Abstract:

In recent years, the need to include contents related to Financial Education in Basic Education in Brazil has been discussed. Given the new conditions of Brazilian economy, not only after a period of good economic growth, but also with a major expansion of credit and purchasing power of the population, many argue the urgency of changes in the curriculum of schools, with the immediate incorporation of such matters. Furthermore, in Brazil, it can be said that the education system almost ignores the subject "Money." After coping with inflation for many decades, Brazilian people have not developed a financial planning culture and that may be due to a lack of solid Financial Education. Given this situation, Brazilian government instituted in the year 2010 the National Strategy for Financial Education (ENEF in Portuguese), a public policy that intends to help the development of financial education activities in schools that join the program, based on the exploitation of didactic situations presented in specific material developed for this purpose for teachers and students. The present work aims to study the level of financial literacy in schools that will adopt the program, to measure students' from the 5th to 9th grade prior knowledge on issues related to the use of the money and to verify habits linked to consumption, savings and debt. For this, two schools were selected, one public and one private.

The questionnaire sought to find:
(1) the level of financial literacy, dimension for which was built a performance index, having been treated as a dependent variable in the research,
(2) a measure of the student’s autonomy in financial matters
(3) the measure of intention to save, index produced from the understanding of beliefs, attitudes and perceived control associated with the act of regularly saving some money.

The results point to a low access to knowledge related to the use of money and high dependence on the family with regard to access to financial information. It was also mentioned that schools, so far, superficially address issues related to the use of money. In addition, differences were found in the consumption and savings habits among students from public and private schools.

Keywords:

Financial Literacy, Financial Education, Savings behaviour, Students.