The Exact Age When You Make Your Best Financial Decisions

The prime years for making smart financial decisions are, on average, 53 and 54.

At around that age, people have accumulated knowledge and experience about money, spending and saving, but haven’t begun losing key analytic cognitive skills. It’s also roughly the age when adults make the fewest financial mistakes, related to things like credit-card use, interest rates and fees.

Knowing what leads to the financial strength of your early 50s is valuable. Younger adults can delve more deeply into basics like inflation and interest rates to hedge against lack of experience, and those who are older can work to keep their analytical skills sharp.

“As we get older, we seem to rely more on past experience, rules of thumb, and intuitive knowledge about which products or strategies are better,” says Rafal Chomik, an economist in Australia at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research.

Chomik led a 2022 study that looked at financial literacy, which is the ability to understand financial information and apply it to managing personal finances. Financial literacy typically peaks at age 54 and then declines, according to the study.

The study gauged financial literacy using questions about inflation, interest rates and diversification. One question: If in five years, your income has doubled and prices have doubled, will you be able to buy (A) less, (B) the same, (C) more than today. (Answer: B)

People can—and do—make good financial decisions from their 20s to their 40s, as well as into their 60s and 70s. Chomik, who is 45, says some of his best financial decisions came earlier in his life and involved his 401(k)-type savings account. Contributions were mandatory when he started his first job at around age 18, but once enrolled, he actively chose funds that benefit those who have a longer investment horizon.

Financial decision-making requires a combination of reasoning skills that differ by age. Those in their 20s are better at absorbing and processing new information and computing numbers—so-called fluid intelligence—but don’t have as much life experience or crystallised intelligence—the accumulation of facts and knowledge. Crystallised intelligence tends to improve with age.

Getting help

Beverly Miller, a financial coach who often works with people who are in debt, says she did most things right before her 50s, avoiding credit-card debt, paying off car loans and paying off a 30-year mortgage in 12 years.

But she didn’t invest as wisely as she could have. For example, she moved money in a retirement savings account out of growth funds and into fixed-income funds.

“We would let market changes scare us into making changes we shouldn’t have,” says Miller, 65.

Miller says she and her husband could have made more money if they had left it in growth funds. Likewise, she invested in rental properties, which she thought could be an easy source of income but weren’t.

It wasn’t until she was in her 50s that she and her husband finally turned to a certified financial planner to help with investments, she says.

“In your 50s, you have enough maturity and experience to know you need help,” says Miller.

Age of reason

People make financial mistakes at any and every age, but they made fewer mistakes at the age of 53, according to economic researchers. In one study, economists looked at financial choices made by adults in 10 financial areas, including home-equity loans, lines of credit, mortgages and credit cards, and how those decisions affected fees and interest payments.

Fees and interest payments, across all 10 areas, are at their lowest levels around age 53, according to the 2009 study in the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity. That age was referred to as the “age of reason,” or the point at which financial mistakes are minimised. A financial mistake would include overestimating the value of a house, for instance.

At the age of 53, “people have been dealing with financial markets for years and know how to look for the right financial product, and minimise fees and payments,” says Sumit Agarwal, a professor of finance at the National University of Singapore and an author of the study.

Agarwal turned 53 this year.

“I have a lot of experience capital right now,” he says. “Going forward, I will be making more mistakes and will be slower making decisions.” People can keep their analytical skills strong and continue to make good decisions by reading and exercising the brain, he says.

One financial mistake 50-year-olds tend to make involves underestimating their life expectancy, which can lead to flawed planning decisions about retirement. A typical 50-year-old expects to live until age 76, when actuarial estimates have that person living another decade to age 86, according to Chomik’s study, which looked at surveys in Australia. A 2020 study in the U.S. found that 28% of adults 50 and older underestimated their life expectancy by at least five years.

Kristen Jacks, a 55-year-old financial educator based in New Haven, Conn., says people in their 50s have often experienced enough financial pain to make them more acutely aware of the need to weigh all financial alternatives carefully and avoid mistakes.

“You’re also at the age when you look at your retirement savings and realise you’re running out of years to make it bigger,” says Jacks.

She also works with younger people who can underspend as well as overspend. One young man in his 20s, she says, earned good money as a traveling nurse but was living in a small $600 a month apartment that he hated.

She says her own best financial decisions are lifelong habits. Jacks, who bought a $1,500 certificate of deposit when she was 15 using babysitting money, doesn’t accumulate credit-card debt and lives below her means.

“You do that for 20-plus years, and you are so much better off,” she says.

Impact investing is becoming more mainstream as larger, institutional asset owners drive more money into the sector, according to the nonprofit Global Impact Investing Network in New York.

