Three in five adults are losing sleep over financial anxieties, according to a new poll, with women more likely to find themselves up at night than men. Older Americans were the most likely to get a good night’s sleep.
The most common worry is saving enough for retirement (39 percent), according to a new CreditCards.com survey. That’s followed by paying education (30 percent); health care or insurance bills (29 percent); being able to pay the mortgage or rent (26 percent); and paying off credit card debt (22 percent). On average, people were bothered by 2.3 of these issues.
More than two-thirds of women lost sleep over financial concerns, compared with 58 percent of men. Forty-four percent of females fretted about retirement savings, while only 35 percent of males did. A third of women were also bothered by health care and insurance bills, versus only a quarter of men.
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There were generational differences as well.
People were more likely to be worried about retirement savings as they got closer to their golden years, 40 percent for 30- to 49-year-olds and 46 percent for 50- to 64-year-olds. They have good reason to worry. Just 55 percent of Baby Boomers have any retirement savings at all. Of those, two in five have less than $100,000 saved, which equals $7,000 a year in retirement income—not a lot to live on.
However, those retirement savings concerns dropped off to 36 percent for Americans 65 and over, according to the survey. In general, money worries peaked before 65 and then fall off sharply.
Paying for college weighed on younger minds. Forty-five percent of young adults cited education expenses as their top worry, while a third of middle-aged Americans did. These concerns, too, are not unfounded.
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Seven in 10 graduates from public and nonprofit colleges had average of $28,950 in student loan debt in 2014, according to the non-profit Institute for College Access and Success. From 2004 to 2014, the average debt at graduation has increased at more than twice the rate of inflation.
