Money Lives: the financial behaviour of the UK
Money Lives is a new piece of pioneering research, conducted by Ipsos in collaboration with Professor Ivo Vlaev from the University of Warwick and Antony Elliott from the Fairbanking Foundation, on behalf of the Money Advice Service into the ways that people manage their money.
We followed the lives of 72 households over a period of nine months to develop a behavioural understanding of financial capability and to see how attitudes and motivations, as well as skills, knowledge and opportunities affect people’s financial behaviour. Each household was visited four times over the research period and, in addition, we also conducted 48 in-depth interviews with those who had recently experienced a significant life event like redundancy, ill-health or divorce, to see how this affected their financial behaviours.
As part of this programme of work we developed interventions designed to target specific aspects of financial capability, like increasing the regularity with which someone checks their balance or curbing areas of excessive spending. The findings from this research are now being used by the Money Advice Service to help it understand what steps need to be taken to improve the financial health of the nation and are also underpinning its Financial Capability Strategy for the UK.
