Why Financial Literacy? Financial literacy begins with your first interactions with money, it is a lifelong journey—one that inevitably has good and bad moments. While you can develop financial literacy by consuming educational content about personal finance, you will also gain it through real experiences. Financial literacy is the ability to understand the pros and cons of a money decision, weigh the costs, and confidently decide what to do. But being financially literate doesn’t mean you know everything about money; rather, it equips you to seek out the answers you need in order to make a good financial decision.