Money Superstitions and Lucky Money Beliefs Around the World
Money has a strange ability to make people superstitious. Your palm starts itching and suddenly cash is supposed to be coming your way. You spot a penny on the ground and have to decide whether it’s lucky enough to pick up. Someone gives you a new wallet and slips a coin inside because handing it over empty apparently isn’t worth the risk.
There are money beliefs tied to moons, weddings, shops, birthdays, New Year, numbers and even snakes. Some promise that more money will arrive. Others warn that what you already have can disappear remarkably quickly if you put it in the wrong place or treat it without enough respect.
The details change depending on where you are. In Ireland, turning money when you first see the new moon could supposedly keep your purse full. In Japan, a five-yen coin is associated with good fortune and a piece of snakeskin in your wallet has been said to attract wealth. Chinese coin-shaped charms have carried wishes for prosperity for centuries, while British sixpences have ended up in wedding shoes and Christmas puddings.
None of these things can change the balance in your bank account, but money is exactly the sort of thing people want a little extra luck with. When so much of life depends on having enough of it, it isn’t surprising that folklore has come up with plenty of ways to encourage it to stay.
Why does money attract so many superstitions?
Money sits right beside some of our biggest worries. Having enough can mean food, shelter, freedom, security and the ability to deal with whatever goes wrong next. Not having enough can make an already difficult situation much worse.
It’s also unpredictable. You can work hard and still receive an unexpected bill. You can save carefully and then have something break. A business can have a brilliant week followed by a terrible one for reasons nobody saw coming.
That uncertainty gives superstition plenty to work with. If turning a coin, carrying something lucky or refusing to hand over an empty wallet might help, the action usually costs very little. Once somebody associates the ritual with a good outcome, it becomes even harder to stop doing it.
Money is also wonderfully easy to turn into a symbol. Coins are small enough to carry, hide, give away, bury, sew into clothing or drop into food. They already represent value before folklore gives them another job.
An itchy palm can supposedly tell you where the money is going
Few money omens are as familiar as the itchy palm.
The usual idea is that one hand means money is coming and the other means you’re about to lose or spend it. Unfortunately, folklore can’t agree on which hand does which. You’ll find the left hand receiving money in one family and paying it out in another, while other versions change according to whether the person is male or female.
Irish folklore collections record itching hands as signs connected with money, and the belief travelled far beyond Ireland and Britain. Nigerian popular tradition also connects an itching palm with approaching money, sometimes with the person rubbing the palm against a pocket as though encouraging the cash to find the right destination.
The contradiction between left and right is exactly why there isn’t one worldwide answer. The full range of versions is covered in what an itchy palm means in superstition.
As a money omen, though, the appeal is obvious. Your hand is the part of you that physically gives and receives money, so an unexplained sensation there already has a convenient story waiting for it.
Finding a penny can feel like money choosing you
A coin you earn is ordinary. A coin that appears unexpectedly in your path is much easier to treat as a sign.
The familiar belief says finding a penny brings good luck, although some versions become fussy about which side is facing upwards. Heads can be lucky while a tails-up penny is better left where it is or turned over so the next person receives the luck instead.
The Bank of Canada Museum includes the lucky penny among its collection of beliefs surrounding money. It records both the general good-luck tradition and the warning against keeping a penny found tails up.
That little detail turns finding almost worthless loose change into a decision. You haven’t just found a coin. Apparently you now need to inspect which way it landed before deciding whether the universe intended you to keep it.
You can read more about why small found coins picked up such an oversized reputation in why finding a penny is considered good luck.
In Ireland, the new moon could keep your purse full
Older money superstition didn’t only watch what was happening on the ground. Sometimes you needed to look up.
Irish folklore records the belief that when you first saw the new moon, you should turn the money in your pocket. Doing that could supposedly make sure your purse stayed full for the coming month or, in some versions, the entire year.
A record from Kells in County Meath says that turning money when the new moon first appeared meant your purse would never be empty during the following month. Another Irish collection says turning the money in your hand would cause you to receive more.
The belief wasn’t limited to Ireland. A nineteenth-century collection of superstitions from the United States and Canada records people turning or shaking money when first seeing the new moon in the hope that their wealth would increase.
There was one obvious problem. You needed to have money with you when the moon appeared. Apparently even lunar luck expected you to provide some starting capital.
The first money earned in the morning could decide the rest of the day
For market traders and shopkeepers, the first sale of the day could receive much more attention than all the ones that followed.
Older English folklore records traders treating their first payment as a handsel, a piece of money whose luck could influence the business still to come. Some kissed it, kept it separately or even spat on the coin before putting it away.
