Uncertainty as a Psychological Cost: Mothers’ Perceptions of Financial Resources During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hardships and Financial Precarity

Even outside of the pandemic, many families with low incomes experience substantial instability in income and expenses from month-to-month (Dynan et al. 2012; see also Morduch and Schneider 2017). Previous work has investigated income instability among households with lower incomes (see, for example, Gottschalk and Moffitt, 2009; Hardy 2017; Hill et al. 2013; Wolf et al. 2014). These studies show how variability makes it difficult to manage finances and save, which can be particularly catastrophic when families are faced with income shocks (Despard et al. 2018). Even in the face of this instability, people may only turn to income support programs when they absolutely need to, given the administrative burdens associated with certain programs (Bartlett et al. 2004; Deshpande and Li 2019; Fong et al. 2016; Kaye et al. 2013; Ribar and Swann 2014; Schanzenbach 2009). While our study occurs in the context of the COVID-19 crisis, many families draw on income supports in response to other sorts of crises. For example, even if not induced by the pandemic, the crisis of a job loss can lead laid-off workers to the UI system. Therefore, while examining perceptions of resources during the onset of the pandemic is a unique contribution of our paper, there are implications for our understanding of how families think about engaging with resources more broadly, as families work to make ends meet in the context of instability.

Financial planning is crucial for households, especially in times of increased economic need (O’Neill and Xiao 2012). Specifically, mental accounting is important in budgeting and spending decisions (Thaler 1999). Mental accounting includes the cognitive and psychological processes that determine how individuals designate money toward certain expenses before actually paying them. Individuals categorize money based, in part, on the source of this income (Zhang and Sussman 2018). The process of budgeting involves planning what sources of income are coming and when, as well as which bills are due and when. Therefore, financial planning takes time and forethought. Research suggests these processes of financial planning may be more difficult for those with lower incomes, as having limited resources may challenge capacities to plan (de Bruijn and Antonides 2022; Ong et al. 2019).

During the early months of the pandemic, hardships were visible across a range of needs, including food and housing insecurity (Engelhardt and Erickson 2020) and were more common among households of color and those with lower incomes (Greene and McCargo 2020; Schneider et al. 2020). However, poverty rates remained stable, since government assistance (for example, stimulus checks and expanded UI) raised incomes, particularly for households with normally limited resources (Parolin et al. 2022). This meant that, while families faced instability associated with lack of childcare and employment disruptions, many also benefitted from increased government assistance. However, some did not gain access to this assistance (Clark et al. 2023). Even prior to the pandemic, poverty designation and the experience of hardship did not move in lockstep, though they were associated, with some above and below the poverty line experiencing hardships (Rodems and Shaefer 2020).

Part of the disjuncture between experiencing poverty, financial instability, and material hardship may lie in the approaches to making ends meet that households deploy, such as the options they see available to them or are able to effectively pursue, including securing cash or in-kind assistance from kin or government assistance programs. For this reason, the present study seeks to understand people’s perspectives of their resources. While government assistance can help protect against material hardship, it can often fall short of entirely covering needs (see Schenck-Fontaine et al. 2017). Therefore, households often deploy multiple strategies, including drawing on assistance programs, help from kin, and individual financial juggling strategies to try to get by (Heflin et al. 2011; Morduch and Schneider 2017). Knowing more about mothers’ perceptions of resources will help us understand how they engage with them.

It is important to distinguish between income instability, which refers to fluctuations in resources, versus income uncertainty, which refers to the lack of confidence individuals have in receiving resources. While income instability may create uncertainty about resource receipt, these two concepts are distinct. For example, a restaurant server could be certain that they will receive a paycheck every two weeks but see a good deal of instability in the amount of each paycheck, as their income fluctuates depending on whether they work busy shifts or not. Likewise, if a worker sometimes gets a tax refund and sometimes needs to pay at tax time, they could face uncertainty each year about whether they will get a tax refund check, apart from any instability in their income. Jonathan Morduch and Rachel Schneider (2017) demonstrate the challenges households have with financial coping when financial resources are not yet in hand, and especially, when earnings instability from precarious work induces uncertainty. However, there is less research that examines perceptions of uncertainty related to social safety net benefits, rather than wages. Uncertainty is important to understand apart from instability, because perceptions of uncertainty and its implications may vary by income source and by households’ financial contexts, with potential consequences for families navigating safety net benefits. In addition, attending to uncertainty in safety net benefits raises questions about how policy design decisions can create or mitigate uncertainty and, thereby, affect recipients’ financial planning.

