Think about the last time you sat down to pay bills, file taxes, or sort out a banking issue. Odds are, it wasn’t the highlight of your day. Even though tasks like these eat up only a sliver of the average person’s schedule, they tend to leave behind an emotional residue that’s out of proportion to the clock time they occupy.
A new paper published in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Finance puts a number on that feeling. Americans spend, on average, just 8.3 minutes a day on financial management activities. But during those few minutes, they report some of the highest stress levels and lowest happiness levels of any part of their day.
A question about the invisible labor of money
The research was led by José Ignacio Giménez-Nadal of the University of Zaragoza, along with José Alberto Molina (also at Zaragoza) and Jing Jian Xiao of the University of Rhode Island. Their starting point was a gap in how economists typically study household finance. Surveys capture what people earn, spend, and save, but rarely how much time they actually devote to the behind-the-scenes work of managing money, or how they feel while doing it.
That matters because, as the authors point out, the US places a heavy burden on individuals to navigate retirement accounts, health insurance plans, consumer credit, and tax filings largely on their own. Doing that well takes time and mental bandwidth, which are not distributed evenly across the population.
The team set out to test several ideas at once: who spends more time on financial tasks, whether those tasks feel worse for some groups than others, and whether education and income buffer the emotional toll.
Inside the data
The researchers drew on the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), a nationally representative dataset run by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau. Since 2003, the ATUS has asked respondents aged 15 and older to reconstruct their previous day in detail, logging every activity, who they were with, and where it took place. The full sample used here covered 191,038 individuals from 2003 through 2023.
Financial activities were defined by specific activity codes covering tasks like paying bills, banking, budgeting, filing taxes, handling financial paperwork, and travel connected to financial services.
For the emotional piece, the team turned to a supplemental Well-Being Module that the ATUS ran in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2021. In that module, respondents were asked to rate three randomly selected episodes from their day on a 0-to-6 scale for happiness, sadness, pain, tiredness, stress, and meaningfulness. Linking those ratings back to the activity codes let the researchers compare how financial tasks feel compared with other activities like leisure, housework, childcare, or paid work.
They then ran regression analyses connecting time spent and reported feelings to variables including gender, age, education, income, race, marital status, employment, and household composition, while controlling for state, year, activity duration, who else was present, and where the activity took place.
Who actually spends time on financial tasks
One of the clearer findings runs counter to an intuitive hypothesis: that people with less money would spend more time budgeting and tracking bills as a coping strategy. In the data, the opposite showed up.
People with a university degree spent about 4.94 more minutes a day on financial activities than those with less education, which works out to roughly 60% more than the 8.3-minute daily average. Income tracked in the same direction. Those earning between $75,000 and $99,999 spent about 3 extra minutes a day on financial tasks, and people earning over $150,000 spent roughly 3.7 extra minutes, about 45% above average.
The authors interpret this pattern as evidence that financial engagement tends to scale with the complexity and opportunity that come with higher income and education: more accounts to manage, more investments to monitor, more tax situations to sort out.
Gender was another sharp dividing line. Men spent about 1.79 fewer minutes per day on financial activities than women, a roughly 22% gap. The difference held up after accounting for employment, income, education, and household size, which the authors suggest points to durable gender norms around who handles day-to-day money management in the home.
Racial differences also showed up. White respondents spent notably more time on financial activities than the sample average, with Black, American Indian, and “other races” respondents also showing positive but smaller differences relative to a baseline reference group.
The emotional texture of managing money
When the team ranked daily activities by how people felt during them, financial tasks landed near the bottom. Average happiness during financial activities was 3.85 out of 6, above only studying. Average stress was 1.94, higher than any daily activity except study and paid work. Pain and sadness ratings were also elevated compared with most other activities.
There was one redeeming dimension: meaning. People rated financial activities at 4.44 on the meaningfulness scale, higher than leisure (4.06) and roughly on par with paid work and adult caregiving. The tasks might feel unpleasant, but respondents recognized them as purposeful.
Layered onto that overall pattern were sharp differences across groups. People with higher education and higher income reported less pain, tiredness, and stress while doing financial tasks. Those in the highest income bracket, for example, reported stress levels about 0.38 points lower than people in the lowest bracket, a gap equivalent to roughly a fifth of a standard deviation.
Older respondents reported more sadness, stress, and pain during financial episodes than younger ones. The per-year increase in stress was small, but it accumulates across decades, which the authors read as consistent with the idea that complex financial decisions grow more taxing as cognitive demands increase with age.
Gender cut a striking pattern here too. Women not only spent more time on financial activities, they reported higher stress, tiredness, and pain during them. Men reported a stress reduction of about 0.34 points compared with women, though they also rated the tasks as slightly less meaningful.
Married respondents reported somewhat higher happiness and lower stress during financial tasks than unmarried respondents, which the authors take as a sign that shared responsibility or social support may take some of the edge off.
When work and gender interact
Adding an interaction between gender and full-time employment sharpened the picture further. The gender gap in time spent on financial activities was smaller among full-time workers, suggesting that some of the difference reflects who has discretionary time available rather than gender alone.
Emotionally, full-time working men reported more happiness, more meaning, and less stress during financial activities than other groups, pointing to an interplay between labor market attachment and how financial chores are experienced.
What it suggests for policy and design
The authors argue that their findings have implications for how financial literacy and inclusion efforts are designed. If lower-income and less-educated individuals are spending less time on financial tasks and finding those tasks more emotionally draining, then programs built around more information alone may miss the point. The authors suggest that interventions need to account for the cognitive and emotional demands of financial engagement, not just the knowledge gaps.
They also note the gendered distribution of financial labor as a candidate for policy attention, pointing to tools that could facilitate shared household financial planning. And they flag emerging AI-based assistants, such as large language model tools, as a technology worth studying for whether it reduces the emotional cost of managing money, potentially more so for people currently bearing the heaviest burdens.
Caveats worth noting
The study is cross-sectional, so it captures associations rather than causal effects. Unobserved factors like personality, financial literacy, or cultural norms could be shaping both how much time people spend and how they feel. Time-use diaries also rely on self-reports, which carry their own biases.
The authors specifically flag one reverse-causality concern: people who already find financial activities meaningful may simply choose to spend more time on them, rather than time investment producing the sense of meaning. They also acknowledge that the ATUS doesn’t cleanly identify whether activities were done online or through apps, leaving the role of digital tools in this picture an open question for future research.
