A Brief Money Management Scale and Its Associations With Personality, Financial Health, and Hypothetical Debt Repayment

Money management is essential for financial health, and more research is needed to better assess people’s money management practices. Therefore, we factor-analyzed 205 scaled questions from previous money management measures to select the best items and examined their internal consistency and convergent validity. Our resulting 18-item Brief Money Management Scale and its factors (management of cash, credit, savings, and insurance) replicate and clarify previous relationships between types of money management and financial outcomes as well as personality and demographic antecedents. Furthermore, this scale is reliable and predicts participants’ hypothetical debt repayment behavior, suggesting concurrent validity. We discuss how future studies can use this multifaceted measure of money management to better understand the antecedents and consequences of different financial decisions.