When it comes to money, the costs of being queer add up quickly. Whether it’s finding a job, getting married, having kids, accessing healthcare or retiring there are ways in which queer folks are disadvantaged, financially speaking. Which might help explain why queer people drop out of school at higher rates, are more likely to be homeless, and carry more debt than our straight peers.

But like so many obstacles that queer people face, we’ve found creative solutions. From crowdsourcing campaigns to building chosen families that support each other, we’ve found ways to thrive.

The financial challenges, and the ways to overcome them are not something we’ve heard a lot of people talk about though, and when we went to research how queer people feel about their finances, there wasn’t a lot of data. So, we commissioned our own survey, in partnership with the national polling firm Morning Consult. We wanted to know things like how many LGBTQ people have emergency funds and when queer people think they’ll be able to retire. You can find the full results at the bottom of this page, but these are a few of the things that we found noteworthy:

52% of people who identify as queer say they have anxiety around finances.

25% of people who identify as queer say that their sexuality or their gender identity has had an impact on their finances.

35% of queer folks say they could rely on family and friends for financial support before coming out, but only 20% say they could rely on family or friends for support after coming out.

57% of queer people say they don’t have kids compared to 36% of straight people.

In the first episode of our six-part series, Team Nancy investigates what’s giving you—our listeners—anxiety about money.

Now it’s your turn to tell us what your relationship with money is like.

Listen to the rest of the Queer Money Matters series every day starting March 4, 2019.

(Also known as Nancy’s 2019 Money Survey of a Representative Sample of the Queer and Non-Queer US Population)

On behalf of Team Nancy, the national polling firm Morning Consult conducted a survey about money as it relates to sexual orientation and gender identity. Morning Consult surveyed 6603 adults in the US, including 778 LGBTQ people between January 24-30, 2019.The interviews were conducted online and the data was weighted in accordance with current U.S. population by gender, age, education, ethnicity, and region to approximate a representative sample of adults in the United States. Results from the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 1 percentage point among the entire population and plus or minus 4 percentage points among the LGBTQ population.

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