Towards an effective budget course

This data set contains data of financially vulnerable individuals who participated in the project ‘Towards an effective budget course’ in 2017 – 2019. In collaboration with five Dutch local government or debt counseling organizations, we conducted a quasi-experimental field experiment. Financially vulnerable individuals are often associated with suboptimal financial behaviors. Evaluated financial education programs so far show difficulties to effectively reach this target population. To solve this problem, we built a behaviorally informed financial education program incorporating insights from motivational and behavioral change theories. In a field experiment among Dutch financially vulnerable people, we compared this program both with a control and a traditional program group. We collected data both before the program started and six months later. In comparison with the control group, we found a strong positive effect of the behavioral informed program on financial behavior, mainly explained by improved budgeting scores. Additionally, we found some evidence for a positive effect on financial skills and knowledge, but not on other outcomes. Contrary to our expectations, we did not detect any evidence that the behaviorally informed program performed better than a traditional program.