Key findings from the 2025 Clever Girl Finance Women & Money Survey
The short version: Women in the Clever Girl Finance community are more financially engaged than ever. Investing more, chasing debt-freedom harder, and building emergency funds at higher rates than in 2022. But they're doing it while carrying more credit card debt and feeling less optimistic about the future than they did three years ago. Progress and pressure, showing up at the exact same time.
In the summer of 2025, we surveyed 591 women in the CGF community about their money — their habits, their confidence, their goals, and their worries. It's the third time we've run this survey, following studies in 2020 and 2022. Which means we finally have something most personal finance platforms don't: a real trend line on how women's relationship with money is actually changing, year over year. And the story the data tells isn't the one you'd expect from the headlines.
Women are more cautious — but not more defeated
Let's start with the number that jumped out at us first: only 54.3% of women told us they feel optimistic or extremely optimistic about their financial future, down from 67.3% in 2022. That's a real drop, and it makes sense Inflation, a tighter job market, and general economic uncertainty haven't exactly made the last few years easy on anyone's wallet.
But here's the part that matters more: that dip in optimism did not come with a dip in confidence. 72.1% of women still feel confident in their ability to build long-term wealth. In other words, women aren't losing faith in themselves — they're just being more clear-eyed about the conditions they're building in. That's not defeat. That's realism paired with resolve, and honestly, it's a pretty healthy place to sit.
The debt picture is the toughest part of this survey
We'd be doing you a disservice if we didn't lead with the hard news here: 60.1% of women now carry credit card debt, up from 54.9% in 2022. Student loan debt remains just as heavy. 67.7% of respondents carry it, and nearly three-quarters of those with student debt (73.3%) owe more than $20,000. And 17.3% of women have had to lean on a payday loan at some point, a number that's ticked up 2.4 points since our last survey.
None of that is easy to read, and we're not going to sugarcoat it. Debt — especially the kind that compounds against you — is one of the biggest things standing between women and the financial futures they want. That's exactly why it matters so much that it's also the thing women told us they care most about fixing.
Retirement anxiety is still the #1 worry — for the second survey in a row
If there's one number that should get every financial educator's attention, it's this one: 70.2% of women told us their biggest financial concern is not having enough saved for retirement. That's been the top concern in every CGF survey since 2020 — it's not a blip, it's a pattern.
And it's not hard to understand why. Retirement is the kind of goal that's easy to put off when credit card bills and day-to-day expenses (a concern for 39.1% of women) are sitting right in front of you. But the fact that retirement anxiety keeps outranking every other worry tells us women aren't just thinking about next month. They're thinking decades ahead, even when the present moment is asking a lot of them.
But women are still showing up and building — in real, measurable ways
Here's where the story turns, and it's the part we don't want to get lost under the debt and anxiety numbers: women are still actively building wealth, at higher rates than ever.
- 73.3% of women are actively investing for their future — up from 72.6% in 2022.
- 62.5% either have an emergency fund or are actively building one, with 28.3% already holding three or more months of expenses in savings.
- 58% of women ranked becoming debt-free among their top 3 financial goals — making it the single most-cited goal in the entire survey, ahead of increasing income, growing investments, and even homeownership.
That last stat is worth sitting with for a second. When we asked women what they actually want, more of them said “get out of debt” than anything else. That's not avoidance — that's women looking directly at the hardest part of their financial picture and deciding to go after it first.
And for the 84.2% of women who don't yet own a home but want to, that ambition hasn't gone anywhere either, even in a housing market that's made homeownership feel further out of reach for a lot of people.
Expert tip: Make a plan to pay off debt
If debt-freedom is your top goal too — and for 58% of the women in this survey, it is — don't wait until it feels “urgent” to make a plan. Pick one method (snowball or avalanche, whichever keeps you motivated), automate one extra payment this month, and revisit it quarterly. Progress on debt doesn't require a perfect system. It requires a consistent one.
What this tells us
Put it all together, and here's what we see: financial literacy isn't a “nice to have” anymore for the women in our community. It's core to how they define who they are and where they're headed. Women aren't waiting for the economy to get easier before they start building. They're doing the work in real time, against real pressure, and they're doing more of it than they were three years ago.
That's exactly the narrative we set out to change back in 2020, when we ran our first survey specifically because the mainstream story about women and money — disengaged, disempowered, leaving it all to someone else — never matched what we saw in our own community. Five years and three surveys later, the data keeps proving that story wrong.
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Where to go from here
If any of these numbers hit close to home — whether it's the credit card debt, the retirement anxiety, or just wanting to build a stronger emergency fund — you don't have to figure it out alone. That's the entire reason Clever Girl Finance exists.
A few places to start:
- Feeling behind on retirement? Our free investing courses walk you through the basics, no jargon required.
- Ready to tackle debt? Check out our guides on paying off debt and building a payoff plan that actually fits your life.
- Want a plan built around your specific situation? Our 1-on-1 coaching is exactly for this.
- Want the full data? Explore every finding, chart, and breakdown in our 2025 Women & Money Survey Report. Pr see how these numbers compare across our full survey series going back to 2020.
Wherever you're starting from, the data is clear on one thing: showing up and doing the work — even messily, even under pressure — is how progress actually gets made. 591 women just proved it.
