Dirkx, Imke

Gerards, Ruud

Schreurs, Bert

Welters, Riccardo

English

Many households in affluent industrialised countries have low incomes and regularly forego on needs such as heating their house or buying essential clothing. Undoubtedly, COVID-19 since 2020 and rising inflation since 2022 will have exacerbated the situation considerably. Many households will have financial worries, or ‘money on their mind’. We have studied how financial worries vary over time, by surveying households in The Netherlands, Belgium and Australia bi-weekly over a period of 4 to 6 months. We find that financial worries and most of its theoretical outcomes such as psychological health, social capital investments and work self-efficacy, vary meaningfully over time. They vary, for instance, with the occurrence of positive financial events such as a gift from family/friend or tax returns. At the within-person level, changes in financial worries mainly go hand in hand with changes in mental well-being, and these associations are quasi-identical across countries. At the between-person level, people with higher levels of financial worries tend to have lower levels of well-being. People with higher levels of financial worries are less likely to grow their social networks or feel competent at work. The association between financial worries and mental well-being can be dampened by several personal factors. For instance, the results suggest that extraverted and open-minded people cope better with financial worries than their introverted and close-minded counterparts. This inspires one of our recommendations, that companies develop interventions that increase employees’ psychological capital so that employees can better cope with stressors, especially financial uncertainty, and its associated worries

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Money on my mind: investigating the dynamics of financial worry

https://cris.maastrichtuniversity.nl/files/112659497/Money_on_my_mind_investigating_the_mechanisms_of_financial_worry_Imke_Dirkx_Ruud_Gerards_Bert_Schreurs_and_Riccardo_Welters.pdf

Money on my mind: investigating the dynamics of financial worry

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Maastricht University Research Portal