Personal finance research has found that financial deficit (e.g., indebtedness, hardly making ends meet) or financial shocks (e.g., job loss, foreclosure) are likely to create a higher level of financial stress. Defined as “a psychophysiological response to the cognition of imbalance, uncertainty, and risk in the realm of financial resource management decision making” (Heo, Cho, & Lee 2017, pp. 4-5), Heo, Cho, and Lee (2017) developed a new scale of financial stress incorporating emotional and physiological responses of financial stress. The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of psychological resources in perceiving financial stress. The psychological resources in this study are financial self-efficacy, external locus of control, self-esteem, and risk tolerance. These are factors known to be associated with diverse financial management behaviors. This study is significant in that it applies a new scale of financial stress that reflects biophysiological responses in addition to the affective and behavioral reaction.
