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Many Americans are looking back on 2025 with regrets about money.
Nearly 40% of adults say their biggest financial regret from this year is not saving enough money, according to a new survey of over 1,000 U.S. adults by Intuit Credit Karma. These are the three most common financial regrets from 2025:
- Not saving enough: 38%
- Emotional or impulse spending: 28%
- Too much credit card debt: 21%
It’s been a year of major economic events, including President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda, Federal Reserve rate cuts, a record-long government shutdown and rising unemployment. And 2 in 3 survey respondents say macroeconomic conditions like inflation and tariffs impacted their spending habits.
“People are feeling [the stress] very deeply in 2025 and there are not signs of that letting up as we look forward into the new year,” Courtney Alev, consumer financial advocate at Intuit Credit Karma, tells CNBC Make It.
Around 73% of Americans say they are saving less for emergencies due to factors like rising prices and elevated interest rates, a recent Bankrate survey found. Additionally, around 24% of households report living paycheck to paycheck in 2025, up slightly from 2024, according to Bank of America Institute research.
“People are feeling trapped,” says Joey Khoury, senior wealth advisor and partner at Mission Wealth.
At the same time, the No. 1 habit Americans say they want to break in the new year is impulse buying, Credit Karma found, with 38% of respondents saying they want to curb the practice.
Here’s how experts say Americans can recover from their financial regrets and build better habits in 2026.
Don’t ‘bury your head in the sand’
One of the first steps to saving more is knowing your numbers — exactly how much money you bring in each month and how much you need to spend on essentials, Alev says. As a place to start, she suggests listing out your specific monthly bills and expenses, as well as your optional costs.
“Just seeing everything in one place brings clarity and calm, even if your situation isn’t where you want it to be, at least then, you know,” she says.
Khoury agrees. “I can always tell who’s on top of their finances by asking them, what’s their monthly spend rate and what’s their savings rate,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what the savings rate is. If it’s low, if it’s high, it doesn’t matter. But the folks that know that are the folks that are paying attention.”
And paying attention is key, he adds. “A lot of people would rather bury their head in the sand,” because dealing with your finances can be stressful and accomplishing your goals will likely take time. Plus, the broader economic conditions out of your control may make saving more or paying off your debt increasingly difficult.
“But not paying attention to it only exacerbates the problem,” Khoury says.
‘Automation is key’
Another reason individuals may wind up ignoring their finances is if they figured out their spend rate once, but never updated it to factor in ongoing changes, like inflation, Khoury says.
He recommends using a budgeting app or similar tool to automatically track your spending and make it easier to see where your money is going and how much you’re spending in various categories. Over time, you’ll be able to see if price increases or impulse buys are impacting your overall spending.
“Automation is key,” Khoury says. “You must automate as much of your budgeting as possible, because you’re never going to sit down and comb through it on a regular frequency.”
From there, you’ll be much better positioned to find areas where you can cut back, he says.
Turn ‘goals into systems’
Alev recommends setting specific saving or spending goals and starting with “one key priority.” That could be maintaining your current credit card balance for a time period if paying it off entirely is too big of a goal or setting up automatic transfers to your savings account, even if it’s a small amount, she says.
“It is so easy to just get paralyzed with overwhelm when you start thinking about all of the different ways that you could go to improve your financial situation, and that can really lead to you not making progress,” she says. “Turn those goals into systems and specific habits because that’s what’s gonna actually make that change stick.”
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