Administrative Burdens

The emotional and relational aspects of making ends meet can be taxing, as people try to secure resources from multiple sources and may face administrative burdens in doing so (Herd and Moynihan 2018). Administrative burdens can contribute to mechanisms of inequality, as individuals may face unique burdens shaped by race, gender, and other social positions (Amerikaner et al. 2025; Jang-Trettien and Bolger 2024; Ray et al. 2023). Therefore, studying how these burdens are experienced among the mothers in our sample, most of whom are Black women, is essential.

The three facets of administrative burden are learning, compliance, and psychological costs. Learning costs include learning that a program exists, knowing whether one is eligible, understanding what the benefits include, and figuring out how to access them. Compliance costs include fulfilling the administrative demands of programs, such as completing paperwork and attending meetings. Psychological costs include the stigma associated with seeking help, as well as stress or a loss of autonomy in program interactions (Moynihan et al. 2015). Psychological costs also encompass frustrations with navigating complex systems, as well as the stress associated with the uncertainty of social benefits (Herd and Moynihan 2018). Research on psychological costs highlights both stressful interactions with caseworkers (see Barnes 2023; Barnes and Henly 2018; Raab 2025; Stuber and Schlesinger 2006) and stigma embedded within program design (see Bhargava and Manoli 2013; Hanks et al. 2016; Ratcliffe et al. 2007). These studies generally suggest the presence of psychological costs deters program participation and contributes to negative government interactions. For example, Carolyn Barnes and colleagues (2023) show how individuals navigating SNAP benefits during the COVID pandemic faced stressful program interactions, as they found SNAP caseworkers to be inaccessible amidst pandemic-induced program changes. Importantly, as Barnes and colleagues (2023) note, some programs, such as the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, are designed in ways that minimize psychological costs to participants. This means that program design may substantially alter the psychological costs that individuals face when navigating programs.

Bjorn Kleizen and colleagues (2025) apply the concept of administrative limbo to government interactions, a concept that is distinct from, but related to, administrative burden. The authors define administrative limbo as bureaucratic inaction in situations that require bureaucratic action, leading to prolonged waiting for individuals for whom the issue is consequential. Being stuck waiting for necessary government action can generate uncertainty. Unlike administrative burden, however, administrative limbo is inherently temporal, hinging on periods of bureaucratic inaction. While administrative limbo involves uncertainty, it is important to explore narratives of uncertainty even in the absence of a clearly identifiable moment of bureaucratic inaction. Therefore, investigating experiences of uncertainty holds implications for our understanding of both administrative limbo and administrative burden.

Despite the rich literature on administrative burden, the role of uncertainty as an administrative burden, and particularly a psychological cost, remains underexplored. The research examining experiences of uncertainty largely centers on precarious work and cash transfers; there is little research that investigates how uncertainty functions vis-à-vis social safety net benefits. Further, researchers have paid limited attention to how uncertainty functions as an administrative burden, particularly as a psychological cost. Uncertainty arising from program design or delivery may impose cognitive and emotional labor on recipients who must anticipate and plan around unpredictable benefit receipt. Managing uncertainty, therefore, may function as an administrative burden because it requires beneficiaries to expend mental resources to make financial decisions without complete information (for example, whether benefits from a particular program will arrive) and develop contingency plans for resource disruptions. This is likely to be particularly challenging for those with precarious resources.

Lisa Gennetian and colleagues (2021) suggest that unconditional cash transfers, in which households do not need to complete certain requirements to obtain the resource, may avoid the administrative burdens associated with conditional cash transfers and most government benefits. For most government resources, households need to complete paperwork to prove and reverify eligibility to receive the support (compliance costs, for example). The design of cash transfers may also shape the administrative burdens that families face. For example, the predictability of cash transfers can alleviate the hassles of mental accounting when the arrival of resources is unknown or uncertain. This reinforces the role of design features in potentially shaping the certainty individuals feel surrounding their resources.

