March 4, 2010 in Blog, Project Updates by Ryan

Results from our test survey on personal financial management

As a part of our market research we are implementing a survey to find out about their need for financial services, knowledge of financial management, how much people know about credit unions, and how willing they would be to support or use student run financial services.

In planning the full survey, we made a test survey specifically about personal financial management. The survey was not meant to represent the population, but help us with subsequent surveys. The results gave us an insight into people’s financial habits and ideas of how we might structure questions differently.

Here is a review of some of the results:

• 38 people responded
• Most people rated their personal financial management 4 or 5 out of 5, but 40% responded 3 or worse.
• 37% of people reported sometimes spending more than they could afford.
• 84% said they could benefit from learning about personal financial management

For open ended questions:

• When asked how people determined whether they could afford a purchase: just under a third of respondents referred to having a budget or tracking spending; about half said they checked how much money was in their accounts or how much money they had on hand; and about 15% said that they were just generally frugal or put savings away before spending anything.
• Asked what tools people used to manage their own finances: 29 % said they used a spreadsheet; the same number 29% said none, they used no tools; 18% reported using a finance program like Quicken, Mint.com, one responded with GnuCash; another 18% said they used their bank’s website; and 5% responded that they used common sense.
• When asked what thinks people thought they could benefit from learning answers were all over the board and difficult to put in categories. Budgeting was one that came up several times and investing was another need. Respondents were also concerned about saving, avoiding, debt, tracking spending, getting a job, credit rating, and long-term planning.
• Others responded uniquely saying: “you don’t know what you don’t know;” “keeping spending down at a night at the bar;” and “Don’t take more of my money Feds.”

The wording of some questions was ambiguous or flawed in some other way.

Some people responded to the question of how they knew they could afford something by saying they checked how much money they had, which is a sensible answer. Others said that they used budgeting, which makes us wonder that the two groups of respondents may have interpreted the questions differently.

A later question asked how they thought personal financial management could be best taught and a list with check boxes was given. Several answers got similar number of check marks, leading us to think it may have been better to ask for a ranking or to limit the number of choices, or both (rank the top three).

Overall, the survey results give us ideas of how we can implement an education program, but we need to find out more. It will be interesting to get the results of our full survey, which will cover more topics.