Abstract:

While personal financial planning is of significant importance in ensuring financial satisfaction in the future, an extensive search of four large online academic databases, namely EBSCOhost, Emerald, Google Scholar and Sabinet Reference revealed no evidence of a validated attitudes-towards-personalfinancial-planning scale within the South African context. To address this gap in the literature, the purpose of this study was to validate attitudes towards personal financial planning as a five-factor structure within the South African context. A single cross-sectional descriptive research design was followed in this study. The study used a survey self-administered questionnaire to collect the necessary data from a convenience sample of 385 black Generation Y students enrolled at two Gauteng-based public South African university campuses. The techniques used to analyse the data included Pearson’s product-moment correlation analysis, multicollinearity analysis, reliability measures and confirmatory factor analysis using the maximum likelihood method. The findings of the analysis validate that the proposed measurement model of attitudes towards personal financial planning is a five-factor structure that comprises the financial planning process, credit planning, insurance planning, investment planning and estate planning. The measurement model showed internal-consistency reliability, composite reliability, construct, convergent, discriminant and nomological validity. Moreover, the measurement model displayed no evidence of multicollinearity between the factors. In addition, the model fit indices were indicative of good model fit.

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