Direct and indirect effects of self-control and future time perspective on financial well-being

Abstract

Financial well-being is getting more attention in research and consumer policy, but there is limited understanding of its determinants. In this study, the effects of two psychological factors (self-control and future time perspective) are studied on two components of financial well-being (current money management stress and expected future financial security). Using structural equation modelling in data from 16 countries (n = 15,773), we find that self-control and future time perspective have both direct and indirect effects on the components of financial well-being. The indirect effects are mediated by past and present financial behaviour and have smaller effect sizes than the direct effects. Self-control is the main determinant of current money management stress, while future time perspective is the main determinant of expected future financial security. Our results emphasize that financial well-being should not be treated as a one-dimensional construct. Instead, the interventions for improving financial well-being should clearly target either its present or future component and consider psychological characteristics in their design.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 28 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.