Midlife Money Worries

Here’s something we don’t talk about nearly enough: How financial worries can ramp up our stress levels and limit our life choices in midlife. A 2021 article published in the journal American Psychologist warned about the combined impact of growing financial pressures, a shrinking social safety net, and increased mental and physical health challenges in particular (all of which are interconnected). To put it bluntly: This is not your parents’ or grandparents’ midlife experience. It’s a whole lot messier and more precarious.

Many midlife women find themselves on financially shaky ground

It’s no wonder there’s so much anxiety among midlife women in particular about the financial implications of growing older. There’s so much to feel anxious about. Sure, women who are moving through midlife today are more likely to have had full-time jobs outside the home than their mothers or grandmothers did, but that doesn’t mean they’re necessarily on more solid ground financially.

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to interview 118 midlife women about their lives and experiences. (This was while I was researching my 2022 book Navigating The Messy Middle: A Fiercely Honest and Wildly Encouraging Guide for Midlife Women.) Given that there’s still such a strong cultural taboo about being open and honest about your finances, I was surprised how many of my interviewees were willing to talk about their money worries. A key takeaway for me: Women who’ve hit a rough patch financially aren’t the only ones who are anxious about their financial futures. Even women who have good jobs and who have been able to build up a bit of a nest egg for the future tend to find themselves circling the same, worrisome question time and time again: “Will this actually be enough to live on?”

"I don't allow myself to think about it"

Of course, for some women, the anxiety is so great that they don’t even allow themselves to dwell on the realities of their financial situation. I’m thinking about a conversation I had with a 42-year-old woman named Emily, who told me that, when it comes to money, she tends to want to bury her head in the sand. “I know there’s not enough money in there,” she said, referring to her retirement savings account. “If I look at the trajectory of that money, it’s pointing straight to eating cat food when I’m 90. I don’t allow myself to think about it.”

Feeling angry and misled, or guilty

Some of the women I spoke to told me that they felt angry and misled—like they were sold a bill of goods about an aspirational midlife lifestyle that is only a possibility for a privileged few.

Others were quick to pivot to a place of self-blame, mistakenly deciding that they must have made a lot of bad mistakes along the way to end up in such dire straits financially, when, in fact, they were dealing with systemic issues (the fact that women still do the majority of care work, for example) and or a series of unfortunate curveballs. They talked about relationship breakups, business failures and bankruptcies, job losses, personal health crises, family members’ health crises, and how they needed to take a break from the workforce to take care of someone else (typically a child or an aging parent). There are a lot of different types of situations that can jeopardize a midlife woman’s financial health—and sometimes there can be a snowball effect, with one kind of crisis triggering another crisis (for example, a relationship breakup necessitating the need to change jobs or sell a family home).

Some midlife women who’d spent the better part of two decades raising children told me that they had expected that the financial pressures associated with parenting would ease once their children grew up and left home, only to discover that their children—now young adults—still needed some degree of financial support.

It’s a mind-boggling and deeply worrisome situation. The need to help keep their young adult children financially afloat can force midlife parents to stop saving for their own retirement or to dip into their retirement savings. And, I should add, it’s not that the parents or the kids are doing anything wrong. It’s simply becoming more and more difficult for a young person to get established financially, given the rising cost of living, and the sky-high cost of housing, in particular—which, in turn, puts added pressure on parents.

It's a lot to think about and to worry about—and there are no easy answers to any of this—but being willing to acknowledge and talk about the extent of the challenge is a crucial first step. Policymakers need to know that the current generation of midlife adults is struggling with financial pressures that can feel crushing.

In other words, it’s not just you.