Save & Invest

This article provides a brief overview of the field of financial education and explores some of the challenges and potential solutions. The author describes developments in the contemporary financial education movement since the 1990s and the background economic changes that stimulated its growth; reviews currently available financial education initiatives for youth and adults and discusses the evidence about its effectiveness as well as broader challenges for the field. The article concludes by highlighting both general and specific examples of efforts to move the field forward.

This article presents best practices and lessons learnt from on the experiences of the National Endowment for Financial Education® (NEFE), a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan and noncommercial foundation committed to increas- ing access to financial education and to empowering in- dividuals to make positive and sound financial decision.

This article provides an overview of bank-based financial education. The role of banks more generally is reviewed, and examples of Marshall and Isley (M&I) Bank's Consumer Education (CE) program are discussed. Evaluation methods used by M&I are described. Key factors for success include clearly defined priorities, a standardized high-quality curriculum, appropriately designed delivery, well-integrated assessment and evaluation, effective community partnerships and a willingness to provide supporting tools.

This article discusses the results of and lessons learnt from the Financial Opportunities Project (FOP), a comprehensive effort by the Center for Economic Progress identify, implement, and disseminate strategies for integrating financial services and asset-building opportunities with community-based tax-preparation services at IRS Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) sites.

This article summarizes a Federal Reserve Board research study focusing on the effectiveness of a financial education program for military personnel. Soldiers attending the Army’s air defender advanced individualized training (AIT) at Ft. Bliss were offered a two-day financial education course taught by staff from San Diego City College.

Despite the growing importance of housing counseling, there is little systematic information about the industry. The industry is known to be marked by significant diversity in a number of dimensions, including the types of organizations involved, their organizational capacity, the types of clients served, the types of services delivered, and the funding sources used. The primary goal of this study is to provide a systematic overview of the housing counseling industry as of 2007.

In 2008, the SEC commissioned a survey to evaluate "plain English" rules approved in 1998 with the goal of making mandated disclosures simpler, clearer and more useuful. Abt SBRI conducted the telephone survey on a national sample of 1000 adults who invested in stocks, bonds and/or mutual funds outside an employer-sponsored reitrement plan. The survey found that many investors do not read disclosure documents and those who do, spend relatively little time on them. Overall satisfaction was mixed.

Abstract: We construct two measures of the current wealth adequacy of older U.S. households using the 1998--2006 waves of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The first is the ratio of "comprehensive wealth"--defined as net worth plus the expected value of future income streams--to the wealth that would be needed to generate expected poverty-line income in future years. By this measure, we find that the median older U.S. household is reasonably well situated, with a "poverty ratio" of about 3.9 in 2006.

Increasingly, individuals are in charge of their own financial security and are confronted with ever more complex financial instruments. However, there is evidence that many individuals are not well-equipped to make sound saving decisions. This paper demonstrates widespread financial illiteracy among the U.S. population, particularly among specific demographic groups. Those with low education, women, African-Americans, and Hispanics display particularly low levels of literacy. Financial literacy impacts financial decision-making.

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. It shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole.