If you’re like most people, the “Big Five” financial literacy questions at the end of this column will be a “Big Fail.”
I base this prediction on the results of a longer test of similarly-worded financial literacy questions, in which the average U.S. adult got just 49% correct. That’s according to a recently issued study jointly conducted by the TIAA Institute, the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), and Stanford University’s Initiative for Financial Decision-Making.
The chart above shows the overall success rate of U.S. adults who took the full 28-question test, known as the Personal Finance Index (P-Fin). The overall average for U.S. adults was virtually unchanged from last year’s 48%. In fact, this figure has barely budged in the 10 years that this test has been conducted — always coming in between 48% and 52%.
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As the chart also shows, the youngest generations have the lowest scores and are therefore especially prone to making financial-planning mistakes. This latest study found that, compared to those with high financial literacy, those with low scores were twice as likely to be “debt-constrained,” three times more likely to be “financially fragile,” and five times more likely not to have a month’s worth of emergency savings (or unsure whether they did).
Read: Your new money guide: 7 ways to save, invest and plan in today’s unpredictable economy
One of the most provocative findings in this newest study is that those with greater financial literacy spend less time on personal-finance issues than those with lower literacy scores. This finding counters a stereotype you might have of the most financially literate investor as someone who lives and breathes the markets. But even though some investors will embody this stereotype, most financially literate people don’t.
The study’s authors discovered this upon comparing respondents’ P-Fin scores with how much time they devote per week on their personal finances. They found that those with the lowest financial-literacy scores were more than twice as likely to spend 10 or more hours a week going over their finances.
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