Age Group and Financial Literacy Rate; Based On Wewala West GN Division

Abstract

Financial decision making is an integral part of daily life of people. Most of financial decisions are made as own decision without advise of financial specialists. Financial literacy has direct impact on financial decision making. In present society there are some troubles with lack of financial literacy. According to the previous literature in many countries, one can identify various factors are affecting to financial literacy rate. Main objective of this study is identifying the age group which is highly financial literate in Sri Lankan context. As well as identifying the other factors affected to financial literacy rate. This study was selected 300 households using simple random sampling technique as the sample from 1442 number of households in the Wewala West GN division which is the population of this study. Here only used primary data for research purposes and they were collected through structured questionnaire which designed as three main parts according to collect qualitative data. Questionnaire contained basically 2 parts as demographic data and financial literacy data. For the analysis purposes analytical tools that validity analysis, frequency analysis, factor analysis, weighted average, chi square test and also one way ANOVA have used for analysis part of this study. Study was constructed index for financial literacy is between 0 - 5.02. Using these index values categorized people two categories as high and low financial literate using the median value of index. This study find that gender, household’s monthly income, education level, sector of job and age category are significantly affecting factor for the financial literacy rate while race is not significantly affect to financial literacy rate. Education level and age are the most important factors among the affected factors. And also this study finds that there is a different between age groups on financial literacy rate and people between age 36-50 and also above 60 groups are significantly have high level of financial literacy rate