Abstract
Households have become increasingly responsible for meeting distant financial needs -- specifically paying down student loans, saving for retirement, and saving for college. This study, using data from the 2012 FINRA Foundation Financial Capability Survey, nevertheless finds that a household's financial satisfaction is highly correlated with its ability to meet its day-to-day needs, with much more muted relationships with its protection against risk and accumulation of savings to meet future needs. Nor do subjective assessments become much more sensitive to distant deficits if the household's day-to-day finances are in reasonably good shape or if assessment is made by a financially literate individual. Households thus cannot be expected to devote much effort to addressing distant deficits by themselves. They need initiatives that raise their awareness of distant financial deficits, such as broadcasting simple rules-of-thumb and providing ready access to quick financial check-ups; and compensate for their on-going lack of awareness, such as structures that make it easy and automatic to address such deficits.