Good credit card management doesn’t come just from what you know about finance, but from what you think you know, according to a national study by UNL economists Sam Allgood and William Walstad. Using data that measured 27,500 Americans’ actual and perceived financial knowledge, they examined how each trait affected credit card management, such as paying bills in full, paying late fees and exceeding credit limit. In all cases, respondents who perceived their financial knowledge as high had better credit card behavior than those who saw their knowledge as low, regardless of actual knowledge. For example, high self-perceivers were about 15 percent more likely to pay their credit card bills in full compared with equally knowledgeable low self-perceivers.

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