Hawaii Leads U.S. in Financial Well-Being; Mississippi Last

by Nader Nekvasil and Alyssa Brown, Gallup.org, October 12, 2015 (excerpt)

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Hawaii residents had the highest financial well-being in the nation in 2014, followed closely by Alaska residents. Mississippi residents had the lowest financial well-being, with Tennessee not far behind.

These state-level data are based on daily surveys conducted from January through December 2014 as part of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. To assess financial well-being, Gallup and Healthways ask U.S. adults about their ability to afford food and healthcare, whether they have enough money to do everything they want to do, whether they worried about money in the past week and their perceptions of their standard of living compared to those they spend time with. Financial well-being is calculated on a scale of 0 to 100, where 0 represents the worst possible financial well-being and 100 represents the best possible financial well-being.

The financial well-being score for the U.S. as a whole was 59.7 in 2014, the first year Gallup and Healthways measured financial well-being using the current questions.

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