household return at retirement. Return was defined as the proportion of
a household’s net worth to its lifetime income. This step was informed by
research indicating the existence of large wealth dispersion at retirement
for households with a similar lifetime income (e.g., Cole and Shastry
2009; Hendricks 2007; Venti and Wise 2000). The result of this step
was a group of households with very high return and a group with very
low return. Next, we collected data on the personal financial education
activities (e.g., education about personal finance at high school) and
personal financial behaviors (e.g., paying credit card bills on time) of the
householders within the groups over their lifetime. Finally, we compared
the high and low return groups on these activity and behavior variables.
Four hypotheses were tested concerning the relationship between personal
financial education activities and behaviors, and household return.
The first concerned personal financial education achieved via financial
socialization (John 1999; Moschis 1987). John proposed that children
pass through stages of consumer socialization, resulting in an increasingly
sophisticated knowledge of advertising, products and brands, better
shopping skills, enhanced decision-making skills, and a more developed
understanding of consumption and materialism. She also proposed
that financial socialization can occur via the family, peers, culture, and
mass media and marketing. In an alternative conceptualization of these
socialization processes, Moschis proposed that young adults learn about
financial behavior via informal and formal financial socialization agents.
Informal agents include family members and friends, and formal agents
include educational establishments. Learning from these agents occurs via
three processes: modeling, which involves imitating the agent’s behavior;
reinforcement, which involves being rewarded or punished for certain
behaviors; and social interaction, a broad category of processes involving
encouragement from significant others to adopt certain norms and skills.
Prior research has provided evidence of the influence of informal
socialization agents such as the family (Grinstein-Weiss et al. 2011;