Financial Well-Being and Its Relationship with Subjective and Psychological Well-Being Among Emerging Adults: Testing the Moderating Effect of Individual Differences

Abstract

Most studies investigating the emerging adults’ (objective and subjective) financial well-being specifically focused on the main predictors of this construct, whereas only few studies tested the financial well-being as antecedent of possible outcomes during emerging adulthood. The current paper aims (1) to test the impact that the emerging adults’ subjective financial well-being (i.e., subjective perception of the own financial condition) has on their subjective and psychological well-being and (2) to verify if this relation is moderated by emerging adults’ individual differences respect to the way in which they can tolerate uncertainty and ambiguity. On a sample of 452 Italian and Portuguese participants (20–27 years old) a cluster analysis was performed in order to identify groups of emerging adults with similar patterns of uncertainty and ambiguity tolerance. We identified four groups: anxiety about ambiguity and uncertainty, comfort with ambiguity and uncertainty, black-and-white thinking, flexible thinking. Then, a multi-group path analysis was carried out in order to test if the relationships between the subjective financial well-being and the subjective and psychological well-being were invariant across groups. We found that the subjective financial well-being has a positive and invariant impact on the subjective well-being, whereas it has a positive but non-invariant impact on the psychological well-being. Implications of the results are discussed.