A Educação Financeira e sua Influência nas Decisões de Consumo e Investimento: proposta de inserção da disciplina na matriz curricular

Abstract

The main purpose of Finance Education is to prepare people how to deal with the nowadays increasingly complex situations which broach finance issues and their numerous and varied products. Making decisions to invest and alternatives to savings accounts are considered as matters of difficult access by people in general. The issue raised here is whether fiancé education has influence on the making of consumption decisions, investments and getting into debt. Therein, the research problem is related to the making of decisions by people concerning finance issues and also whether the lack of knowledge would be a decisive factor by making decisions which are not optimized. This research work was carried out by students attending courses in Business Administration, Accounting, Economics, and Mathematics at UENP Universidade Estadual do Norte do Paraná FAFICOP Campus, whose sample comprises 587 students. The questionnaire applied in it poses 25 questions and requires background knowledge in concepts such as cash flow, value of money over time, cost of chance and risk. Based on the analysis of the results achieved, the research also proposes the insertion of the discipline Finance Education as an elective one into the curricula of the courses at issue, as part of the basic syllabus content available to the students of all those courses, offering suggestions concerning activities which show clearly the use of electronic spreadsheets.