This paper is concerned with the role of emotions in reading and interpreting financial accounts. Even though people’s capacity to understand accounting to a large extent has been taken as given in the accounting research field, some studies have shown that accounting information nor the ability to interpret it, seldom inhibit any universal meaning. Prior research demonstrates how accounting users tend to engage in various kinds of sense making activities, referred to as “accounting talk”, in which cognitive capacities are developed, helping people translating accounting information into local contextualized knowledge. Whereas previous studies of accounting talk have focused on how the individual’s cognitive resources are developed, this paper broadens the analytical scope to include the emotive resources for making sense of financial accounts. The paper provides a detailed close-up of how pension-savers interpret and react to financial accounts presented to them during individual pension advisory meetings. Informed by a sociological approach to emotions, the empirical results indicate that emotions play several but different roles in people’s interpretations of financial accounts, and should not necessarily be perceived as inhibiting people’s cognitive sense-making ability. In fact, the relation between rational reasoning and emotions in relation to accounts should be understood as a symbiotic interdependence.