Financial crises put stress on the society of the country of our investigation, whose financial vulnerability is raising from high indebtedness, a history of defaulted loans, and an insufficient level of financial literacy. In this context, financial awareness has been recognised as a means for decreasing households’ exposure to financial difficulties, bridging crisis periods with the substantial precautionary holding of liquid assets, and improving their well-being over longer periods of time. Raising financial awareness is a crucial policy aim, and has been investigated in this study as well. A questionnaire survey was completed by Hungarian university students across different majors, to assess the financial literacy level of the responders from their own perspective. In addition to this, we have investigated their e-banking habits. According to our findings, different student groups (clusters) have been identified by means of Ward analysis (where the significance of clusters were tested by ANOVA). Our results confirm that across all clusters the university students place their trust in non-governmental organisations and central bank foundations rather than those of the financial institutions in evolving financial literacy. This outcome of our study may provide an argument for designing policy incentives for raising financial awareness in an institutionalised way, relying on the role of the privately funded NGOs and on the central bank.

Decrease in the willingness of childbearing is an international phenomenon that afflicts Hungary just like any other country. Following the consolidation after the 2007/2008 crisis, new types of economic policy tools have been introduced in Hungary to improve birth rates. In consent with the arguments of former international research, the study assumes that although the factors affecting birth rates are wider than fiscal incentives, the government is able to have a considerable effect on achieving the required rate of reproduction via home settlement subsidies, and for this purpose, it has to ensure fiscal sustainability. The paper aims at providing an outlook for the period 2020–2040, in respect of the possible fiscal obligations of the family home settlement benefit that is an important pillar of the Hungarian family subsidising regime. Demographic data and the regulation for family home settlement benefit serve as the model computation framework. The calculations demonstrate that the family subsidising regime imposes sustainable commitments to the fiscal budget, and may change the birth rate trends favourably.