Setting financial goals can promote a favorable financial situation and well-being. It has been suggested that financial awareness is an important underlying driver of positive financial behaviors like goal setting. Yet awareness studies have focused on an individual’s current financial situation. In this study, we expand the view of personal financial awareness to incorporate expectations for expected future situations. We develop the construct of financial capacious acuity or FCA (i.e., the ability of an individual to see the big picture of their current and future financial situation clearly). We develop a brief measure of FCA and show how it is related to goal setting directly and indirectly through decision confidence and willingness to take risks. We found that the future dimension of FCA had a positive association with goal setting while the current dimension had an indirect negative association with goal setting through its influence on an individual’s willingness to take risk. The current and future dimensions were both positively associated with decision confidence. Our results suggest that having a clear and holistic view of the current and expected future financial situation is important in promoting behaviors such as goal setting.

Accepted Poster Presentation