According to Principal Financial Group Inc.’s “Financial Well-Being Index,” your fellow citizens are getting more conservative with their finances.

They asked people how they plan to spend their tax refund, and after looking at the results, Dan Houston, Principal’s executive vice president of retirement and investor services, said, “This belt-tightening shows a swing toward financial resolve by Americans.”

I’m not so sure about that. I know a number of Americans personally. I’ve been in danger-laced shopping malls with them in December. I’ve seen what they do in Las Vegas when they think no one is looking. I’ve watched them in car showrooms, inquiring about the sport option package.

When it comes to handling money, these people are nuts.

In the first place, they get excited about receiving a tax refund, as if their number just came up on a roulette wheel at Prairie Meadows. Some sweet day, when they realize that the government is just returning their money after playing with it all year, that will be one step toward good money management.

But a lot of steps will remain, and I don’t see them making the climb unless there’s a big shiny toy at the top. In America, you don’t need a savings account like the one your timid grandmother had; what you need is a 52-inch, flat-panel, high-definition TV so you can watch “Wheel of Fortune.”

I read the other day that Americans expect a new car to last three to five years. Come on, socks last three to five; a car can go 10 or 12, easy. My brother-in-law drove his Japanese pickup to the moon – 240,000 miles. (Not literally. Although, come to think of it, I haven’t seen him for quite a while.)

I read that 80 percent of U.S. home mortgage refinancings in 2005 were finagled just to get cash to buy more stuff. Americans yanked $243 billion from their home equity, and a guy at Freddie Mac sized it up this way: “Previous years pale in comparison.”

But then, previous years pale in comparison to almost everything we’re doing now – and previous decades are pale enough to require medical assistance. As I recall those decades, houses didn’t have theaters, and middle-class parents didn’t take their young kids to Hawaii for the holidays.

Principal’s research found that nearly half of U.S. workers plan to use tax refunds to pay down or pay off short-term debts. Admirable, but here’s another way to look at it: What’s with all the short-term debts? The average American household has a $7,750 credit card bill hanging around its neck along with all that jewelry.

The Consumer Federation of America reported last year that the nation’s young women “were particularly poor savers; 55 percent of women ages 25 to 34 had less than $500 in an emergency fund.”

The only positive here is that America traditionally has been a good place to recover from a slow start.

Once, long ago, a kindly landlord told me his life story: Conscripted into the German army by the Nazis during World War II, captured by the Russians, seven years in a Siberian labor camp … I’m guessing he didn’t have a lot in savings after that.

But the spunky little guy persevered, made his way to the gold-plated United States and somehow managed to buy a small apartment building in Chicago. He seemed to be doing fine.

I don’t think he was spending much on jet skis and snowmobiles, though. r