Here’s a number that should stop you mid-scroll: American adults just posted the lowest financial literacy score in a decade. Not a bad quarter. Not a rough year. The lowest in ten years of tracking, according to the TIAA Institute’s 2026 study — with the share of adults in the “very low knowledge” category climbing from 20% to 25% since 2017.

Read that again. We are getting worse at understanding money, at the exact moment money is getting harder to manage.

Surya Kolluri, who heads the TIAA Institute, put it bluntly: this isn’t one weak spot. It’s a widening gap across spending, borrowing, investing, and retirement — the entire landscape of everyday financial decisions. And the people paying the highest price are the ones who can least afford to: adults with very low financial literacy are four times more likely to live paycheck to paycheck and four times more likely to have zero emergency savings.

This isn’t a personal failing. It’s a cultural one.

We love to frame money struggles as an individual problem — you should’ve paid more attention in school, you should budget better, you should just try harder. But look at what’s actually happening around us.

Big-picture decisions aren’t the only issue — there’s a much more everyday problem: most people have no system for knowing where their money is going before they spend it. Without that, every purchase becomes a small decision made in the dark, and that adds up to real stress — the kind that shows up at the dinner table and in arguments with a spouse or partner about money that was never really about the money at all. It’s hard to feel calm about your finances when you can’t answer a simple question: can I afford this, right now, without borrowing from something else that matters?

At the same time, when people go looking for help, they’re increasingly turning to social media for answers. And as Kolluri notes, financial content there is engineered to be engaging — not educational. It’s built to hold your attention, not to teach you how to build a spending plan that actually matches your paycheck or why the same take-home pay can feel tight one month and fine the next. We’ve built an entire culture of financial content with almost no financial education underneath it.

Layer on top of that a culture that treats financial stress as something to push through in silence, and you get exactly what the data shows: a third of adults in survival mode, with zero bandwidth left to learn the very skills that would get them out of survival mode. It’s a trap by design, not by accident.

And it starts young. More than a third of Gen Z adults are stuck in the lowest knowledge bracket — right as they’re facing student loans, first paychecks, and their first 401(k) decisions. Kolluri’s warning is worth sitting with: low financial literacy at that life stage sets a trajectory that’s difficult to reverse.

Gen X isn’t off the hook either. They scored better than Gen Z, but they’re the sandwich generation — often supporting aging parents and kids at the same time, with retirement now close enough to see but not close enough to feel secure about. That’s a lot of financial complexity landing on a generation that got very little formal money education to begin with.

It’s only too late if you don’t start now.

You don’t fix a culture-sized problem by trying harder alone, at 11pm, doom-scrolling financial “advice” from strangers. You fix it with a clear system, a plan built around your actual life, and someone in your corner who knows the traps because they’ve walked other people through them.

That’s the work we do at Get Priorities Straight. Not selling you products. Not another quiz. A real plan for where your money goes and why — so you’re not part of next year’s statistic. When you’re intentional about your spending instead of reactive to it, you’re in control — you get real choice, more freedom to say yes to what matters, and the peace of mind that comes from actually knowing where you stand.

If any of this hits home, let’s talk. Book a free Discovery call and let’s get your priorities straight.