In January 2026, the CFP Board — the professional body for certified financial planners in the United States — released the results of a survey of more than 1,100 Americans between the ages of 25 and 64. The headline finding was not about retirement savings or investment strategy. It was about friendship.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they had declined a social invitation in the past two years primarily because they could not afford to attend. From weddings (13%) to family holiday gatherings (23%) to trips with friends (30%), Americans are quietly withdrawing from the events that sustain their social bonds — not because they don't want to go, but because the cost of participation has become prohibitive.
More striking than the avoidance itself was the silence surrounding it. Of those who declined invitations, 56 percent never told the person who invited them that money was the reason. They made excuses. They said they were busy. They disappeared from group chats. The shame of being unable to afford a dinner or a weekend trip was, for many, worse than the loneliness of missing it.
This finding sits at the intersection of two well-documented crises — the cost-of-living squeeze and the loneliness epidemic — and suggests they may be more deeply entangled than either field has fully acknowledged. What follows is a review of the emerging research on how financial strain drives social isolation, who is most affected, and what the evidence suggests about breaking the cycle.
The Scale of the Problem: A Global View
The CFP Board survey captures an American snapshot, but the broader pattern is global. In September 2025, Thomas Fuller-Rowell of Auburn University and colleagues published the most comprehensive analysis of worldwide social isolation trends to date in JAMA Network Open. The study drew on 2,483,935 person-level assessments across 159 countries and 16 annual time points from the Gallup World Poll.
The headline finding: the global prevalence of social isolation increased from 19.2% to 21.8% between 2009 and 2024 — a 13.4% relative increase — with virtually the entire rise occurring after 2019. But the study's most significant contribution may be its income analysis. Fuller-Rowell's team examined isolation rates by within-country income groups and found a persistent gap: lower-income individuals were consistently more isolated than higher-income individuals.
The disparity peaked in 2020, when 26.4% of people in the lowest income group reported social isolation, compared with 15.6% of those in the highest income group — a gap of 10.8 percentage points. While this gap narrowed slightly in subsequent years, it remained substantial through 2024. The researchers noted that the pandemic-era increase was "disproportionately concentrated among lower-income groups," suggesting that economic vulnerability amplifies the social effects of large-scale disruptions.
This is not simply a story about poverty in low-income countries. The pattern held across national contexts. Financial strain appears to erode social connection through mechanisms that operate independently of absolute wealth — what matters is not how much you have, but whether what you have is enough to participate in the social life around you.
How Financial Strain Becomes Social Isolation
The CFP Board data, together with several supporting studies, suggests at least three distinct pathways through which financial pressure translates into social disconnection.
1. The Cost of Participation
Modern social life is expensive. A dinner out, a weekend trip, a birthday gift, a round of drinks, a concert ticket, a holiday gathering with travel costs — the cumulative cost of maintaining an active social life adds up quickly. A 2026 analysis reported by San.com found that young adults spend up to $1,775 over six months simply to participate in social activities with friends.
For people experiencing financial strain, these costs create a binary choice: spend money you don't have, or stay home. The Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll, conducted in spring 2025 with approximately 2,000 Americans aged 18 to 29, found that 42% of respondents said they were "barely getting by" financially, with young women (47%) and young Latinos (52%) disproportionately affected. For nearly half of young adults, the economic foundation required for regular social participation is simply absent.
2. The Shame Spiral
The CFP Board's finding about silence — 56% never disclosing the financial reason for declining — points to a second, more insidious mechanism. Financial struggles carry significant stigma, particularly among younger adults whose peers appear to be thriving on social media. The survey found that more than 80% of Americans intentionally avoid at least one money topic with the people closest to them. Additionally, 85% reported feeling "out of sync" with their friends' financial situations in areas like housing purchases (28%), travel (28%), and career progress (26%).
This creates a compounding cycle: financial strain leads to event avoidance, event avoidance requires a cover story, the cover story prevents honest conversation about the underlying problem, and the resulting distance erodes the relationship further. The person experiencing financial difficulty becomes increasingly isolated not only from activities but from the emotional support that could help them cope.
3. The Anxiety Overlay
In July 2025, AMFM Healthcare released the results of a survey of 725 U.S. adults examining the mental health effects of financial stress. The findings were stark: 87% of respondents reported feeling anxious about their finances, with 79% saying that anxiety had worsened over the preceding months. Among the downstream effects, 67% reported strain on personal relationships and 77% reported disrupted sleep.
Financial anxiety doesn't just prevent people from attending social events — it changes how they show up to the ones they do attend. When a person is preoccupied with money worries, their capacity for the kind of present, emotionally engaged interaction that sustains friendships is diminished. They may be physically present but psychologically absent, leading to interactions that feel hollow to both parties.
The Long Shadow: Financial Strain Across the Lifespan
One of the most striking recent findings comes from Deborah Finkel, a research scientist at USC Dornsife's Center for Economic and Social Research, whose team analyzed data from the Swedish Twin Registry — a longitudinal dataset tracking approximately 1,600 adults over decades. Their results, published in May 2025, suggest that the relationship between financial strain and loneliness is not limited to acute episodes of economic hardship.
The study found that people who experienced financial strain in childhood showed elevated loneliness symptoms nearly 20 years earlier than those who had felt financially secure growing up. When economic stress accumulated over time — persisting from childhood into adulthood — the effects on emotional well-being were especially pronounced, extending into participants' 70s and beyond.
