed by any kind of contact with their own finances and suffer from a malaise. physical when it is required to do so.

In 2003, Burchell published a study that found that around 20% of the UK population suffered from financial phobia – a syndrome that has so far not been categorized as a psychiatric disorder.

The expert had been intrigued by data from a financial services company that pointed to apparently irrational behavior on the part of Britons when dealing with their personal finances, which caused them high costs.

“Most people have some symptoms of financial phobia, but I think for 10% to 20% of the population it’s a really significant problem,” Burchell told Sheet. “Financial phobia doesn’t just happen to people with debt, but it sure makes it harder to deal with.”

According to Burchell’s studies, the idea of ​​having to face their personal finances makes some people, victims of financial phobia, feel an emotional and physical discomfort, which includes irritation, anxiety, dizziness, immobilization (staying ” stuck”) and have the impression of being sick.

A good part of these symptoms was present in the life of the micro-entrepreneur Patcha Pietro Belli, 38 years old. An architect by training, she decided to stop working in the area and become an entrepreneur in 2019, making artisan breads.

“I took some courses for sale on social media and my demand increased a lot during the pandemic”, says she, who decided to hire a financial mentor at the beginning of last year to better deal with the expanding business. “I was already aware that, in order to reduce expenses, I would need to have my accounts well organized.”

But it was at this point that Patcha literally “stuck”. “I just couldn’t fill in the spreadsheets the mentor sent me asking for information about the business, like purchases, costs, sales,” she says.

She was surprised by her own behavior, because while working as an architect she became an expert in the Excel spreadsheet editor, developing formulas and internal controls for various activities.

The interruptions meant that the mentoring, which would last between 3 and 6 months, extended to a year. “We scheduled meetings every 15 days and I felt sick, had colic, headaches, even fever. It was a panic whenever I saw her name on the cell phone call”.

It wasn’t just mentoring that got stuck: Patcha let the company’s taxes pile up.

“There was a lot of insecurity when I started to see the numbers up close. I kept asking myself all the time: ‘What if the business is not viable? And if I have to increase prices, are my products that good? everything I need?'” he recalls.

Patcha’s mentor, Danielle Ramos Soares, asked her to be patient with herself and not push herself so hard. Take it one step at a time to put an end to the procrastination, and for her to work hard at work, which gave her pleasure, to deal with her anxiety and anguish.

“It took many analysis sessions and establishing a trusting relationship with my mentor. But I got over it: today I can look at my finances head on and do the company’s accounting by myself. I negotiated my debts and since last month I’ve been putting everything in order. “

With businesswoman Cláudia Barreto Wortmann, 54, the problem was much more intense.

Business administrator, with a master’s degree in controllership, she worked for 28 years in the financial market, until she opened a restaurant in partnership with some friends, at the end of 2019.

In early 2020, however, she found out she had breast cancer. The pandemic came and she needed to close the doors of the business. When the movement returned, the partners decided to leave the restaurant, located inside a traditional club in São Paulo. Some time later, the club unilaterally terminated the contract and gave her two weeks to close the establishment. Claudia had to go to court to keep the doors open.

“I was completely floored”, she says, remembering that she faced the death of her brother in the same period. “I stopped paying the bills, only what was in automatic debit was paid off. I didn’t see a statement, personal checking account, card, anything for 8 months. I didn’t want to leave the house, I had a serious depressive condition”.

With 26 employees, she started to delay payments, the company was protested and she entered the list of defaulters, getting the “dirty name”. “There were days when I wanted to kill myself because of the debts”, she recalls. “The psychiatrist doubled my medication and the psychologist called me every day”.

Gradually, she opened up to her family about the problem. She entered into a court settlement with the club and received half of the fine for the termination. But she still owes $500K.

“To this day I don’t know how a person as rational as me fell into this, I still struggle with this phobia of numbers,” says she, who continues to take anxiety medication, but at a lower dose, and goes to therapy once a week.

“Today I can face my monthly debt of R$ 30,000. I went back to paying taxes and promised myself to end August with all the bills paid”, says Cláudia, who maintains a café in the region of Avenida Paulista, in São Paulo.

‘Shrunken spring’ makes purchase in installments from the market and spend on shows

The devastation that the pandemic has wreaked on the finances of many families may have triggered this aversion to numbers, according to Diogo Angioleti, an expert in finance and behavior at the Ailos credit union system.

“Those who go through very bad experiences lose confidence in themselves, as well as control of their own finances”, says Angioleti.

That’s what happened with André Dias. About ten years ago, he inherited a family business, a small savory company on the coast of São Paulo. To increase earnings, he invested in the industrialization of production, until then artisanal. He started to sell more, but he miscalculated the allocation of resources and, some time later, the company went bankrupt.

“That left me very frustrated”, recalls Dias, who graduated in Law. “I’m a guy who always knew how to manage his own money, I was able to save. But today, just talking about money makes my hands cold.”

Economist Paula Sauer, master in administration at PUC-SP, doctoral student in consumer behavior at ESPM, recalls that the taboo of talking about money in the pandemic was diluted, since many were forced to change their standard of living, in the face of the loss of employment and income.

“But the pandemic has also given rise to the ‘shrunken spring’ phenomenon: after going so long without fulfilling their desires, people want a reward,” he says. “It’s what justifies, for example, buying supermarkets in installments on the card, but spending it to see the show of the favorite singer or the game of the favorite team in the stadium”, she says.

“People are extremely distressed.”