Financial Fitness Project

Funded by the Financial Industry Regulation Authority Investor Education Foundation, this project is aimed at helping everyday Americans enhance their financial fitness and, in doing so, improve their family's overall quality of life.

What is financial fitness?

Financial fitness is like physical fitness. Why? Because your physical health and your financial health are important factors affecting your wellbeing and security.

While physical fitness involves building muscle and becoming more aerobically efficient, financial fitness involves building financial reserves and making your money work more efficiently. And while physical fitness helps you cope better with life’s challenges and increases your chances of living well in old age, financial fitness helps you cope with life’s financial challenges and increases your ability to retire comfortably.

But just like physical fitness, financial fitness doesn’t happen automatically; we must work at it. And just as it is often difficult to find time to work on our physical fitness, it is often difficult to find time to think about our financial fitness.

However, the benefits of being prepared for the future, safeguarding your family, and providing yourself with more free time and better opportunities for healthcare, far outweigh the costs in terms of time. So no more excuses! Help shape your future! You deserve to give yourself the gift of living well through financial fitness.

Why is getting financially fit more important than ever?

Because we are living longer than ever! Average life expectancy for someone born in 1900 was 47 years but this increased to 68 years for someone born in 1950 and to 77 years for those born in 2000. This is obviously great but it does mean that we need more funds for retirement. So, action is needed now to ensure you are financially fit for the future.

So how can I increase my financial fitness?

For three years our research team has been searching for answers to this question. However, rather than drawing on ideas commonly held about personal finance to come up with these answers, we’ve been carefully researching personal financial strategies that actually helped real householders accumulate wealth and become financially fit. And we feel confident that our research findings will be useful to all Americans.

In our research, we contrasted the personal financial strategies of householders who had similar opportunities to accumulate wealth over their lifetimes but ended up with very different amounts of wealth nearing retirement. We focused in particular on the personal financial strategies used in “top performing” households; those containing householders who were the most financially fit approaching retirement. Our investigations revealed six such strategies, which we have called the Simple 6.

Find out about the Simple 6.