May 2021
This fact sheet provides a snapshot of the state of Americans’ financial resilience right before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many Americans were unprepared to cover a mid-sized emergency expense, and there are considerable variations across groups with different demographic backgrounds and socioeconomic status.
TIAA Institute and GFLEC | May 2020
The TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance (P-Fin) Index demonstrates the precarious position of many U.S. adults just before the coronavirus pandemic.
In January 2020, about one-in-four Americans were financially fragile. Financial fragility is the inability to cope with a mid-size shock in a short period of time. It is a self-assessed measure of capacity to deal with financial shocks, regardless of whether the source of funds is the respondent’s own assets, capacity to borrow, a network of family and friends, or something else.
Click here to see the March 2020 version of this fact sheet.
When surveyed about their investment knowledge, female investors performed poorly compared to male investors. Out of ten questions designed to assess knowledge, on average, male investors correctly answered 5.2 questions while female investors correctly answered 4.1 questions. Moreover, 40% of female investors answered fewer than three questions correctly thus demonstrating low investment knowledge, while only 8% of female investors correctly answered at least eight questions, demonstrating high financial knowledge.
The Global Thinking Foundation | May 2018
The Global Thinking Foundation | May 2018
National Endowment for Financial Education | April 2018
To read the National Endowment for Financial Education’s Summer 2018 Digest, which features GFLEC’s research on financial fragility as its covers story, click here. This research was supported by NEFE.
Visit Dr. Annamaria Lusardi's website to see additional research ➤