Do · ten statements · about three minutes
How are you actually doing?
Updated 2026-08-01 · Sources: 2 · CFPB Financial Well-Being Scale · raw total only
A net-worth figure will not tell you whether money is running your life. These ten statements are the Financial Well-Being Scale published by the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a research instrument, reproduced here as it stands. It asks about security and freedom of choice, which is much closer to what Scripture is interested in than the balance is.
Nothing you tick is stored, saved, or sent anywhere. There is no account, no cookie, and no request to any server while you answer. The arithmetic happens in the page in front of you and disappears when you close the tab.
What this number is, and what it is not
It is the raw questionnaire total, nothing more. The CFPB's official score is a 0 to 100 figure produced by a calibration table that differs by age group and by how the questions were put to you. We could not extract that table from the source document, and this site does not guess at tables it has not read, so you get the raw total, honestly labelled, instead of a confident-looking number we invented. If you want the official score, answer the same ten statements at consumerfinance.gov. The questions there are the same ones; the arithmetic afterwards is theirs.
It is also not a verdict on your faithfulness. A high score can belong to someone who has simply had an easier decade, and a low one to a household doing everything right in a year that went badly. Six of the ten statements (6 of them) describe strain, and strain is a circumstance before it is a character reference.
Scoring it by hand, and what the parts mean
- Each answer is worth 0 to 4 points. The number is printed beside it.
- Four statements are positive: 1, 2, 4 and 8. On those, the strongest agreement ("Completely", "Always") scores 4 and the weakest scores 0.
- Six statements are negative: 3, 5, 6, 7, 9 and 10, marked reverse above. On those, agreeing is the bad answer, so "Completely" or "Always" scores 0 and "Not at all" or "Never" scores 4.
- Add the ten numbers. The total runs from 0 to 40. Higher is better.
- Roughly: 32 and above means the strain statements mostly do not describe you; 24 to 31, stable with named pressure points; 16 to 23, several of them describe you; below 16, most of them do. Those bands are our plain description of the raw range, not CFPB categories.
Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me: Lest I be full, and deny thee, and say, Who is the LORD? or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.Proverbs 30:8-9
KJV. Agur asks for neither end of the scale, and gives a reason for each: too much and he forgets God, too little and he is driven to take what is not his. It is the only prayer in Scripture that treats a middle position as something to ask for by name, which is more or less what this questionnaire is measuring, from the outside.
Two places to go, whatever the number came out at. If the strain statements rang true, start with surviving real months and the bill triage tool, which sets the order to pay in when there is not enough to go round. If the number is high, the instruction in 1 Timothy 6:17-19 is addressed to exactly that situation, and it is not congratulations; see wealth: blessing and warning.