The Personal Finance Ecosystem is a research-informed framework developed for use by practitioners, researchers and policymakers. In practice, it also can be used with individuals to help them understand the unseen forces at play in their financial lives as well as highlighting opportunities for intentional change.
The Personal Finance Ecosystem can also be used to:
- Contextualize financial education among other interventions and illustrate various considerations when examining an individual’s financial well-being.
- Make deliberate decisions about how to evaluate personal financial education efforts and determine appropriate key performance indicators.
- Determine the impact of specific catalysts of change on an individual.
- Show intended cause and effect (not studied cause and effect) and galvanize researchers around establishing scientific links.
- Orient those who are new to the financial well-being field and can set expectations for the plurality of factors and interventions that could relate to—and inform—an individual’s financial life and experiences.
- Inform those who have more experience in the field on the elevation of practice, advancement of research, establishment of partnership and development of talking points for philosophical debate.
NOTE: This framework is not intended to be used as a research model. It simply lays out factors that may influence financial well-being as we see them.