Two aspects of this finding deserve attention. First, the relationship was cumulative: it was not a single period of hardship but the accumulation of financial stress over time that produced the strongest association with loneliness. Second, the study identified a protective effect of upward mobility — people who improved their financial situation over time reported lower levels of loneliness, even if they had started from a position of strain. This suggests the relationship between money and social connection is not deterministic. It can be interrupted.
The Swedish Twin Registry design also offers a methodological advantage: by studying twins, the researchers could partially control for genetic and shared-environment factors, strengthening the case that financial strain itself — rather than confounding variables like personality or family dysfunction — plays a causal role in the pathway to loneliness.
The Structural Dimension
It would be convenient to frame financial loneliness as a problem of individual budgeting — if people managed their money better, they could afford to socialize. The research does not support this interpretation.
The OECD's report on Social Connections and Loneliness in OECD Countries, published in October 2025, examined the structural barriers to social participation across its member nations. The report found that people with lower incomes, those experiencing unemployment, and those with lower levels of education were consistently more likely to experience deprivations in social connections. Critically, the OECD identified that those with lower incomes or recent financial stress have fewer resources to spend on social leisure activities — highlighting a structural barrier rather than a behavioral one.
The cost of socializing has not remained constant. Housing costs have driven young people into smaller apartments further from city centers, increasing the time and money required to see friends. The decline of free or low-cost "third places" — public libraries, community centers, parks with programming — has reduced the options available to people who cannot afford commercial social venues. Even digital connection carries costs: reliable internet access, a recent smartphone, subscription-based platforms.
Fuller-Rowell and colleagues make a related observation in their JAMA Network Open study. They note that 54 of the 159 countries they examined showed worsening isolation trends by 2024, while 41 showed improvements — suggesting that national-level factors, including economic policy and social infrastructure, play a meaningful role in determining population-level isolation outcomes. Isolation is not simply a function of individual circumstances; it is shaped by the environments and systems within which people live.
What the Research Does Not Tell Us
Several important caveats apply to this body of evidence.
Causation remains difficult to establish. The CFP Board survey, the AMFM Healthcare survey, and the OECD report are all cross-sectional or descriptive in nature. They show associations between financial strain and social isolation, but they cannot definitively prove that one causes the other. It is plausible that loneliness contributes to financial difficulty (through reduced work performance or poor financial decision-making) just as financial difficulty contributes to loneliness. The Finkel study, with its longitudinal design and twin controls, provides stronger evidence for a causal direction, but it remains a single study in a specific population.
The economic costs of loneliness itself remain contested. A systematic review published in PharmacoEconomics in 2025, examining 15 studies on the economic burden of loneliness and social isolation, found that cost-of-illness estimates ranged enormously — from US$2 billion to US$25.2 billion per year depending on the study, the country, and the methodology. Some studies found that lonely individuals had higher healthcare costs; others found lower costs. The authors concluded that the economic evidence base remains "inconsistent," and that claims of specific dollar figures should be treated with caution.
Social participation may be protective even under financial constraints. The OECD report notes that social participation can buffer against the effects of low income on loneliness. This is encouraging, but it raises a structural question: if the very activities that could protect against financial loneliness are themselves expensive, how accessible is this buffer in practice? The research has not yet answered this satisfactorily.
Implications
Taken together, this body of research suggests several things.
First, loneliness interventions that ignore economic context are incomplete. Most loneliness programs focus on psychological factors — addressing maladaptive cognitions, building social skills, creating opportunities for interaction. These matter. But if a significant proportion of social isolation is driven by the inability to afford participation, then interventions that don't address cost barriers will miss a large part of the problem. As we noted in our review of loneliness interventions, the overall effect sizes of existing programs remain modest — and the financial dimension may be one reason why.
Second, the silence around financial difficulty is itself a barrier. The CFP Board's finding that 56% of people never disclose the financial reason for declining invitations suggests an enormous amount of hidden social withdrawal. Normalizing honest conversation about the costs of socializing — and creating social options that don't require significant expenditure — could address both the practical and psychological barriers simultaneously.
Third, the relationship between money and loneliness is bidirectional and cumulative. The Finkel study's finding that childhood financial strain predicts adult loneliness decades later underscores that this is not simply about current economic conditions. It is about the long-term effects of economic insecurity on social development, self-perception, and the capacity to form and maintain relationships. As we discussed in our analysis of Gen Z loneliness, economic pressure is one of several structural factors shaping this generation's social experience — and it may deserve more attention than it has received.
Finally, the design of social technology matters. If the cost of participation is a primary driver of social isolation, then platforms that reduce that cost — by enabling free or low-cost social interaction, by removing the need for expensive venues or activities, by connecting people based on shared interests rather than shared spending power — address a structural barrier that offline interventions often cannot. This is not a theoretical consideration. It is a design principle with direct implications for how social platforms are built and whom they serve.
A Note on What Comes Next
The research on financial strain and social isolation is relatively young. The CFP Board's survey, while informative, sampled only Americans aged 25 to 64. The JAMA Network Open analysis provides a global view but measures isolation, not loneliness — related but distinct constructs. The Finkel study draws on a Swedish population that may not generalize universally.
What the field needs is more longitudinal research that tracks the same individuals through periods of financial change, measuring the corresponding effects on their social connections. It needs intervention studies that test whether reducing the financial barriers to socializing — through subsidized community activities, free public gathering spaces, or accessible digital platforms — actually reduces loneliness at the population level. And it needs honest accounting of how much modern social life costs, and who is being excluded as a result.
The evidence we have, while imperfect, points in a consistent direction: money and loneliness are connected, the connection runs deep, and any serious attempt to address the loneliness epidemic must grapple with the economic structures that sustain it.
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