Upright the Four of Coins is read as security sought through control and saving; reversed, as the grip loosened into either generosity or anxiety about money, depending on which way the reader takes the release.
This is one of several small cards where the Rider-Waite-Smith image and the older cartomantic tradition point in almost the same direction without having arrived there the same way. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century cartomancers, working from number and suit rather than picture, generally gave the earth-suit four a meaning of settled, static possession, neither growing nor being spent; Smith's clenched figure sharpens that stasis into something closer to fear, and it is her picture, not the older number-based reading, that gives the card its now-standard association with hoarding rather than simple stability.
Waite's own published meaning for the upright card is comparatively neutral, gift, legacy, inheritance, and it is later twentieth-century readers, working from the picture more than from Waite's text, who pushed the card toward miserliness and control. This is a useful case for a general point about the deck: a card's illustration and its earliest printed meaning do not always agree, and where they diverge it is very often the picture that wins out over time, since it is what most readers actually look at.
Read carefully, the card is less a moral judgment on saving than a description of what saving costs when it hardens into a defense against loss.