Effective financial education: Five principles and how to use them
The CFPB has conducted research over its first five years into what makes financial education effective. We have summed up our findings into five principles that financial educators, financial coaches, and other practitioners can put into practice to help drive financial action and well-being.
Effective financial education means helping consumers as they work to bridge the gap between their knowledge, their intentions, and the actions they take. It means deploying a wide range of strategies that help consumers to achieve the ultimate goal of financial education: financial well-being.
We offer these principles as a path forward for effective financial education, in its many different forms. The five principles build on insights about how people make financial decisions, marshalled from many fields of study, and on what we have learned about consumers’ own experiences in the financial marketplace.
The report presents the principles, provides tested strategies as well as practitioners’ tips for ways to put the principles into practice.