You know exactly what it feels like to have nothing, or you have spent your whole life making sure you never find out.
What it looks like in a life
Pluto's sign is shared by everyone born in your years. The house is the part that belongs to you alone, and yours went to money, property, and worth. Money is never neutral for you. Either you hold it close, track the balance, and keep reserves nobody knows about, or you spend down to zero and dare life to finish you. There was a collapse somewhere, in your family or in your own accounts, and it left a mark you still budget around. You are drawn to the parts of money other people find distasteful: debt, leverage, who actually controls what. And you can tell within minutes when someone is using money to hold power over you.
The gift
You can build from nothing and do it again after a wipeout. You understand money as power rather than decoration, so the appearance of wealth rarely fools you. You will go without while you build, for years if that is what it takes. And you know your own value at a depth most people are still arguing themselves into.
The friction
Enough keeps moving. No number ever proves you are safe, so you work past the point where the work was the answer. You grip objects and people with the same hand, because letting go of anything registers as loss. And when worth is tied to holdings, a bad year does not just cost you money. It costs you your sense of who you are.
The esoteric layer
Pluto is a modern planet, discovered in 1930, so the ancient traditions say nothing about it. The house is old. The Hellenistic astrologers called the 2nd the Gate of Hades, the place of livelihood and of what gets handed over. Pluto is Ploutōn, the rich one, lord of what lies buried. Bailey's esoteric line adds that Pluto is non-sacred and carries the destroyer aspect of the First Ray, killing what the soul has finished with. In this house, the thing that has to die is the belief that you are what you own.
Where this goes
The ruler of your 2nd house says where the money actually comes from and what it is for. A natal chart reading sets that beside the pattern above so the two stop working against each other.
Related
See it in your own chart
Cast your chart free and read this placement next to everything else you carry.