Paying bills, balancing a budget, sitting on hold with a bank. These tasks rarely take up much of anyone’s day, yet they can leave a distinct sour taste. A stack of unopened statements or an overdue tax form seems to weigh far more than the few minutes it takes to handle it. Why do such small chores carry such an outsized emotional load, and who ends up shouldering them?
A study published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance takes up these questions by measuring, minute by minute, how Americans spend time on financial tasks and how they feel while doing them. The researchers find that money management occupies a tiny slice of the day, is among the least enjoyable things people do, and is spread unevenly across lines of income, education, gender, age, and race.
A neglected corner of household economics
Economists have long studied how much people earn, save, and spend. Much less attention has gone to a different resource: the time it takes to manage all of it. José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal and José Alberto Molina of the University of Zaragoza in Spain, together with Jing Jian Xiao of the University of Rhode Island, set out to treat that time as a subject worth measuring in its own right.
Their starting point is that financial capability is not only about knowledge. It also depends on having the time and mental bandwidth to put that knowledge to use. The authors point out that the United States places heavy demands on individuals to manage their own financial lives, from choosing retirement contributions to navigating insurance plans and consumer credit. Time to handle these decisions, they note, is a scarce resource that is distributed unequally across society.
The team drew on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative dataset run by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. Since 2003, the survey has asked people to reconstruct a full 24-hour diary of their previous day, recording each activity along with where it happened and who else was present. The researchers isolated activities such as paying bills, banking, budgeting, filing taxes, and handling financial paperwork, then added up the minutes each person devoted to them. Their main sample covered 191,038 respondents.
Small in minutes, heavy in feeling
The first result is a matter of scale. On an average day, people spent just 8.3 minutes on financial activities. That is dwarfed by personal care and sleep (about 652 minutes), leisure (342 minutes), paid work (228 minutes), and housework (143 minutes).
To understand how those minutes feel, the authors turned to a special add-on called the ATUS Well-Being Module, collected in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021. For a handful of randomly chosen activities, respondents rated how happy, sad, tired, stressed, and pained they felt, and how meaningful the activity seemed, each on a scale from 0 to 6.
Financial tasks landed near the bottom for enjoyment. Happiness during financial activities averaged 3.85, lower than childcare (4.97), leisure (4.47), and even housework (4.29). Only studying scored lower. Stress during financial tasks (1.94) ran well above the levels reported during leisure (1.01) or personal care (1.20), approaching the stress of paid work (2.34).
Yet the emotional picture was not entirely negative. People rated financial activities as fairly meaningful, with a score of 4.44, second only to childcare. The authors read this as a sign that money management, though stressful, is seen as purposeful rather than trivial.
Who spends the time
The researchers had expected, based on earlier work, that people with fewer resources would spend more time on financial chores, budgeting and monitoring to stay afloat. Their data pointed the other way. People with more education and higher incomes spent more time on financial tasks, not less.
Someone with a university degree spent roughly 4.94 extra minutes a day on finances, close to 60 percent above the average. People earning more than $150,000 spent about 3.74 additional minutes, some 45 percent above the mean, while those in the lowest income group did not stand out from the reference category. The authors suggest this reflects the greater financial complexity that comes with more assets, investments, and opportunities to manage.
Gender showed a clear and persistent pattern. Being male was associated with 1.79 fewer minutes a day on financial activities, about 22 percent below the average. This gap held even after accounting for employment, education, household size, and income. The researchers interpret this as evidence of role-based divisions within households, where women tend to take on more of the day-to-day budgeting and administrative work, rather than a difference in ability.
Race was linked to differences too. White respondents spent nearly 60 percent more than the sample average on financial tasks, while Black and American Indian respondents spent somewhat more than average but less than White respondents. The authors connect these gaps to possible differences in financial inclusion and household financial roles, and note that the racial patterns held steady when they added income and education controls step by step.
The emotional cost is not shared equally
Beyond who spends the time, the study examined who feels the strain. Here the results largely matched the researchers’ expectations about financial capability. People with more education and income reported less stress, tiredness, and pain while handling money. Those in the highest income bracket reported stress lower by about 0.38 points, roughly a fifth of a standard deviation, than lower-income respondents. University-educated respondents reported meaningfully less pain during financial episodes.
Age moved in the opposite direction. Older individuals reported slightly more sadness, stress, and pain during financial tasks. The increase in stress amounted to about 0.04 points per year of age, a small effect that the authors suggest can build up over time. This fits their expectation that financial decisions can grow more taxing later in life.
Men reported lower stress, tiredness, and pain than women during financial activities, alongside a slightly lower sense of meaning. So women in this data both spent more time on money management and found it more emotionally draining. Married people and those working full time reported somewhat more positive feelings during these tasks, which the authors read as a possible cushioning effect of social and economic support.
The team also looked at how gender and employment interact. The tendency for men to spend less time on finances was weaker among full-time workers, and full-time working men reported more happiness and meaning and less stress during financial tasks than other groups. This suggests that attachment to the labor market, not gender alone, shapes both the time and the feelings involved.
What it means, and what it doesn’t
The authors argue that financial literacy programs might work better if they reach the people least likely to engage with money matters in the first place, and if they account for the emotional weight of these tasks rather than just the information involved. They also point to the gendered split in household financial labor as something policy could recognize, for instance through tools that support shared planning.
Several caveats deserve emphasis. The data is cross-sectional, capturing a snapshot rather than tracking people over time, so the study describes associations rather than causes. Unmeasured factors such as personality or financial literacy could shape some of these patterns. The authors also flag a specific concern about their finding that more time is linked to greater perceived meaning: it may run the other way, with people who already find finances meaningful choosing to spend more time on them. Finally, the survey does not track whether tasks were done online, leaving open how banking apps and, increasingly, AI assistants might reshape both the time and the emotional toll of managing money.
