Established in 2021 at Aston University, 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.
Read the Centre's first Annual Review (2022-2023).
Our 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 living on lower incomes, how to ‘decumulate’ wealth well into later life, 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 development of a ‘nation of savers’. We look at both common and alternative approaches to developing and maintaining saving strategies. Our work explores effective savings support for those on lower incomes and in precarious work, and those affected by migration and displacement.
- Principles of personal financial wellbeing
This theme seeks to explore the underpinning and underlying principles of personal financial wellbeing. We examine issues such as how can financial wellbeing be best defined to enable its effective development in practical ways. We study how the results of change from different interventions can be measured and assessed reliably. We look at the implications of viewing financial wellbeing in different ways to aid it’s impact on people’s lives.
