In my early 50s, I walked away from a comfortable position at a reputable national magazine with the intention of launching a weekly newspaper. Nobody I encountered at the time seemed to think this was a crazy idea, but two years later, having burned through about a quarter of a million dollars of borrowed money without the faintest sign of profitability on the horizon, it occurred to me that I may not have adequately considered the risks.
The bankruptcy proceedings that followed the shuttering of The Minneapolis Observer required that we vacate our home, forfeit our car, and decamp with our two teenage kids, a dog, and three cats to a tiny two-bedroom bungalow we were fortunate to rent from a friend who was desperate for a tenant. It was not, to put it mildly, a shining moment in my midlife narrative.
I was reflecting on that tumultuous period last week after perusing a new study out of Columbia University suggesting that a lack of financial well-being during middle age and our senior years may lead to cognitive dysfunction.
There’s plenty of evidence documenting the alarming levels of poverty among U.S. seniors. One recent study found that 45 percent of the Medicare set — more than 19 million Americans — couldn’t cover their basic living costs with their current income. And 80 percent didn’t have the wherewithal to recover from a major financial blow. But what struck me about this new research was the notion that financial trauma in midlife, not just later life, could short-circuit the brain’s mechanisms.
Unlike in earlier studies, Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri, PhD, and her team looked beyond a participant’s bank balance to scrutinize their “financial well-being”: their sense of financial control, outlook, and satisfaction. “Financial well-being is an emerging economic determinant of health that may be associated with cognitive aging,” Zeki Al Hazzouri, an associate professor of epidemiology, explains. “Prolonged financial strain may overwhelm mental bandwidth and contribute to negative cognitive outcomes.”
Analyzing data from 7,676 people 51 years old and older who participated in the Health and Retirement Study from 2010 to 2020, the researchers calculated each individual’s average financial well-being over a four-year period using an index that measured both the psychosocial strain of financial stress and the material hardship of an inadequate income. They then compared that score with the individual’s performance on a test measuring memory and cognitive function.
They concluded that each one-point decline in an individual’s financial well-being index was associated with lower memory scores and faster cognitive decline over the following four years. It’s the unsurprising product of money worries and an inability to afford the ingredients of a healthy lifestyle.
“Prolonged experiences of poor financial well-being may lead to chronic stress, anxiety, and unhappiness, and worries about finances may overwhelm mental bandwidth, altogether contributing to negative cognitive outcomes as individuals age,” Zeki Al Hazzouri writes in the American Journal of Epidemiology. “Beyond these psychosocial pathways, poor financial well-being may also constrain investment in health-promoting resources such as nutritious food, healthcare, and social engagement, all of which are important for healthy cognitive aging.”
Those cognitive effects were more profound among seniors than their middle-aged counterparts, researchers note, perhaps owing to the younger cohort’s ability to recover more easily from financial setbacks. Older adults, on the other hand, may find their ability to recover limited by fixed incomes and poor health.
But before you start blaming your past — or current — bank balance for your momentary cognitive glitches, you should note that the study’s results were based on a limited sample size and did not fully account for health issues among the older participants that could affect both financial well-being and cognitive function. In some cases, Zeki Al Hazzouri admits, it may not be a dwindling bank balance that sparks cognitive issues; it could be cognitive issues that limit your ability to earn a decent income.
Still, I suspect I may be an outlier. When I consider my ill-fated newspaper venture, it’s pretty clear to me that my dose of cognitive dysfunction emerged before, rather than after, tumbling into the financial abyss. In other words, the decision to quit my job and launch a publication was not a particularly smart one.
More than 20 years later, my sense of financial well-being — unlike many of those seniors who participated in the study — has only thrived. I’m fortunate to be gainfully employed and as financially secure as anyone can expect to be in these troubled times. And while my memory may not be quite as nimble as it once was, I find certain life lessons to be unforgettable.
