Financial Well-Being: A Conceptualization and Research Agenda is a 2017 academic paper published in the Journal of Business Research by Brüggen, Hogreve, Holmlund, Kabadayi, and Löfgren.
Summary: This paper tackles a basic problem, there was no agreed-upon definition of “financial well-being” across academic fields, so researchers were all measuring different things. The authors propose a new definition and build a framework showing what drives financial well-being (interventions, behavior, personal factors, context) and what it affects (individual, organizational, and societal outcomes). It’s more of a foundational/organizing paper than a study with new data.
Big Idea: Financial well-being is “the perception of being able to sustain current and anticipated desired living standards and financial freedom,” it’s subjective, so two people with identical incomes can feel very differently about their financial well-being.
Playable Takeaway: The paper’s list of “life events” that shake up financial well-being (marriage, job loss, having kids, buying a house, retirement) reads like a built-in event system for a life-sim or resource-management game, each event could trigger a shift in a character’s stress/freedom/security stats rather than just their cash total.