Financial Behavior and Attitudes of Asians Compared to Other Racial/Ethnic Groups in the United States

Most research studying family financial behavior of racial/ethnic groups has ignored Asian households or arbitrarily combined them with other racial/ethnic groups. We treated Asian households as a separate racial/ethnic group to compare twelve financial behaviors and attitudes of Asian households to those of three other racial/ethnic groups: White, Black and Hispanic. Using multivariate analyses with the 2010 Survey of Consumer Finances, we found differences in seven behaviors/attitudes between Asian households and each of the other three household types, although the differences were not consistent across groups except for a lower credit delinquency rate of Asian households. Our results suggest that Asian households should be analyzed as a separate group and should not be combined with other racial/ethnic groups for comparison purposes.