Picture two people weighing the same offer: take $1,000 today or wait a year for $1,500. One is 30, the other is 70. Does age change how tempting the wait feels? And does it matter whether the person making the choice has a comfortable bank balance or is stretched thin? Researchers have spent decades trying to pin down how getting older shifts our financial choices, and the answers have stubbornly refused to line up.
A pair of studies published in Frontiers in Psychology offers a possible reason for the confusion. The work suggests that aging does change how people value future and uncertain rewards, but the changes depend heavily on income and differ depending on the type of decision involved.
Two ways we discount the value of a reward
The research centers on a concept called discounting. When people choose between money now and a larger sum later, the delayed amount tends to feel less valuable the longer they have to wait. This is “delay discounting.” A related idea, “probability discounting,” describes how a possible reward loses value as the chances of actually getting it shrink. Someone who would rather take a guaranteed $400 than a coin-flip shot at $1,000 is discounting the uncertain option steeply.
These tendencies are linked to real outcomes. Steeper delay discounting, meaning a strong pull toward immediate payoffs, has been associated with problematic financial decisions, substance use, and gambling. Because of these links, degree of discounting has been described by some researchers as a marker that cuts across many behavioral and psychiatric problems.
The trouble is that studies on how discounting changes with age have pointed in different directions. Some found older adults discount the future more steeply, some found the opposite, and recent large reviews concluded the overall age effect was small enough to be of “trivial” practical significance. Haoran Wan and colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis suspected something was being left out of those reviews: money. Income has been shown elsewhere to shape discounting, and if older and younger groups in earlier studies differed in income, that difference could have masked or muddied the role of age.
The buffering idea
The team built on what they call the buffering hypothesis, introduced in their earlier work. The reasoning goes like this. Financial scarcity is a source of stress, and stress tends to push people toward steeper discounting and more impatient choices. At the same time, research on personality suggests people tend to become more emotionally stable as they age. That growing stability, the authors argue, may cushion older adults against the stress of having little money.
If that is true, a specific pattern should appear. Among lower-income people, younger adults under financial pressure should discount steeply while older adults, better buffered against the same pressure, should discount less steeply, producing a clear age gap. Among higher-income people, where scarcity stress is largely absent, both younger and older adults should discount gently, and the age gap should shrink or vanish.
How the studies were run
The researchers recruited two separate samples through an online platform, screening for U.S. participants and balancing each age decade by gender. After dropping people who failed attention checks, Study 1 (delay discounting) included 596 participants and Study 2 (probability discounting) included 592, all aged 20 to 80, spanning household incomes from under $30,000 to over $100,000 a year.
Both groups completed what is called an adjusting-amount task using hypothetical money at three sizes: $150, $2,500, and $30,000. In the delay version, participants repeatedly chose between a smaller amount available now and a larger amount available after a set wait, ranging from one month to ten years. The immediate amount rose or fell based on each choice until it closed in on the point where the person valued the two options about equally. The probability version worked the same way, but instead of waits it used chances of payout, from a 5 percent shot up to 95 percent. Participants also completed a standard anxiety and depression questionnaire and answered questions about income, education, and health.
To measure discounting, the researchers used something called area under the curve. The detail to remember is that a larger area means gentler discounting, meaning the delayed or uncertain reward held onto more of its value, while a smaller area means steeper discounting.
What the analysis revealed
One early prediction held up cleanly. Among participants under 35, reported income had no meaningful relationship to discounting. The authors suggest this is because young adults’ stated income may not reflect their true financial pressure, since many still receive support from parents. For that reason, the main analyses focused on people 35 and older.
For delayed rewards, older adults discounted less steeply than younger adults, meaning they were more willing to wait for a larger payoff. This runs against theories predicting that older people, sensing shorter time horizons, would lean more toward the present. But the age pattern was not the same across income levels. The age-related shift toward patience showed up among lower- and middle-income participants and was essentially absent in the highest-income group, where younger and older adults already discounted gently. That is the pattern the buffering hypothesis predicted.
Probability discounting told a different story. Here, older adults were generally more risk-averse, discounting uncertain rewards more steeply. But the relationship with age was not a straight line. Risk aversion increased from young adulthood into middle age and then leveled off, with little change after roughly 60. Income mattered again: this curved age pattern appeared among the lowest-income participants but flattened out among the highest-income group, who held a fairly steady level of risk tolerance across the lifespan. The authors interpret this as income acting as a buffer in a somewhat different way, providing a stable resource base that insulates choices from the psychological shifts of aging.
The studies also reproduced a well-documented quirk: the size of the reward pushed delay and probability discounting in opposite directions. Larger delayed amounts were discounted less steeply, while larger probabilistic amounts were discounted more steeply. This held across age and income groups. In both studies, the influence of age was strongest for the smallest amount and weaker for the largest.
One earlier finding did not fully repeat. In the team’s prior, smaller study, statistically accounting for psychological distress erased the age difference in delay discounting. In this larger and more varied sample, distress did not significantly predict delay discounting, though anxiety did show a link to greater risk aversion in the probability study.
What to keep in mind
The authors are direct about the limits of the work. Both studies are cross-sectional, meaning they compare different people of different ages at a single moment rather than following individuals as they age. That design cannot separate the effects of aging itself from generational differences. People who came of age in different economic eras may simply carry different attitudes toward money and risk.
The rewards were also hypothetical, not real cash. The researchers point to prior studies finding that hypothetical and real rewards tend to produce similar discounting patterns, and they note that handing out $30,000 in a lab is not feasible. Still, stated preferences may not perfectly match real behavior.
Finally, the authors caution that income is only a rough stand-in for financial stress. Higher income tends to travel with other things, such as financial knowledge and accumulated wealth, so the gentler discounting they observed in well-off older adults might reflect acquired financial skill as much as emotional buffering. They recommend that future research measure subjective financial strain and financial literacy directly to tell these explanations apart.
Taken together, the studies argue against a one-size-fits-all account of how aging shapes financial decisions. As the authors put it, the effects of aging “follow distinct, domain-specific trajectories that are markedly influenced by socioeconomic context.” Patience for delayed rewards appears to grow with age, but mainly for those with less money, while caution toward risky bets follows its own curve.
