How Feeling Financially Secure Shapes Health After COVID-19

When the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe, it did more than overwhelm hospitals. It destabilized paychecks, savings accounts, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing you can pay next month’s bills. A new study from Brazil, published in the journal Trends in Psychology, suggests that how people feel about their money—not simply how much they earn—may be one of the most powerful predictors of how well they recovered, physically and psychologically, once the worst of the pandemic passed. The research, led by Nicolas de Oliveira Cardoso and colleagues at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul, offers some of the first systematic evidence that subjective financial well-being predicts a wide range of post-pandemic health and life outcomes, often more strongly than age, income, gender, or education.

The concept at the heart of the study is subjective financial well-being, abbreviated SFWB. Unlike objective measures such as bank balances or salary figures, SFWB captures a person’s own perception and evaluation of their financial situation. The researchers measured it using a validated 25-item instrument, the Multidimensional Subjective Financial Well-being Scale, which breaks the construct into distinct facets: a general cognitive assessment of one’s finances, expectations about one’s financial future, satisfaction with one’s ability to manage money, a materialistic dimension capturing whether one feels one has enough money, and a social dimension involving comparison of one’s finances with those of peers. This multidimensional approach matters, the authors argue, because people with identical incomes can perceive their financial situations very differently—and those perceptions, not the raw numbers, appear to drive health outcomes.

The theoretical scaffolding for the study draws on two influential psychological frameworks. Stress and coping theory, developed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, holds that insufficient financial resources act as chronic stressors that continuously tax an individual’s coping mechanisms, increasing vulnerability to anxiety, depression, and physical illness. Conservation of Resources theory, proposed by Stevan Hobfoll, adds that financial resources are central to acquiring and preserving other resources—social connections, psychological reserves, and the autonomy to make healthy choices. When financial security erodes, a cascade of resource loss can follow; when it holds, it buffers against stress and supports resilience. The Brazilian findings map neatly onto both models.

To test these ideas empirically, the team analyzed cross-sectional data from 290 Brazilian adults collected online between December 2022 and October 2023, after Brazil’s health ministry declared the end of the national COVID-19 emergency in April 2022. Participants rated ten health and life domains—physical health, mental health, physical activity, eating habits, alcohol and drug use, financial condition, social support, working conditions, resilience, and the ability to achieve goals and plans—by comparing their current status with the peak pandemic period of 2020 to 2021. The researchers then used ordinal and multinomial logistic regressions to determine how well each dimension of subjective financial well-being, alongside standard sociodemographic variables, predicted whether participants reported their circumstances as worse, the same, or better.

The headline result is striking: for each unit increase in certain dimensions of subjective financial well-being, the odds of reporting better health and life outcomes rose by between 63 and 160 percent compared with those who reported deterioration. The materialistic dimension—simply feeling that one has enough money—emerged as the strongest predictor, associated with seven of the ten outcomes measured. Each unit increase in this dimension raised the odds of reporting better physical activity by 78 percent, better physical health by 63 percent, better mental health by 65 percent, and better eating habits by 94 percent. It also predicted better social support, financial condition, and working conditions, with the odds of reporting improved working conditions rising by 140 percent per unit increase.

The behavioral dimension of money management told a subtler story. Higher money management scores predicted the odds of maintaining stable physical health, mental health, eating habits, and resilience—essentially, of avoiding decline—rather than of outright improvement. The authors suggest this may reflect the composition of their sample, which skewed toward upper-middle and high-income adults in Brazil’s wealthier south and southeast regions, where financial management stress tends to be lower. Meanwhile, the social dimension of peer comparison predicted better financial condition and goal achievement, echoing the classic Easterlin paradox: income gains boost well-being only when they outpace the gains of one’s peers. The temporal dimension of financial future—optimism about one’s financial prospects—predicted better resilience and goal attainment, with each unit increase more than doubling the odds of reporting improved resilience.

Perhaps the most consequential finding is a comparative one. Subjective financial well-being outperformed sociodemographic variables—age, income, gender, education, parental status, household size, and employment status—as a predictor of eight of the ten outcomes studied. Only alcohol and drug use defied prediction by any variable in the models, a result the authors attribute to the complex, multifactorial nature of substance use and the small number of participants reporting change in that domain. For mental health, gender emerged as a significant factor in one comparison, but only the having-money dimension predicted mental health consistently across both statistical comparisons, leading the researchers to conclude that subjective financial well-being carries at least equal weight to gender in shaping psychological recovery.

The study’s context amplifies its significance. Brazil, a middle-income country with a history of economic instability, saw unemployment rise by 33 percent during the pandemic, deepening poverty and eroding purchasing power. Roughly three-quarters of Brazilians earn low to middle incomes, with an average family income far below that of the study’s relatively affluent sample. The authors argue that because populations in low- and middle-income countries face greater difficulty meeting basic needs, the perception of having adequate money may be especially consequential there—and they hypothesize that the predictive power of subjective financial well-being could be even larger in lower-income samples than the odds ratios observed here.

The researchers are careful about the limits of their design. Data were cross-sectional, so causal direction cannot be established; it is possible that better health drives better financial perceptions rather than the reverse. Outcomes were measured with single retrospective self-report items, introducing potential recall bias, and the general financial well-being factor was excluded from regression models due to multicollinearity with other dimensions. The sample, dominated by women and residents of Brazil’s most prosperous regions, cannot be generalized to the country’s poorer north and northeast. Future work, the authors suggest, should employ longitudinal designs, mediation models testing whether physical activity and stress reduction link financial security to health, and stratified sampling across income groups.

Even with those caveats, the practical implications are clear. The authors call for interventions that treat financial well-being as a lever for public health: financial literacy campaigns to reduce fragility during crises, budgeting and debt-management programs to strengthen the behavioral dimension, long-term savings and planning strategies to cultivate financial optimism, and education to help people manage corrosive social comparisons. Employers, they note, could partner with policymakers to offer workplace financial education and stress management, given that financial stress reverberates through both mental and physical health. In a post-pandemic world still reckoning with economic aftershocks, the message from Brazil is that helping people feel financially secure may be one of the most direct routes to helping them be well.

Subject of Research: Subjective financial well-being as a predictor of post-pandemic health and life outcomes among Brazilian adults

Article Title: Subjective Financial Well-Being as Predictor of Post-Pandemic Health and Life Domains in a Middle-Income Country

Article References: Cardoso, N. D. O., Machado, W. D. L., & Guilherme, A. A. (2026). Subjective Financial Well-Being as Predictor of Post-Pandemic Health and Life Domains in a Middle-Income Country. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-026-00519-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-026-00519-6

Keywords: subjective financial well-being, COVID-19 pandemic, mental health, physical health, Brazil, financial security, resilience, stress and coping theory, money management, middle-income countries, logistic regression, public health