Households’ finances and financial literacy 2020

Single-adult households with children continue to have a more difficult financial situation than other households. FI has measured households’ financial literacy and found that it has improved in almost all areas compared to previous surveys.

FI commissioned a household survey to increase its knowledge about Swedish households' finances and financial literacy.

Many households state that they have strong finances, but the share of households that do not have money left over at the end of the month has increased 2 percentage points since the last survey and is now 8 per cent. Single-adult households with children continue to have a more difficult financial situation than other households.

Households with the lowest income demonstrate the least interest in long-term planning and staying informed about matters related to their personal finances, and they demonstrate the lowest financial literacy and arithmetic ability. Given that many of these households say that they have difficulty making their money last means that they are particularly vulnerable from a financial perspective.

The change in financial literacy should be interpreted with some caution compared to the comparison in the 2017 survey since we changed the method we used to gather the data.