“As good as it may feel to have taxes behind you, the information that you’ve just gathered is an up-to-date roadmap of your financial life right in front of you,” said Gregory J. Anton, chairman of the AICPA’s National CPA Financial Literacy Commission. “Don’t simply file and forget your tax return. Use it as a tool to help you in developing a plan that will put you on the path to reach your financial goals.”

As one might imagine, a lack of financial literacy can be expensive. The National Financial Educators Council, in a recent poll, asked about 1,500 adults this year a single question: "During the past year (2020), about how much money do you think you lost because you lacked knowledge about personal finances?" The average amount named was $1,634 per adult. By extrapolating these results to be representative of the approximate total of U.S. adults (254 million), it estimated that financial illiteracy cost the country's citizens more than $415 billion in 2020.