Financial well-being of Vietnamese students

This study aims to analyze financial well-being as well as the factors affecting the financial well-being of Vietnamese students. The study surveyed 658 students in Vietnam via email and Facebook groups with suitable survey subjects in the period from May to June, 2021. The study also collected demographic information and the status of independence or financial dependence of students participating in the survey in Vietnam. The study analyzes the direct and indirect effects of six groups of independent factors on the financial well-being of Vietnamese students through the PLS-SEM model. Empirical study results show that three factors, such as Financial Attitude, Financial Behavior, and Financial Self-Efficacy, have a direct impact, while two other factors, Financial Knowledge and Financial Skills, have an indirect impact on financial well-being of students in Vietnam. Although there are some limitations in the representative level of students participating in the survey, sampling methods and the number of respondents in the survey, the study achieved its research objectives. This study provides more empirical evidence and insights to the Ministry of Education and Training and economics universities in designing training programs that equip students with knowledge and skills to achieve financial well-being.
AcknowledgmentThe author wishes to acknowledge support from the Banking University of Ho Chi Minh City. The author would like to thank all the lecturers and students for their support in sharing the survey, and the students who completed the survey. This study was made possible thanks to all valuable support from relevant stakeholders.


INTRODUCTION
The COVID-19 pandemic has had a negative impact on the health and financial stability of individuals, households and the whole society. It also reaffirmed the importance of maintaining personal financial health in order to have savings and backups for future unexpected problems and financial contingencies. Financial health is important not only for individuals, but also for families and the whole society, as it can affect a person's health and well-being (Mahendru, 2020). Managing to maintain financial health is the basis for each individual to achieve financial well-being (Sehrawat et al., 2021).
Financial well-being has become an increasingly popular research topic, especially for students who often face financial difficulties (Gutter & Copur, 2011;Williams & Oumlil, 2015;Brüggen et al., 2017;Philippas & Avdoulas, 2020). The main reason for this problem is that students often commit overspending behavior due to the lack of knowledge and experience in personal financial management skills. In addition, they are often under pressure from high educational fees, uncertain job opportunities and debt burden (Gutter & Copur, 2011;Philippas & Avdoulas, 2020).
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows: Section 1 introduces the literature review and hypotheses development. Section 2 presents methods and data. Section 3 presents the results of the study. Section 4 presents a discussion. The paper ends with conclusions.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESES DEVELOPMENT
One of the main goals of every individual and household is to achieve financial well-being. It is a determinant of quality of life. An individual encountering financial problems is likely to be anxious and stressed about the income, debt, work, etc., these pressures affect the mental and physical health of each individual, thereby reducing work performance (Xie et al., 2020;Iramani & Lutfi, 2021).
Financial well-being is defined as a feeling of financial security both in the present and in the future. Financial well-being is the condition in which a person is able to meet the needs of life, feel secure in the future, enjoy life in the present, and be able to cope with unexpected financial demand in the future (Predergast et al., 2018 Financial knowledge is the knowledge and ability to understand, analyze and manage finances.
Financial knowledge helps with making the best financial decisions, avoiding financial problems and moving towards a state of financial well-being. One's financial knowledge requires developing financial skills and learning how to use financial tools, such as budget preparation, investment planning, and insurance planning. Financial knowledge is one of the key aspects of determining financial well-being. People with good financial knowledge tend to save more and invest more for the future. Research results show that there is a difference in financial happiness between male and female students, and financial socialization and financial knowledge are two factors that have a strong impact on the financial well-being of Malaysian students.
Gutter and Copur (2011) analyzed the impact of financial behavior on financial well-being of university students using the OLS regression method. The data for the study were collected in 2008 from a survey of 15,977 students at 15 higher education institutions in the United States. Research results indicate that demographic characteristics, financial characteristics, financial education and orientation have a strong influence on the financial well-being of American students.
The study proposes six research hypotheses, which are as follows: H1: The right financial attitude will positively affect financial well-being.
H2: Good perceived behavior control will have better financial well-being.
H3: Financial behavior has a positive effect on financial well-being.
H4: The higher the financial self-efficacy, the better the financial well-being.

