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How Financially Literate Are You With Investing?

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How Financially Literate Are You Compared to the Average American?

Are You Financially Literate?

If you’ve ever paid attention to any report on financial literacy from around the world, you’ll likely know that the results aren’t exactly awe-inspiring.

For example, according to one global survey, only about 33% of adults are financially literate.

Americans tend to fare better on average, but not as much as you might imagine. In fact, as we showed in our infographic on the Financial Literacy Problem, one ongoing survey actually sees average U.S. performance slowly dropping over time.

It raises the question: what do people actually know about money, investing, and wealth?

Investment Literacy

A recent poll by Lexington Law aimed to get a sense of U.S. financial literacy, with a focus on basic investment knowledge on stocks, bonds, and building a safe portfolio.

Specifically, it asked 4,000 Americans four different multiple choice questions:

  1. What is the safest investment type?
  2. What happens to bond prices when interest rates rise?
  3. What is a bull market?
  4. What happens to your stock if a company goes bankrupt?

If you think you know the answers to even two of these questions, you are off to a good start!

The survey ultimately found that the average score on this test was 48.8% – meaning that Americans get slightly fewer than two questions correct on average.

Cheat Sheet

Question #1: Safest Investment
Based on the options provided on the multiple choice, the correct answer was Treasury Bonds. Roughly 53% of Americans would get this right, if asked.

Question #2: Bond Prices
Only 25% of respondents said that bond prices would decrease if interest rates rise, which is the correct answer. To be fair, this relationship is somewhat counterintuitive.

Question #3: Bull Market
With the current bull market becoming the longest in history this month, this terminology has been all over the news. That said, just 53% of respondents understood a bull market to be a period in which stock prices are expected to rise.

Question #4: Bankruptcy
If you own a stock and the company goes bankrupt, what happens? Interestingly, people fared best on this question, with 64% realizing that the stock becomes “virtually worthless”. It’s worth noting, however, that a 64% success rate is still the grading equivalent of a “D”.

How did you do on this test – are you financially literate about investments? Where did you go wrong?

If you need to brush up on investing knowledge, don’t forget to visit our Wealth 101 project that features easy-to-use infographics about personal finance topics.

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Visualizing All of the U.S. Currency in Circulation

This graphic illustrates the amount of U.S. currency in circulation globally, by denomination, based on data from the Federal Reserve.

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Visualizing All of the U.S. Currency in Circulation

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Have you ever wondered how much U.S. currency is in circulation?

Every year, the U.S. Federal Reserve submits a print order for U.S. currency to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP). The BEP will then print billions of notes in various denominations, from $1 bills to $100 bills.

In this graphic, we’ve used the latest Federal Reserve data to visualize the approximate number of bills for each denomination globally, as of Dec. 31, 2022.

Breakdown of U.S. Currency in Circulation

The following table lists all of the data we used to create the visualization above. Note that value figures were rounded for simplicity.

Type of BillNumber of notes
in circulation (billions)
Value ($B)
$114.3$14B
$21.5$3B
$53.5$18B
$102.3$23B
$2011.5$230B
$502.5$125B
$10018.5$1,850B
$500-10,000*0.0004n/a

*$500-10,000 bills are listed as a range, and a total circulation of 0.0004 billion. Not included in graphic.

From these numbers, we can see that $100 bills are the most common bill in circulation, even ahead of $1 bills.

One reason for this is $100 bills have a longer lifespan than smaller denominations, due to people using $100 bills less often for transactions. Some businesses may also decline $100 bills as payment.

Based on 2018 estimates from the Federal Reserve, a $100 bill has a lifespan of over 20 years, which is significantly higher than $1 bills (7 years) and $5 bills (5 years).

If you’re interested in more visualizations on the U.S. dollar, consider this animated chart which shows how the dollar overtook the British pound as the world’s most prominent reserve currency.

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