Established in 2021, the Centre for Personal Financial Wellbeing is an interdisciplinary research centre that seeks to get the heart of the causes and consequences of personal and household financial insecurity. It focuses on providing accessible and timely insights to support a wide range of leaders and decision makers including those in, the financial service industry, third sector organisations, academics as well as the general public.

Centre’s research is focussed around three key themes:

Establishing effective ‘everyday’ personal finance wellbeing approaches

Managing personal finance is a feature of everyone’s lives. Doing it well is key to living life to the full. Under this theme we undertake work that explores how to achieve effective personal financial wellbeing for different parts of society including exploring how best to support people to live on lower incomes, how to ‘decumulate’ wealth well into later life, understanding how people make decisions about where to live and how to pay for this choice, the impact of being a migrant managing money, and decisions such as whether to decide to be an employee or work for yourself.

Creating financial resilience

This theme of our work seeks to improve our understanding of how to balance spending and savings, over the short and longer terms, and how to facilitate the developing of a ‘nation of savers’. This theme focuses on both common and alternative approaches to developing and maintaining saving strategies, savings support for those on lower incomes and in precarious work, those affected by migration and displacement, and the role of the insurance industry in developing financial resilience.

Developing effective financial education for all ages

Our work applies academic expertise to aid the development of ever more effective financial education to improve decision making skills related to money. This will include, but not only be focused on, the young, as improved financial education is needed across all age groups and in all groups of society.