For those of you that do not know, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was established by the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010. The goal of the department is to make existing financial products and services work for Americans and enable consumers to make the best decisions for their families.
One of the main focuses for the CFPB is financial education. They have most recently conducted a research project collecting letters and verbal statements from approximately 200 leaders in financial education as well as different organizations, individuals, and financial institutions.
The incentive of this project was to try and decipher what works best when it comes to financial education. By finding a combination of skills that would help individuals reach their financial goals, they would then be able to relay their findings onto the general public. After their extensive surveying of data, the CFPB has been able to develop new strategies on financial education with the help of psychological research from the field of behavioral psychology. Their findings were that when conducting financial education, the strategies must be comprehensive. Comprehensive in a sense that only the most prominent information should be discussed, it must be brought up at the most applicable time, and it must be integrated into the consumer’s life in some way or another.
Comprehensive we say, could they have not surveyed themselves internally? Or did they really need to utilize a portion of their $60 million budget for research to come up with this conclusion? It seems like there is a problem with financial education, but of course, we wouldn’t want to place anyone under the spotlight.