There has been an increasing recognition that financial knowledge (i.e., literacy) is lacking across the population. Moreover, there is recognition that this lack of knowledge poses real problems as credit, mortgages, health insurance, retirement benefits, and savings and investment decisions become increasingly complex. Financial Decisions Across the Lifespan brings together the work of scholars from various disciplines (family and consumer sciences, economics, law, finance, sociology, and public policy) to provide a broad range of perspectives on financial knowledge, financial decisions, and policies. For consistency across the volume each chapter follows a similar format: (1) what individuals know or need to know (2) how what they know