Can You Top the National Average?

Financial knowledge and financial skills aren’t the same thing. You can know that diversification lowers risk and still panic-sell during a downturn. You can understand compound interest and still carry a credit card balance every month.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau built a scale to measure the second one: your financial skills, not your financial facts. It measures how you find reliable financial information, how you weigh it, and how you follow through once you’ve made a decision. Researchers call these three components finding, processing, and executing. You could just as easily call them the difference between reading about a plan and living inside one.

Answer the 10 questions below honestly, based on your day-to-day habits. Then score your financial skills against the national average.

Take the 10-Question CFPB Financial Skills Self-Test

Rate how well each statement describes you, or how often it applies. Write down the number next to your answer as you go. You’ll add them up at the end.

Section 1: How well does this describe you?

#	Statement	Not at all	Very little	Somewhat	Very well	Completely
1	I know how to make complex financial decisions	0	1	2	3	4
2	I am able to make good financial decisions that are new to me	0	1	2	3	4
3	I know how to get myself to follow through on my financial intentions	0	1	2	3	4
4	I am able to recognize a good financial investment	0	1	2	3	4
5	I know how to keep myself from spending too much	0	1	2	3	4
6	I know how to make myself save	0	1	2	3	4
7	I know where to find the advice I need to make decisions involving money	0	1	2	3	4

Section 2: How often does this apply to you?

#	Statement	Never	Rarely	Sometimes	Often	Always
8	I know when I don’t have enough information to make a good decision involving my money	0	1	2	3	4
9	I know when I need advice about my money	0	1	2	3	4
10	I struggle to understand financial information	4	3	2	1	0

Question 10 is scored in reverse. Answering “Never” earns 4 points, not 0. The table above already accounts for that, so just circle your honest answer and use the number in that column.

How to Turn Your Answers Into a Financial Skills Score

Add up the 10 numbers you circled. That total, somewhere between 0 and 40, is your raw score. Now convert it using the table below, based on your age.

The CFPB tested this scale on two groups, adults 18 to 61 and adults 62 and older, because the groups tend to answer the same questions in different ways. The conversion accounts for that, so a 61-year-old and a 63-year-old with the same raw score can land on different final scores. That’s how the age adjustment is designed to work.

Raw Score	Score (Ages 18–61)	Score (Ages 62+)
0	5	3
2	11	9
4	15	14
6	20	18
8	23	22
10	27	26
12	30	29
14	33	32
16	36	35
18	39	38
20	42	42
22	46	45
24	49	48
26	52	51
28	55	55
30	59	58
32	63	62
34	67	66
36	72	71
38	77	77
40	85	85

Source: Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Financial Skill Scale scoring tables (2018). Odd-numbered raw scores fall between the rows shown; the CFPB’s full table includes every value from 0 to 40 for exact scoring.

Most Adults Score Near the Middle of the Financial Skills Scale

The average adult in the U.S. lands at 50 on this 0-to-100 scale. A quarter of adults score below 42. A quarter score above 57. Most people cluster in the middle, and very few land at either extreme end of the scale.

There’s no official cutoff for a “good” financial skills score, and that’s worth taking seriously rather than treating as a dodge. A few points of difference can come down to how you happened to answer one question that day, not a real shift in how you handle money. Use your score as a general read on where you stand, not a verdict.

Financial Skills Predict Behavior More Than Knowledge Does

The CFPB validated this scale against real financial behaviors. Financial skills track with follow-through more than knowledge alone does.

Source: CFPB, Measuring Financial Skill (2018), Appendix B, based on 2016 National Financial Well-Being Survey data.

Notice what’s missing from that list: nothing about what you know. The strongest relationships are all about what you do once you’ve decided something. That’s the entire premise of the scale. It measures whether your intentions turn into action, a different question than how many facts you can recite.

Why Financial Skills Matter More the Closer You Get to Retirement

A separate CFPB study of adults 62 and older found something specific to this age group: financial skills carry more weight for financial well-being among older adults than among younger ones. The correlation between skills and well-being was 0.58 among older adults, compared to 0.47 among adults under 62.

The same study found older adults with above-median financial skills scored a full 13 points higher on financial well-being than those at or below the median. That difference holds even after accounting for how different their answers tend to be.

It’s not hard to see why the stakes shift with age. A 30-year-old with weak follow-through skills has decades to course-correct a missed contribution or an unresearched investment. A 68-year-old deciding when to start Medicare or how to sequence withdrawals doesn’t get years of do-overs. The same weak spot that costs a younger person some compounding costs an older person a decision they may not get to remake.

A Financial Skills Score Only Helps If You Act on It

Knowing where you land on this scale is useful. Knowing what to do about it is more useful. If your weak spot is follow-through, a structure that makes the next right move obvious does more good than another piece of information.

That’s the gap the Boldin Planner is built to close. It won’t raise your financial skills score. It handles the follow-through work instead, the parts that depend on memory and willpower, and turns them into something the tool tracks for you, from contribution schedules to a withdrawal order you can test before you commit.

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