Folklorist Edwin Sidney Hartland described English market sellers spitting on the first money they received for luck. He also recorded related beliefs in continental Europe, including money being bitten or spat upon in the hope that more would follow it.
The reasoning was almost as if money could become attached to more of itself. Treat the first coin correctly and the rest of the day’s earnings might follow. Let the first sale go badly and there was something uncomfortable about wondering whether the day had already been set on the wrong course.
You can see the same pattern in plenty of other superstitions. The first visitor at New Year, the first dream, the first person you meet and the first thing that happens in the morning all get treated as though they’re setting an example for everything still to come.
A new wallet shouldn’t start its life empty
If you give somebody a wallet as a present, there’s a good chance you’ve heard that you should put some money inside it first.
The amount doesn’t usually matter. A coin or small note is enough. What matters is that the wallet begins its new life already holding money, with the hope that it will never become completely empty afterwards.
The belief has been recorded in several family traditions. It’s particularly familiar in the Philippines, where wallets given as gifts can contain a small amount of money to encourage prosperity. Similar versions have also been collected in North America, where a penny placed inside a new purse or wallet is supposed to keep the owner from going broke.
The logic is hard to miss. An empty wallet represents exactly what you don’t want for the person receiving it. Putting money inside gives the gift a much more encouraging beginning.
It might only be a dollar or a few coins, but apparently even good fortune appreciates not having to start from zero.
Japan has more than one way to make a wallet lucky
In Japan, one of the smallest coins can carry a surprisingly useful name.
The five-yen coin is pronounced go-en, which sounds like another Japanese word referring to a fortunate connection, relationship or fate. That wordplay has helped give the coin a lucky reputation, and five-yen pieces are commonly offered at Shinto shrines.
The Japan Foundation explains the good-luck association through the shared pronunciation of five yen and go-en. It’s a good example of a superstition or lucky custom that makes much more sense once you know the language behind it.
Then there’s the considerably stranger idea of putting snakeskin in your wallet.
Snakes have long-standing associations with financial fortune in Japanese belief. The National Diet Library’s collaborative reference database records the tradition of keeping shed snakeskin in a wallet so money will accumulate. The explanation is connected with Benzaiten, a deity associated with fortune and wealth whose traditions also became linked with snakes.
The belief is still familiar enough that Japanese cultural coverage continues to mention a piece of shed snakeskin or a snake charm in the purse as something associated with financial luck.
If carrying old reptile skin next to your bank cards isn’t appealing, the five-yen coin is considerably easier to explain when somebody asks what’s in your wallet.
Chinese coins could be money and lucky charms at the same time
China has a much older tradition of objects that look like money but were never really intended to be spent.
Coin-shaped charms have been made for centuries with inscriptions and images connected with wealth, long life, marriage, protection and good fortune. Some resemble ordinary coins closely enough that their purpose isn’t immediately obvious until you look at what has been written or pictured on them.
The British Museum holds Chinese coin-shaped charms intended to drive away evil and invite good fortune. Other examples in the museum’s money collection carry wishes for long life, wealth and honour.
The choice of a coin shape matters. Money already represents value and exchange, so it doesn’t take much of a leap for a coin-like object to become a compact way of carrying wishes for prosperity around with you.
That doesn’t mean every old Chinese coin is a lucky charm. Genuine currency and objects deliberately made for ritual or symbolic use existed alongside each other, and the difference matters.
Eight became an expensive lucky number
Sometimes you don’t need a lucky coin at all. You just need the right number attached to the price, address or account.
Eight is famously fortunate in Chinese number symbolism because the word for eight sounds similar to words associated with prospering or becoming wealthy. That has made the number especially desirable in situations involving business, phone numbers, addresses, licence plates and other places where people can choose one number over another.
The most spectacular examples involve people paying extra to secure combinations containing several eights. The belief became impossible to miss when the Beijing Olympics officially opened at 8.08 pm on August 8, 2008.
The financial association is quite different from modern Western numerology, although there’s an interesting overlap. The site’s guide to the meaning of the number 8 explains why modern numerology also connects eight with money, value, ambition and material success without treating those separate traditions as though they came from the same source.
A British sixpence has been given more than one lucky job
If one British coin deserves overtime pay for superstition, it’s probably the sixpence.
The old wedding rhyme ends with a bride carrying “a sixpence in her shoe.” The coin is supposed to encourage prosperity and good fortune in the marriage, and the tradition survived long enough that the Royal Mint still produces special sixpences for people who want to keep it going.
Sixpences also found their way into Christmas pudding. The person who discovered the silver coin in their serving was supposed to receive wealth and good luck during the coming year.