In the GIIN’s State of the Market 2024 report, published late last month, researchers found that assets allocated to impact-investing strategies by repeat survey responders grew by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14% over the last five years.

These 71 responders to both the 2019 and 2024 surveys saw their total impact assets under management grow to US$249 billion this year from US$129 billion five years ago.

Medium- and large-size investors were largely responsible for the strong impact returns: Medium-size investors posted a median CAGR of 11% a year over the five-year period, and large-size investors posted a median CAGR of 14% a year.

Interestingly, the CAGR of assets held by small investors dropped by a median of 14% a year.

“When we drill down behind the compound annual growth of the assets that are being allocated to impact investing, it’s largely those larger investors that are actually driving it,” says Dean Hand, the GIIN’s chief research officer.

Overall, the GIIN surveyed 305 investors with a combined US$490 billion under management from 39 countries. Nearly three-quarters of the responders were investment managers, while 10% were foundations, and 3% were family offices. Development finance institutions, institutional asset owners, and companies represented most of the rest.

The majority of impact strategies are executed through private-equity, but public debt and equity have been the fastest-growing asset classes over the past five years, the report said. Public debt is growing at a CAGR of 32%, and public equity is growing at a CAGR of 19%. That compares to a CAGR of 17% for private equity and 7% for private debt.

According to the GIIN, the rise in public impact assets is being driven by larger investors, likely institutions.

Private equity has traditionally served as an ideal way to execute impact strategies, as it allows investors to select vehicles specifically designed to create a positive social or environmental impact by, for example, providing loans to smallholder farmers in Africa or by supporting fledging renewable energy technologies.

Future Returns: Preqin expects managers to rely on family offices, private banks, and individual investors for growth in the next six years

But today, institutional investors are looking across their portfolios—encompassing both private and public assets—to achieve their impact goals.

“Institutional asset owners are saying, ‘In the interests of our ultimate beneficiaries, we probably need to start driving these strategies across our assets,’” Hand says. Instead of carving out a dedicated impact strategy, these investors are taking “a holistic portfolio approach.”

An institutional manager may want to address issues such as climate change, healthcare costs, and local economic growth so it can support a better quality of life for its beneficiaries.

To achieve these goals, the manager could invest across a range of private debt, private equity, and real estate.

But the public markets offer opportunities, too. Using public debt, a manager could, for example, invest in green bonds, regional bank bonds, or healthcare social bonds. In public equity, it could invest in green-power storage technologies, minority-focused real-estate trusts, and in pharmaceutical and medical-care company stocks with the aim of influencing them to lower the costs of care, according to an example the GIIN lays out in a separate report on institutional strategies.

Influencing companies to act in the best interests of society and the environment is increasingly being done through such shareholder advocacy, either directly through ownership in individual stocks or through fund vehicles.

“They’re trying to move their portfolio companies to actually solving some of the challenges that exist,” Hand says.

Although the rate of growth in public strategies for impact is brisk, among survey respondents investments in public debt totaled only 12% of assets and just 7% in public equity. Private equity, however, grabs 43% of these investors’ assets.

Within private equity, Hand also discerns more evidence of maturity in the impact sector. That’s because more impact-oriented asset owners invest in mature and growth-stage companies, which are favored by larger asset owners that have more substantial assets to put to work.

The GIIN State of the Market report also found that impact asset owners are largely happy with both the financial performance and impact results of their holdings.

About three-quarters of those surveyed were seeking risk-adjusted, market-rate returns, although foundations were an exception as 68% sought below-market returns, the report said. Overall, 86% reported their investments were performing in line or above their expectations—even when their targets were not met—and 90% said the same for their impact returns.

Private-equity posted the strongest results, returning 17% on average, although that was less than the 19% targeted return. By contrast, public equity returned 11%, above a 10% target.

The fact some asset classes over performed and others underperformed, shows that “normal economic forces are at play in the market,” Hand says.

Although investors are satisfied with their impact performance, they are still dealing with a fragmented approach for measuring it, the report said. “Despite this, over two-thirds of investors are incorporating impact criteria into their investment governance documents, signalling a significant shift toward formalising impact considerations in decision-making processes,” it said.

Also, more investors are getting third-party verification of their results, which strengthens their accountability in the market.

“The satisfaction with performance is nice to see,” Hand says. “But we do need to see more about what’s happening in terms of investors being able to actually track both the impact performance in real terms as well as the financial performance in real terms.”

The Exact Age When You Make Your Best Financial Decisions

There’s a magic number for when your expertise and cognitive powers align

Getting help

Age of reason