NEW YORK, Jan. 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ &emdash; A new report by The McGraw-Hill Research Foundation calls for a more comprehensive approach to help adults make sound personal finance decisions. “Maximizing the effectiveness of financial training is not just a matter of better use of classrooms and better development of training materials, but also of re-envisioning what financial literacy education can be,” the authors found. They concluded a series of steps by institutions, as well as individuals, must be packaged with financial education to improve consumers' spending and saving choices.
The paper, “From Financial Literacy to Financial Action,” is authored by Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, and Managing Director of the Financial Access Initiative, and Barbara Kiviat, a David Bohnett Public Service Fellow at NYU Wagner and a Research Associate at the Financial Access Initiative. The authors suggest governments, businesses and non-profits organizations focus on five areas to create more effective financial literacy programs. They are:
“To make financial education as powerful as possible, we need to focus on knowledge that is made up of more than just financial facts. Knowing basic rules of thumb and being aware of legal rights and recourses matter too,” the authors write. “Beyond that, practitioners of financial literacy education must broaden their worldview to take into account the extent to which individuals possess self-awareness, feel support from broader social norms, can access reliable financial products, and have available workable structures to implement ideas.”
A copy of From Financial Literacy to Financial Action – A White Paper on Financial Literacy is available for download here.
A video about the report by co-author Jonathan Morduch can be seen here.