In the lead up to building Lucie Money, we ran a survey of 358 young Australians, aged 18 to 35, about their money. Three findings stood out.
1. Most young Australians don’t feel on top of their money, and they’re remarkably open about it
Only 12% said they felt totally on top of their money. The other 88% sat somewhere between “mostly sorted” and “winging it”.
Only 24% described their overall money situation as “pretty solid”. The remaining 76% described themselves as “not bad”, “average”, “not too good” or, in many cases, “struggling”.
And when we asked them to explain, they were surprisingly open about it:
“I have so much trouble saving and organising my bills.”
“I’m not good at managing my finances.”
“Struggling with spending and budgeting and not really knowing what to do is hard.”
And here’s the thing: 93% of them already use a banking app. The information is already in their pockets. They acknowledged this; but they also highlighted that the control isn’t.
There is nothing performative about these comments. They’re matter-of-fact admissions from people who already have available to them every tool and every chart and every dashboard the industry has produced over the last three decades.
The standard industry presumption is that what users need is more visibility into their money. But the truth is that this assumption doesn’t sit with feedback from users who are quite clear about what’s missing in their financial lives, and it isn’t visibility.
The gap, in other words, is between knowing what to do and actually doing it. We have called this the doing gap in earlier essays. And the survey suggests that it’s not a niche issue for a small group of disorganised people but a dominant experience for this age group.
2. The biggest hurdle isn’t not earning enough; it’s surprise
When we asked what made staying on track hardest, the three top answers were:
- Getting hit with unplanned expenses: 45%
- Not earning enough: 36%
- Making too many unplanned purchases: 28%
Volatility was named more often than income. That’s not to say that these issues don’t intertwine; an unplanned $1,400 car repair can be both a timing problem and a crisis. But the pattern is pretty strong: the thing most likely to undo a person’s money plan, for the largest share of respondents, was something they didn’t see coming.
Nearly one in five directly endorsed the statement “I get anxious or overwhelmed by money stuff.”
This matters because it changes what the response should look like. If the problem is information, the answer is dashboards; if the problem is surprise, the answer is something that watches ahead, anticipates what is about to come due, and highlights it in time to act.
3. People are juggling several money goals at once, not one
We asked respondents what their main money focus was, other than basic living costs. Across the sample:
- Saving for travel or experiences: 48%
- Investing for the future: 45%
- Covering basic living costs: 40%
- Saving for a house: 37%
- Building an emergency fund: 34%
- Paying off debt: 33%
This was a multi-select question, so the percentages don’t add to a hundred. The interesting figure is that the average respondent picked 2.6 categories. Most are trying to achieve several goals concurrently, not one at a time.
But multiple money goals don’t always play nicely. Travel money is short-term; investing is long-term; a house deposit is medium-term; paying off debt is open-ended; the emergency fund is the precaution against the surprise the second lesson was about. Each makes a different claim on the same income. Each has a different time horizon. Each implies a different default behaviour.
And the picture extends across institutions, too. As one respondent noted, unprompted:
“Currently have Amex, NAB, commbank, ING, as well as Pearler, Spaceship and a SMSF. I don’t want to have money in another place.”
This also connects back to the first two lessons. Trying to track multiple goals across siloed accounts is exactly the kind of attention-demanding work that produces the doing gap. And surprise hurts more when several goals are in train at the same time, because the surprise that derails one of them tends to take attention away from the others.
What these add up to
Taken together, the three findings describe ordinary financial lives that turn out to be more demanding than they look. Most respondents don’t feel on top of their money. Most are juggling several goals at once. Most are likeliest to be undone not by what they earn but by what they hadn’t planned for. These are not exotic problems and they are not confined to people who are disorganised with money. They are what managing money in 2026 actually looks like for the people we surveyed.
The harder problem is not information. It is the watching, the anticipating and the balancing. That is the design problem worth working on.
To tackle this, we’re building the MVP of Lucie Money now. If any of this sounds interesting, there’s a waitlist at lucie.money.