The purpose of this quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group study was to determine the influence that a financial education intervention administered in First Year Experience courses had on students' perceptions of their financial behavior such as compulsive spending and credit card use. This study utilized the five-point Likert-type scales: Compulsive Buying Scale (d'Astous, Maltais, & Roberge, 1990) and the Degree of Irrational Credit Use Scale (d'Astous, 1990) to assess a student's predisposition to spend compulsively and to make unwise decisions with credit cards. This study included 502 students who were enrolled in a First Year Experience course at a mid-sized land-grant Great Plains university. The data were analyzed using t tests and analysis of covariance to determine if a significant difference existed between the groups. There were significant differences in the Compulsive Buying Scale pretest scores between the men and women, indicating that women may have a higher propensity to compulsively spend than men. Analysis of covariance found significant differences between the control group and both treatment groups for many individual questions on the Compulsive Buying Scale posttest as well as the composite posttest score (p <0.05). This revealed that the inclusion of financial education in first-year seminars makes a positive difference on the student's perception of their financial behavior regarding compulsive spending decisions.