Our research
Wesley Mission’s latest report, Making ends meet: Financial stress is not just about money, contains input from multiple sources including a literature review, a focus group with Wesley Mission financial counsellors and case study interviews with people who have sought financial counselling from Wesley Mission. The actual results are from a quantitative survey which was conducted in April, 2010 and consisted of 313 telephone interviews and 308 online interviews.
Key findings
Here are some of the main findings:
- Financial stress in NSW is becoming more acute
- More than half the people in NSW are worried about their future financial situation
- Electricity cost increases are hurting
- Financial stress is leading to other health and social problems
- Households money management skills not well developed
- People leave it too late to seek help
- Download the executive summary of the report (90 KB | PDF)
- Download the full report (4 MB | PDF)
For 850,000 homes in NSW, this Christmas wasn't a happy one.
That’s the staggering number of households struggling to make ends meet, according to recent Wesley Mission research.
Implications for policy
The Wesley Report calls for a number of actions and new initiatives to tackle the issue of financial stress. These cover areas such as:
- the need for more public education on financial money management
- providing training in financial literacy for people working in the social services sector
- urgent action on many fronts to make housing more affordable
- an expansion of financial counselling services
- further measures by the financial services sector to increase information and protection for consumers using credit cards.
- Download implications for policy (630 KB | PDF)
- See previous Wesley Reports
