Resources you control alone
The distinction that makes this house readable is ownership. The second house is what is yours outright: earnings, savings, belongings, skills you can sell. Anything held jointly, borrowed, inherited or owed belongs to the eighth house instead. A chart with a busy second house and a quiet eighth often describes someone who would rather earn slowly than borrow quickly.
Values, not just valuables
The older meaning is worth keeping. This house also holds the standard you measure things against: what you consider a fair price, what you think is beneath you, what you would keep if you had to choose. Two people with identical incomes and opposite second houses spend completely differently, and neither thinks the other is being sensible.
How a planet here behaves
Planets in the second house attach themselves to security. Venus here tends toward comfort and quality; Saturn toward caution and a long memory of going without; Jupiter toward generous spending and a conviction that more will arrive. Uranus produces income that arrives in bursts rather than salaries.
The sign matters as much as the planet. A second house in a fixed sign accumulates and holds; in a mutable sign it flows in and out and is far harder to pin down.
Reading an empty second house
Emptiness here is common and is not a forecast of poverty. Find the sign on the cusp, take its ruler, and see where that planet sits. A second house ruled by Mercury with Mercury in the tenth points to income arising from public work and communication, whether or not any planet occupies the second itself.
Across from the eighth
The second and eighth houses form the resource axis: what is yours against what is shared. Debt, inheritance, joint accounts and other people's money sit opposite. Charts often show tension along this line, since building something independently and being entangled financially with someone else pull in opposite directions.
The second house is not the same as Venus
Both cover value, and the two get conflated constantly. Venus is a body with a position and a set of aspects; it describes taste and the style of wanting. The second house is a region of the chart that any planet can occupy, and it describes the machinery of holding rather than the flavour of wanting. Someone can have Venus in a difficult condition and a perfectly stable second house, or the reverse. When the two disagree, read Venus for what appeals and the second house for what actually gets kept.
The same caution applies to Taurus. The sign is the natural fit for this house, which is a structural correspondence rather than a claim that anyone with a Taurus second is wealthy.
Questions people ask about this
Does the second house predict how much I will earn?
No. It describes your relationship to earning and owning, not a figure. Nothing in a chart produces a number.
Where does inherited money go?
The eighth house. The second is only what you hold in your own right.
My second house is empty. Is that bad?
No. Read the ruler of the sign on the cusp and see where it sits; that is where the house does its work.