METHODS AND DATA
The survey was conducted in June -July 2021 with the respondents being students at universities and colleges in Vietnam. At the end of the survey, 658 valid questionnaires were obtained. The survey questionnaire has been translated into Vietnamese to help respondents understand the information.
Survey data were collected through an online survey sent to email and Facebook groups with student members in June -July 2021. Then, the survey was shared by the lecturers and students who took the survey among Facebook groups whose members are mostly students. The questionnaire was designed based on the previous studies of Philippas and Avdoulas (2020) A snowball sampling method was employed in this study.
All 676 people took the survey but there were 18 invalid responses, so the dataset has a total of 658 valid responses. Invalid responses are responses that are missing information or all answers have the same value. Before analysis, the data were verified to ensure the validity of the responses and the variables were encoded. After removing invalid responses, the final dataset contains 658 valid responses. All raw data were pre-processed with Excel before being entered and analyzed with SPSS version 23.0 and SmartPLS version 3.2.9. Figure 2 Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics of demographic variables of Vietnamese students, including year, major, age, GPA, residence, and financial situation. Classified by academic year, the second-year students accounted for the highest number with 37.54% of the total 658 participants in the survey. Statistical results show that up to 83.28% of the students are in the business sector and the remaining 16.72% is from other sectors. In terms of age, the majority is 20-year-old with 228 students, which accounted for 34.65%. GPA from 3.0-3.5 accounted for the largest rate with 66.41%. There were 341 students renting apartments during studying at the university. In terms of financial status, 90.58% of students answered that they were financially dependent on their families, only 9.42% of students had the ability to be independent and financially self-sufficient during their studies.   Table 3 and Figure 3 present the result of the first PLS-SEM algorithm analysis based on the proposed research model.

RESULTS
After the first PLS-SEM algorithm in Figure 3 analysis results based on the proposed research model, the variables (i) Perceived behavior control and items (i) FB2, (ii) FK4 and (iii) FK5 were excluded from the model. In the next step, the research con-ducted the second PLS_SEM algorithm analysis to derive the final research model in Figure 4. Table 4 shows the result of the second PLS-SEM algorithm analysis. Figure 4 shows the final   The results of the PLS-SEM model presented in Figure 4 and Table 5 show that the model has a Chi-square statistical value of 1,427.483 with p-value = 0.000 < 0.005. The model receives an SRMR = 0.069 < 0.1 (Hulland, 1999); the research model is concluded to be consistent with the factors affecting Vietnamese students' financial well-being.
The results and reliability of this study were performed through non-parametric Bootstrap analysis (Bootstrap test). The technique of resampling over 1000 observations (n = 1000) with an initial sample size of 658 observations is a suitable strategy to test the model.

DISCUSSIONS
The results presented in Tables 5 and 6 show that the financial well-being of Vietnamese students is directly and indirectly affected by five factors: (i) Financial Attitude; (ii) Financial Behavior; (iii) Financial Self-Efficacy, (iv) Financial Knowledge, and (v) Financial Skills.
First, Financial Self-Efficacy is a significant factor that directly, positively and strongly affects the Financial well-being of students in Vietnam.
The results of empirical research on students in Vietnam indicate that students' confidence in making and implementing financial plans in the future leads to financial well-being. The results also confirm that the positive relationship between Financial Self-Efficacy and Financial well-being is similar to the studies by Renaldo et al. (2020 ) and Selvia et al. (2021).
Second, Financial Behavior is the second most influential factor on the financial well-being of students in Vietnam. Research results show a positive relationship that students who have right financial

CONCLUSION
The purpose of this empirical study is achieved when five groups of factors were identified that have a direct and indirect impact on the financial well-being of Vietnamese students. The main results show that Financial Self-Efficacy is the factor that has the strongest impact on financial well-being of Vietnamese students. Following are the factors Financial Behavior, Financial Attitude, Financial Knowledge and Financial Skills that are significant and affect the financial well-being of Vietnamese students. The study used the PLS-SEM method with a bootstrapping technique and re-sampling of 1000 to analyze the direct and indirect effects of factors on the financial well-being of Vietnamese students.
Although some specific objectives have been achieved, the study still has certain limitations such as: (i) surveyed students live mainly in Ho Chi Minh city. Therefore, these surveyed students do not represent all students in Vietnam; (ii) the representativeness of the research sample is not high due to the used snowball sampling method; and finally, (iii) the sample size of only 658 is too small to represent all of the nearly 1.7 million students in Vietnam.
The paper recommends that in order to help Vietnamese students achieve financial well-being, education managers and universities need to pay attention to providing financial knowledge and financial skills to Vietnamese students. In addition, the formation of good and correct Financial Behavior and Financial Attitude is very important from the family for students in Vietnam to achieve a state of financial well-being.