55% of Americans Say Their Finances Are Getting Worse

A client called me a few weeks ago sounding genuinely shaken. She’d just seen a headline: a record share of Americans say their financial situation is getting worse. Her business was doing fine. Her savings rate hadn’t changed. But the headline still landed like a gut punch.

“Should I be worried?” she asked.

Here’s what I told her — and it’s worth sharing with you too, because the data behind that headline tells a more useful story than the headline itself.

The numbers are real, and they’re historic.

According to Gallup’s most recent Economy and Personal Finance survey, 55% of Americans now say their financial situation is getting worse — the highest share Gallup has recorded since it began tracking this question in 2001. That’s higher than during the 2008 financial crisis. Higher than during the COVID-19 pandemic. This marks the fifth consecutive year that more Americans report worsening finances than improving ones — a streak with no modern precedent outside the Great Recession.

The specific worries paint a clear picture: 62% fear not having enough money for retirement, up from prior years. 60% worry about being unable to cover medical costs from a serious illness. 28% are worried about making minimum payments on their credit cards — up 11 percentage points since 2021. And separately, the Allianz Center for the Future of Retirement found that 67% of Americans are now more worried about running out of money than they are about dying — up 10 points in just a year.

That’s not background noise. That’s a population feeling genuinely disoriented.

Here’s the part that matters most: this isn’t just about the economy. It’s about clarity.

If you looked only at the objective numbers — credit card delinquencies, unemployment, inflation — the picture is real but mixed, not uniformly catastrophic. So why does the anxiety feel so much bigger than the data alone explains?

Because financial anxiety isn’t just a function of your net worth. It’s a function of whether you know where you stand.

A 2026 Fidelity Investments study found that 83% of people with a written financial plan feel confident about retirement — compared to just 38% of people without one. Charles Schwab found nearly the same pattern: 96% of people with a written financial plan feel confident about reaching their financial goals, and yet only about a third of people actually have one in place.

Read that gap again. The confidence isn’t coming from having more money. It’s coming from having a plan.

And working with an advisor doesn’t just build the plan — it measurably reduces the anxiety itself.

This isn’t a vague industry talking point. Vanguard’s most recent Emotional & Time Value of Advice survey put real numbers on it:

• 86% of advised investors report having more peace of mind about their finances than they did managing things on their own — rising to 88% among clients working with a human advisor.
• Advised investors are roughly half as likely to experience high financial stress compared with people managing their finances alone — 14% versus 27%.
• Among people working with a human advisor, 79% reported a decrease in negative emotions — anxiety, worry, sadness, and feeling overwhelmed — and 71% reported an increase in confidence and security.

Vanguard’s separate Advisor’s Alpha research — now in its 25th year — has consistently found that behavioral coaching (the discipline of helping clients stay the course instead of reacting emotionally to headlines and market swings) can add up to 2% in additional net portfolio value annually. Vanguard describes advisors as “emotional circuit breakers” — the person who interrupts the spiral before a bad headline turns into a bad decision.

So here’s the honest answer I gave my client:

The 55% of Americans who feel their finances are worsening aren’t wrong to feel something. Costs are genuinely up. Uncertainty is elevated. But the data is equally clear that the anxiety gap between “having money” and “feeling okay about your money” isn’t closed by earning more — it’s closed by having a plan, and having someone in your corner who helps you stick to it when the headlines get loud.

If you don’t have a current, written plan, click Book A Meeting.