SaveWise: The impact of a real-life financial education program for ninth grade students in the Netherlands

This experimental study with a pre-post and follow-up design evaluates the financial education program “SaveWise” for ninth grade students in the Netherlands (n = 713). SaveWise adopts a holistic approach, emphasizing action rather than mere cognition. Benefitting from explicit instruction embedded in real-life contexts, students in the program set a personal savings goal and are coached on how to achieve it. The short-term treatment results indicated that SaveWise expanded the students’ level of financial knowledge; encouraged their intentions to save more, spend less and earn an income; and broadly improved their financial and savings behavior. The program demonstrated that it could serve as an effective and low-cost method to enhance the financial literacy of pre-vocational students, a financially vulnerable group. Although long-term effects were expressed only through financial socialization, this study offers evidence linking curricula to increased knowledge and improved behavior for a specific sample of students.