My sense would be that there are cases where people are taken for a ride -- extremely bad decisions around payday loans, high APR leasing, bad use of credit, gambling, etc. -- but it's unclear whether or not most of these come from a lack of financial education or rather a sense of struggle and fatalism around pre-existing lack of economic opportunity. Likewise, we can all name people we know who are single mothers and are diligent about credit and clip coupons and have great savings tricks, but for the most part this headroom might be enough to stave off drowning but it never enables freedom because the costs and salaries don't enable freedom.
By contrast, I know plenty of 6 figure earners who more or less don't give a shit and still manage to be more or less free. Some of them will reap what they sow come retirement time by virtue of having not invested well, but when we say freedom we typically mean something more here and now.
I'd love to see a longitudinal RCT that actually uses a paired subject design to look at the impact of a 2-4 year financial literacy component to education. My guess is that the effects, though probably positive in sign, would be marginal in magnitude.
The article motivates this as "people on benefits spend them without budgeting", but another way to look at this is that 30 years ago, people on benefits had access to a robust council housing market, the ability to climb the property ladder, career advancement prospects even in unskilled labour, and a better public pension system than now. Maybe financial literacy has declined, maybe scams have increased, but it seems like the biggest free variable is the degree of comfort state support, even if budgeted well, provides. This is pretty well documented; Ken Loach's I Am Daniel Blake covers this, the well-regarded "Up" documentary series is unintentionally almost entirely focused on the effects of the erosion of the welfare state, deindustrialization, and the death of blue collar opportunity...