Financial Wellness Self-Assessments
Two tools built around the same north star — helping people notice, name, and act on their financial well-being — but designed for very different moments and audiences.
Pick the right tool
Each of these assessments does something the other doesn't. Neither is a replacement for the other, and they're often useful in sequence.
Financial Wellness Checkup
A multi-dimensional self-assessment that walks a person through their whole financial picture — goals, confidence, net worth, cash flow, emergency savings, and retirement readiness — and returns a personalized action plan grounded in Federal Reserve data and retirement-readiness research.
Built in Streamlit. Best for someone who wants a deeper, one-time diagnostic they can work through on their own time (roughly 10–15 minutes) and use to prioritize what to change next.
CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale Activity
A short, embeddable 10-question activity built around the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's validated Financial Well-Being Scale (public domain, 2015 / 2017). The activity auto-scores using the CFPB's own scoring tables, shows the participant's score band, and offers tailored, non-prescriptive next steps.
Designed to drop into a Canvas course, a first-year orientation module, an advising session, or any other educational experience via a simple iframe. All scoring and interpretation come directly from the CFPB; this is an educational wrapper around their work, not a replacement or reinterpretation.
When to use each
A quick heuristic for picking between them — or using both.
Reach for the Checkup when…
… a person wants a personal, one-time deep-dive across their whole financial life. It's the right tool if the goal is prioritizing next actions across budgeting, debt, savings, and retirement all at once.
It's less useful when the goal is a quick pulse-check, when the person will only spend a couple of minutes, or when you need a comparable number for pre/post measurement.
Reach for the CFPB Scale Activity when…
… you need a brief, validated, standardized measure that can sit inside a course or program. It's the right tool for a first-week baseline, a semester-end reflection, or any moment where "the CFPB score" itself is the useful number.
It's less useful as a standalone financial diagnostic — the score is a snapshot of how someone feels, not a plan for what to do next. Pair it with follow-up conversation or content.
Using both can also work well: the CFPB scale as a repeated pulse-check over the term, and the Checkup once or twice a year as the deeper cross-sectional look. They measure related but distinct things.
Credit where credit is due
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
The 10-item Financial Well-Being Scale, its response options, and the age- and administration-mode-specific scoring tables were developed by the CFPB and published in Financial Well-Being: The Goal of Financial Education (2015) and the CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale: Scale Development Technical Report (2017). The scale is in the public domain and free to use.
The CFPB Scale Activity on this site follows the CFPB's published scoring exactly — nothing about the measurement itself is my work.
Learn about the CFPB scaleStudent Money Management Center
The activity's call-to-action points to the University of Illinois System's Student Money Management Center (SMMC), a unit of University Bursar that provides free financial education to students, parents, employees, and alumni across the U of I System's Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield campuses. SMMC offers bi-weekly e-newsletters, live and recorded webinars, the Financial Literacy Badges Program, and the Making Cents of Money podcast.
SMMC is where I do this work day-to-day — but the scale itself is CFPB's, not SMMC's.
Visit SMMC