If knowledge is power, financial knowledge is fiscal power—and the lack thereof is the key to money woes.

That's according to a paper from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, which finds that those who are ignorant of finance can get into serious money trouble through that lack of knowledge.

The article, "Optimal Financial Knowledge and Wealth Inequality," by Annamaria Lusardi, Pierre-Carl Michaud and Olivia S. Mitchell, published in the Journal of Political Economy, points out just some of the problems the financially unsophisticated can get into via high fees and high-cost borrowing from such products as rent-to-own and payday loans.

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