The Impact of the Inflationary Environment on Individuals' Financial Culture and Purchasing Decisions

In today's world, it is increasingly challenging to make financially sound, forward-looking decisions. Since the 1990s, the services offered by the financial market have gradually expanded, requiring more and more knowledge to make a major decision. The 2008 economic crisis showed that society has very little and incomplete knowledge of how financial instruments and products work. After the 2008 economic crisis, there has been a gradual increase in the attention paid to financial literacy/culture research targeting younger generations, trying to find out the correlation between financial literacy, financial behaviours seen in the family and long-term financial well-being. National leaders and economic actors have realised that they can build a financially stable society for the future by starting financial education at a young age. The current generation, aged between 18 and 35, is the generation that has already learned basic financial skills at least in secondary school, and this influences their future financial decisions. The past year has seen unprecedented inflation in the world and in our country, and this scale of change has had a major impact on the lives of the younger generation. In this study, we explore the extent to which young people have been able to overcome the financial obstacles caused by inflation and how their financial culture has changed in the light of a questionnaire survey conducted in Hungary.