Money is never just money. It represents security, freedom, status, control, care, identity, and sometimes a very organized attempt to keep existential dread in a high-yield savings account.
A growing body of research suggests that awareness of death—what psychologists call mortality salience—can influence how we spend, save, insure, invest, and plan for what happens after we are gone. This does not mean every estate plan is a disguised panic attack, or every luxury purchase is a cry for immortality in Italian leather. But it does mean that our financial behaviors are often shaped by deeper emotional motives than spreadsheets alone can explain.
Terror management theory offers one helpful lens. The theory proposes that as humans, we face a uniquely difficult psychological conflict: we want to live, yet we know we will die. To manage that anxiety, we seek meaning, self-esteem, cultural belonging, and forms of symbolic continuation—ways to feel that something of us will matter beyond our biological lives. Classic terror management research suggests that reminders of death can increase our need to defend valued identities, beliefs, and sources of self-worth. A large meta-analysis of mortality salience experiments found broad support for these effects, while also leaving room for nuance about when and how they appear.
So what does this have to do with money? Quite a lot.
One line of research suggests that death awareness can increase materialistic strivings. In a study by Kasser and Sheldon, participants who were asked to write about their own death reported higher financial expectations for the future and greater intentions to spend on pleasurable consumption than participants in a neutral condition. The researchers interpreted this as evidence that mortality reminders can heighten insecurity, which may then drive people toward money, possessions, and consumption as buffers against vulnerability.
In everyday life, this may look like “I deserve it” spending after a health scare, a milestone birthday, a funeral, or a period of grief. It may show up as the sports car, the major trip, the jewelry, the kitchen renovation, the sudden interest in being a person who owns an espresso machine that costs more than a kayak. To be fair, some of this spending may be life-affirming. Death awareness can clarify that we do not, in fact, get unlimited chances to enjoy what we love. But it can also become a way to soothe death anxiety with consumption that provides only temporary relief.
Death awareness does not only make us spend. It can also make us save.
A series of studies by Zaleskiewicz, Gasiorowska, and Kesebir tested whether saving money can buffer death anxiety. Across four studies, the researchers found that saving-related thoughts reduced death fear more than spending-related thoughts, and that mortality reminders increased people’s preference for saving over spending. Their interpretation is psychologically intuitive: saving can create a sense of control, future security, and agency in the face of life’s uncertainty.
This helps explain why financial planning can feel emotionally regulating. A retirement account, emergency fund, trust, or insurance policy is not only a technical instrument; it can also be a psychological structure. It reassures us that “something is handled.” For some people, saving money is less about miserliness and more about building a small fortress against chaos. The risk, of course, is that saving can also become over-saving: a refusal to use money for joy, connection, generosity, or aliveness because the future never feels safe enough.
Investing carries its own death-anxiety complications. Long-term investing requires imagining a future self. But mortality awareness can make the future feel both precious and precarious. Some people may become more conservative, wanting to preserve assets and avoid losses. Research on mortality salience and retirement spending found that reminders of death increased the desire to retain assets in retirement and reduced preferred spending rates. In other words, thinking about death may not always make people throw caution to the wind; it may make them cling more tightly to the money pile, like a dragon with a 401(k).
Estate planning may be the most obvious place where death awareness and financial behavior collide.
It is, by definition, planning for a world in which we are no longer available to explain ourselves. This can trigger avoidance. Russell James, who has written extensively on mortality salience in personal financial decision-making, argues that estate planning, life insurance, annuities, charitable bequests, and related decisions are often shaped by the psychological discomfort of confronting death. His model suggests that people may avoid financial products or planning conversations that make death too explicit, even when those decisions would benefit them or their families.
Current survey data suggest the avoidance is real. Caring.com’s 2025 Wills and Estate Planning Study reported that only 24 percent of Americans had a will, down from 33 percent in 2022. The same report noted that many people still delay planning despite its practical importance. Gallup’s earlier polling found that 46 percent of U.S. adults had a will, with rates varying substantially by age, education, and race. The exact estimates differ by survey wording and methodology, but the broad pattern is consistent: many people know estate planning matters and still do not do it.
Life insurance offers another revealing example; it is an act of love wrapped in a product that requires you to contemplate your own absence. That can make it emotionally awkward. James has argued that the mortality salience of life insurance may lead consumers to resist or delay purchasing it, especially when the product is framed purely around death. At the same time, life insurance can reduce anxiety by transforming a feared possibility into a plan: income replacement, debt coverage, education funding, taxes, or liquidity for an estate.
The need remains substantial. LIMRA and Life Happens reported in their 2025 Insurance Barometer materials that 51 percent of American adults say they have some form of life insurance coverage, while 40 percent believe they need life insurance or more of it—representing roughly 100 million adults. That gap is not just about denial; cost perceptions, confusion, distrust, and competing financial pressures matter too. LIMRA has also reported that many younger adults dramatically overestimate the cost of life insurance, which can further delay action.
The practical takeaway is not that advisors should scare people into planning. In fact, blunt death reminders can backfire, especially when people feel overwhelmed. Terror management research suggests that when death is made too threatening or abstract, people may defend, deny, distract, or cling to familiar beliefs. But when mortality is approached specifically, compassionately, and in connection with values, it can become clarifying rather than paralyzing.
The best financial and estate planning conversations may therefore ask not only, “How much do you need?” but also: “What do you want your money to make possible while you are alive? What do you want it to protect when you are gone? What burdens do you want to spare your loved ones? What would you regret not doing, giving, saying, or arranging?”
Death awareness can make us spend too impulsively, save too fearfully, invest too cautiously, or avoid planning altogether. But when handled well, it can also help us use money as it was always meant to be used: not as proof that we beat mortality, but as a tool for care, freedom, meaning, and a life that feels more fully lived before the paperwork has to speak for us.