Financial Literacy in the United States and Its Link to Financial Wellness: The 2019 TIAA Institute-GFLEC P-Fin Index
Many Americans lack the personal finance knowledge needed for sound financial decision making.
The 2019 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index (P-Fin Index) represents the third wave of a long-term project designed to assess U.S. adults’ financial literacy. The P-Fin Index is unique in its capacity to produce a robust measure of overall knowledge of personal finance along with a nuanced analysis of knowledge in eight areas. The 2019 study also explores financial literacy’s link to financial wellness, showing that greater financial literacy is positively associated with the capacity to handle a financial shock, saving for retirement on a regular basis, being unconstrained by debt and other indicators of financial well-being.
To explore sections of the 2019 report on our website, visit this page.
To learn more about all of our P-Fin Index research, visit our P-Fin Index hub page.
The TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index is a survey-based assessment of financial knowledge and understanding. The 2019 wave of the survey examines financial literacy across eight common dimensions of personal finance and includes new questions probing the relationship between financial literacy and financial wellness. The survey was fielded online in January 2019 with a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, ages 18 and older, and was completed by 1,008 individuals.