Financial Struggles and Financial Knowledge

Column distributed by Hearst Connecticut Media Group.

Links to resources referenced:

FINRA Investor Education Foundation: Financial Capability in the United States
- https://www.finrafoundation.org/sites/finrafoundation/files/2025-07/NFCS-Report-Sixth-Edition-July-2025.pdf
  - Related column excerpt:
    - “The final version of the 2024 National Financial Capability Study was recently released by FINRA’s Investor Education Foundation.”
FINRA Podcast: National Financial Capability Study: Key Trends and Insights
- https://www.finra.org/media-center/finra-unscripted/nfcs-key-trends-and-insights?utm_source=MM&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=O%5FMediaAdvisory%5FFINRA%5FUnscripted%5F080525%5FFINAL
  - Related column excerpts:
    - “Before I go into the statistics, it might be helpful to understand how ‘financial capability’ is defined. Gerri Walsh, the president of the FINRA Foundation, offered an explanation in a FINRA Unscripted podcast, saying, ‘It measures attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, experience, and then of course also knowledge. And we measure it along four pillars: making ends meet, planning ahead, managing financial products and financial knowledge.’”
    - “What caused the change? FINRA senior researcher Olivia Valdes told the FINRA podcast that the difficulty in making ends meet ‘seems to be driven by inflation.’”
    - “At the end, it comes back to financial knowledge. As FINRA Foundation Research Director Gary Mottola said on the podcast about the NCFS findings related to people’s self-assessments versus objectively measured knowledge, ‘There’s a potential that there’s a fairly large swath of the U.S. population [that] is a little overconfident with their financial knowledge.’”