Financial literacy, self-control, self-esteem, and credit card utilization

Abstract

This study combines one personal financial management concept, money-related literacy, and psychological ideas, i.e., self-control and self-esteem, in one model to be statistically associated with credit card behavior by utilizing gender as the control variable. Therefore, this study investigates and analyses the effect of financial literacy, self-control, and self-esteem on credit card usage. Furthermore, this study employs 120 bank employees as samples, taken by a snowball sampling technique. Besides, this study surveys their perspective based on the close-ended questions in the questionnaire. After obtaining their responses, their validity and reliability are verified. Also, the goodness-of-fit model is detected. After the model fits the data, the structural equation model based on covariance is utilized to examine the causal relationship declared in the proposed hypotheses. After checking them, this study concludes that financial literacy, self-control, and self-esteem successfully create credit card utilization. Employees with strong financial literacy, self-control, and self-esteem are responsible for owning credit cards because they tend to use them less and pay their bills on time. Females have a positive propensity for credit card utilization to achieve their identity and emotional status. As an implication, the study recommends females instantly convert their transactions into installments and pay the bill in the maximum and minimum ranges to avoid a decrease in credit scores. Besides, internal and external marketing is needed to attract female employees working at similar banks or other banks that cannot issue credit cards.