The Royal Mint records the Victorian Christmas-pudding tradition and the promise of wealth attached to finding the sixpence. Museum Wales has preserved the same custom from Welsh families, where coins were placed in puddings as lucky tokens.
The Bank of Canada Museum also includes both the wedding sixpence and Christmas-pudding coin in its exhibition on money and luck, showing how far British coin folklore travelled.
Wedding guests can explore the rest of the rhyme in Wedding Superstitions and Their Meanings. The sixpence is only one of the many things a bride has supposedly needed to remember before reaching the aisle.
Coins have been worn as lucky charms too
Putting money in your pocket is normal. Drilling a hole through it and wearing it around your neck gives the coin a slightly different job.
The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Cornwall holds a nineteenth-century British silver fourpenny piece that was pierced so it could be worn as a good-luck charm. The museum notes that silver threepences and sixpences were also commonly treated as lucky coins at different times.
The museum’s coin charm shows how ordinary currency could stop being something to spend and become something to keep. Once a particular coin was thought lucky, exchanging it for groceries rather defeated the purpose.
That’s one reason lucky money often survives long after the currency itself disappears. A discontinued coin can become more valuable emotionally once nobody expects you to spend it.
Sometimes lucky money isn’t meant to make you richer
Not every coin charm promises a bigger pile of money.
Coins have also been carried for protection, health, love and safe travel. The Bank of Canada Museum holds examples of old British “touch pieces,” coins associated with the belief that a monarch could cure illness through touch. Chinese coin charms could drive away harmful forces as well as attract fortune.
This is worth remembering because modern ideas about lucky money can make every coin charm sound as though somebody was trying to get rich. Often the object’s value was only part of the attraction. Metal, shape, inscriptions, religious associations and the person who gave or handled the coin could all matter.
A coin can represent wealth without the superstition being about wealth at all.
New Year is particularly interested in your finances
If you want to see money superstition working overtime, wait until December 31.
Italian lentils become tiny coins. Round fruits in the Philippines represent financial good fortune. Black-eyed peas and greens in the American South can stand for coins and paper money. Mexican New Year traditions include coins and yellow clothing associated with prosperity.
The foods and objects change, but the hope is remarkably consistent. Begin the year surrounded by signs of plenty and perhaps the next twelve months will follow the example.
Rather than repeating all of those traditions here, they’re covered properly in New Year Superstitions and Lucky Traditions Around the World.
Why are coins so much luckier than banknotes?
Paper money certainly appears in superstition, but coins have a few advantages when you’re trying to build folklore around them.
They last. A coin can survive for decades, pass between generations and remain recognisable after the person who first carried it is gone. You can drill it, engrave it, sew it into clothing, hide it in a pudding or keep it permanently in a pocket without destroying it.
Coins also make excellent discoveries. Finding one unexpectedly feels different from seeing an ordinary piece of paper on the pavement. A small flash of metal can look like something waiting to be noticed.
Then there’s the shape. Coins are circular, and circles have picked up their own symbolic associations with completeness, cycles and continuity. Add the fact that the object already represents money and you have something almost suspiciously well designed for becoming a lucky charm.
Why does money superstition survive when money itself keeps changing?
The objects change much faster than the idea behind them.
A sixpence stops circulating and becomes a keepsake. Pennies become worth so little that plenty of people don’t bother picking them up, yet finding one can still feel lucky. Cash becomes less common and the superstition moves into wallets, numbers, bank balances and the little rituals people follow before spending or receiving money.
The hope underneath it hasn’t changed much. People want money to come in more easily than it goes out. They want a business to do well, a gift to carry prosperity and a new beginning to start with enough rather than not enough.
That makes money especially good at collecting personal superstitions too. You might keep the first dollar you earned at a new job, refuse to spend a coin someone gave you for luck or always choose the same lottery numbers because they once won you twenty dollars. The object becomes special because of what happened around it, not because there’s anything unusual about the money itself.
Does any of this actually attract money?
There’s no evidence that turning a coin at the new moon fills your purse, keeping snakeskin in a wallet increases your income or choosing the number 8 makes a financial decision more likely to succeed.
What these superstitions do show is how people think about money when they can’t completely control it. We look for signs that more is coming, rituals that might help us keep what we have and tiny pieces of reassurance when the future feels uncertain.
A lucky coin can also mean something without actually being lucky. The sixpence from your wedding, the dollar your grandfather put into your first wallet or the penny you found on an important day can become valuable for reasons that have nothing to do with what’s stamped on it.
That might explain why money superstitions survive so easily. Everyone knows a coin can’t decide what happens next. Plenty of people still aren’t quite ready to spend the lucky one.
You can find more lucky objects, warnings and everyday beliefs in Weird Superstitions From Around the World and the wider Superstitions and Omens collection.