Do you know more about money than the average American?

A personal finance survey shows that financial literacy is declining for Americans. Take the related quiz to see how you do.

It’s not really shocking that most Americans don’t know a lot about money. Some of this isn’t people’s fault, as most people weren’t taught personal finance in school, and many parents weren’t equipped to teach their children either.

But there comes a time where we want to stop blaming the past for our challenges and start to become accountable for our lives. Personally, my most successful clients are the ones who are sick and tired of feeling bad about money, and are ready to do something about it.

Recently, a study put out by the TIAA Institute revealed that as a whole, Americans have actually gotten less financially literate.

We can talk about that study, of course. But the study also shed light on a short financial literacy quiz that anyone can take to test their financial knowledge, and I think that’s quite interesting.

I’ll show you how you can take it, and tell you what happened what I took it. (Yes, it surprised me.)

Personal Finance Index

The TIAA Institute has a yearly survey called, with enviable pith, The TIAA Institute–GFLEC Personal Finance Index. Or P-Fin Index, for short.

In their words:

The P-Fin Index survey provides a robust measure of overall financial literacy using 28 questions, also allowing analysis of personal finance knowledge across eight areas in which individuals routinely function: earning, consuming, saving, investing, borrowing and managing debt, insuring, comprehending risk, and go-to information sources.

So it’s basically a financial literacy test.

And it’s not going well.

The results aren’t good

The 2026 results were published recently. And for the survey participants, the average percentage of questions that they got right was 47%. This was the lowest in the whole of the ten years of the study.

Now, this wasn’t a huge drop, from a high of 52% in 2020, but I’m not sure that’s much consolation.

The whole report is pretty depressing, to be honest. Here’s some more:

The share of adults demonstrating very low financial literacy (correctly answering seven or fewer of the 28 questions) has grown from 20% in 2017 to 25% in 2026. … The situation appears particularly concerning among younger Americans. Gen Z correctly answered only 38% of the index questions in 2026, far below older generations. The disparity is driven largely by an alarmingly high share of young adults with very low financial literacy. These young people are entering adulthood … without the foundational knowledge to make sound choices.

Speaking in the New York Times, the head of the TIAA Institute blames the aftermath of the pandemic, as well as the stressed caused by rampant inflation.

“‘It may be that financial stress is crowding out our cognitive ability to learn’.”

Like I said, I’d love to be out of a job, but I don’t suspect I will be any time soon.

Take the quiz

There doesn’t appear to be an easy way to take this 28 question survey, as far as I can tell.

But they have published a shorter quiz, called (again with pith) the P-Fin 8 Index. This is, as its name suggests, an 8 question version of the larger quiz.

And I want you to take it.

This quiz is published here and it’s freely available, and you don’t even need to give out your email address to get the results. Give it a try!

How I scored

As a financial professional, I felt pretty confident in my abilities on this quiz. So I decided to give it a go.

How did I do? Did I get a perfect score?

Well, not exactly. One of the questions referenced something called “expected winnings”, in a lottery context. I didn’t know whether that phrase had a technical definition or just a notional one. (I’m not that into gambling, and especially not the lottery.)

So I looked it up, and once I learned the definition of the phrase, I was able to answer it correctly.

But because I looked the definition up, I’m not counting that one.

So I got 7 out of 8. I’m still perfectly happy with it, as it put me in the top 15% of respondents. But it just goes to show that even when you think you know finance, there’s always something more to learn.

I’m curious how you did.

We need to do better

Financial literacy is a big problem in this country. People do not have the skills to be able to successfully manage their money, and with everything getting more unaffordable, we do not have that luxury of not knowing.

Luckily, if you’re reading this, you’re probably one of the people who want to learn more. And you’ve got here over 1,000 articles on virtually any financial topic you could imagine, all for free. And, of course, you can work with me too.

But the status quo isn’t good enough. Money affects every aspect of our lives. We need to get better at it.