About the Money Mindsets quiz

This quiz will help you make better financial decisions and prioritize your finances. You’ll get a tailored spending personality profile with easy-to-understand financial education to work through areas of financial growth and reach your goals. The quiz and your spending profile are based on academic literature, financial and psychology experts, and insights from everyday workers experiencing financial stress.

Everyone’s got a spending personality. What’s yours?

Your profile isn’t meant to be a rigid box, but a financial guide.

Each spending profile includes your financial strengths, areas of growth, ideal collaborators and your own personalized financial wellness toolkit.

Talking about money can be difficult, overwhelming, and stressful. Your spending profile is here to make financial education straightforward, useful, and even a little fun.

Methodology: How we built your spending profile

1. Experts behind Money Mindsets

We sat down with psychology, economics and business academics to provide expertise in each spending profile and toolkit. Here are the minds behind Money Mindsets:

• Dr. Shih Yung Chou is a Brenner Endowed Professor of Business Management at Winston-Salem State University. His research explores the relationship between personality traits and online behaviors. Chou provided foundational insights into how the Big Five personality traits affect decision-making and financial choices (Picazo-Vela, Chou, Melcher, & Pearson, 2010).
• Dr. Janet Koscianski is a professor of Economics at Shippensburg University and author of the economics textbook Microeconomic Theory (Koscianski, 1989). Her work on how individual preferences and consumer spending interact with market behavior was crucial in grounding our profiles in economic theory.
• Dr. Dianna Lunsford is a professor and Program Director of Occupation Therapy at Gannon University. Her research on financial education in various populations, particularly marginalized groups, highlights how the right training can significantly improve financial decision-making. This guided our approach to creating practical advice tailored to each spending profile.
• Dr. Michael Grabowski is the Director of the Game Design & Production program and a Professor in the Communication Department at Manhattan College. He has published work on popular culture representations of the working class and financial stress. His insights helped us specifically highlight how human values and emotions impact financial behavior and habits in the spending profiles.

2. Academic literature review

While we were interviewing experts, we also conducted a comprehensive review of academic literature on personality and financial behavior. Findings from this leading research directly shaped the spending personalities.

For example, in their 2014 paper “Household finances and the ‘Big Five’ personality traits,” Brown & Taylor found conscientious people tend to have lower personal debt, while extraverted individuals are more likely to accumulate higher debt.

3. Employee real-world research

How do we ensure that this academic financial knowledge is applicable to your everyday life in the real world? We interviewed employees across industries to determine what’s missing and needed from financial education today.

So, this isn’t run-of-the-mill financial advice. This is academic-backed expertise that addresses the gaps and needs of financial education today.