U.S. adults answered 47% of personal finance questions correctly. Financial education and open conversations can help people make sense of harder choices.
Money decisions now span more products, platforms and sources of information than they did a few decades ago. Yet U.S. adults answered fewer than half of the questions on a 2026 personal finance assessment correctly. That combination gives financial educators and business owners a practical reason to make money easier to discuss: people need room to ask questions, compare what they hear and build understanding over time.
The results come from the 2026 TIAA Institute-GFLEC Personal Finance Index. Adults answered an average of 47% of its 28 questions correctly. Gen Z respondents averaged 38%, lower than older generations. Those figures point to a knowledge gap, but the broader challenge is that people must make decisions amid a much larger stream of financial products and advice.
More choices, more noise
Gustavo Barboza, a professor of international business at Loyola University New Orleans, described the decisions consumers face today as unusually complex. In earlier decades, people had fewer retirement accounts and investment products to navigate. Cryptocurrency, online sports betting, prediction markets and AI tools have since added new topics to the mix. Social media has also expanded the amount of financial material people encounter, without making it easy to judge which sources are reliable.
More information can help someone learn a concept at their own pace. It can also leave them sorting through competing explanations and unfamiliar terms. For a person trying to make sense of a financial choice, finding information is only one part of the work; evaluating it and knowing what questions to ask matter too.
That makes financial education more than a matter of memorizing definitions. People need opportunities to connect concepts to decisions and talk through what they don’t understand. Barboza’s point is direct: “We need to learn to manage money, because the alternative is that money manages us.”
Education reaches beyond the classroom
At the 2026 Teaching Personal Finance Conference at Stanford University, educators from across the country and around the world spent a day discussing how to teach people about money. The gathering included shared experiences, research, successes and challenges. One discussion, hosted over lunch by Barboza, focused on extending personal finance learning beyond school.
That wider reach matters because people don’t make financial decisions only in classrooms. They encounter choices throughout everyday life, and conversations with friends, relatives and colleagues can help them put new information into context. Conference speakers described a ripple effect: people who learn financial concepts and skills often pass them along to their families and communities.
For business owners and managers, the same principle offers a useful lesson about workplace communication. Money can shape how employees think about compensation, benefits and future plans, yet people may not feel comfortable raising questions. Making space for clear, respectful conversations can help staff understand the financial details they encounter at work. It can also help an organization see where people need more explanation. This is a general workplace takeaway from the article’s focus on open discussion, not a claim about a particular employer.
The approach doesn’t require anyone to act as an expert. Barboza recommends online tools that let people learn at their own pace. Shared discussion can complement that individual learning: a person can check an unfamiliar idea, ask follow-up questions and hear how someone else made sense of it. The aim is greater understanding, rather than assuming that one conversation resolves every question.
Progress is uneven
Financial literacy education is expanding in schools. According to the 2026 Survey of the States from the Council for Economic Education, 39 states require students to complete a personal finance course to graduate from high school. That’s four more than in the organization’s 2024 survey.
The increase signals broader access to formal instruction, while the assessment results show how much there is still to learn. Course requirements and average scores describe different parts of the picture: more students may receive structured instruction, but adults still face decisions that can be difficult to interpret. The variety of available products and the volume of online material make opportunities to build and revisit financial knowledge especially useful.
People who are learning can start by using an online resource to explore a topic at their own pace, then bring questions into a conversation with someone they trust. For educators and employers, the takeaway is to keep explanations accessible and make questions welcome. Barboza says that being more open about money can help people understand where they stand financially and where they want to go. The next useful step is often simple: keep talking, and make space for others to learn alongside you.