Investigating mothers’ perceptions of uncertainty in making ends meet with their safety net benefits is important, as it expands researchers’ understanding of how psychological costs may shape mothers’ approaches to managing their resources and, therefore, program impact. While it may seem self-evident that mothers would not rely on resources they are uncertain about, it could be possible that mothers with constrained economic resources do not have the choice to not rely on tentative resources. Alternatively, they may not seek to engage in any financial planning in advance because there is uncertainty in some aspects of their budgets. We investigate these possibilities.

COVID-19 Pandemic

In the days and weeks after March 2020, the regular financial strategies households used to make ends meet were often disrupted. Some lost jobs or hours, and accessing government benefits became more difficult as public transportation (necessary for some to reach benefits offices) and benefits offices themselves closed. Also, because everyone was impacted simultaneously, turning to family and friends for support was less readily an option (Rinker et al. 2020).

In the early months of the pandemic, the federal government instituted the Families First Coronavirus Act and the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which included increased access to and generosity of UI and food assistance (through increased SNAP benefits and the creation of the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer benefits, which supported families who lost free or reduced-price school meals when schools closed), and an eviction moratorium (from March 2020 through August 2021). In addition, the federal government delivered stimulus checks, with the first going out in April 2020, a second delivered in December 2020 and January 2021, and the third in March 2021. The first stimulus check provided $1,200 per adult and $500 per dependent child to single filers who made $75,000 or less and to those married and filing jointly who made $150,000 or less. The second stimulus check delivered $600 per adult and $600 per dependent child, and the last stimulus check was $1,400 per adult and $1,400 per dependent child. Individuals who had filed a tax return in 2018 or 2019 automatically received the stimulus checks, and those who did not could apply online through the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Estimates suggest that 92 percent of households that were potentially eligible for the stimulus checks received them, with Hispanic individuals being the least likely to do so (Clark et al. 2023).

Analysis

The BFY:MV research team deductively coded all interview transcripts using Dedoose 9.0.62. We took a symbolic interactionist approach to our data analysis, which focuses on the meanings that individuals attribute to their situations, derived from their perceptions of and interactions with their surroundings (Blumer 1969). This approach is suited to the present study, as it provides a framework for understanding mothers’ perceptions of their financial resources and the meaning that they attribute to them, which may shape their decisions about how to plan for and use these resources.

Our analyses may be shaped by our own social positions, including our racial and socioeconomic backgrounds (both authors identify as White and neither is living below the poverty line). To expand our perspectives and understanding, we exchanged ideas with the broader research team, which includes members of various racial and ethnic identities and from an array of economic backgrounds. We also ground our approach in a broader literature, discussed in our literature review, to draw our attention to themes and issues that could be important. The participants in this study face distinct experiences of administrative burden shaped by their racial and socioeconomic positions (Amerikaner et al. 2025; Jang-Trettien and Bolger 2024; Ray et al. 2023). While a full exploration of how race and class intersect with administrative burden is beyond the scope of this paper, we recognize these dynamics as integral to experiences of the social safety net and highlight them as an important area for future research.

For the current paper, we first deductively coded transcripts from all interviews between April and December 2020 to capture mothers’ financial experiences during the pandemic and mothers’ experiences with their BFY money during the pandemic. To ensure consistent coding, we conducted regular consistency checks, in which two researchers coded the same interview and worked with a third researcher to discuss and resolve any discrepancies. We then inductively coded these excerpts, drawing out themes in mothers’ narratives. Our inductive codes included mothers’ approaches to managing their finances, the financial resources they discussed, and their perceptions of these resources. We analyzed these themes to help us understand the financial management strategies of mothers with limited incomes during the pandemic crisis. For the mothers with two interviews during this timeframe, we coded for any changes that occurred between interviews, most of which involved changes in employment. To protect the identities of the mothers, we use pseudonyms and limit identifying information in the findings.

Baby’s First Years Cash Gift

Mothers consistently spoke with certainty about receiving the BFY monthly cash gift, especially compared to the other resources described in the following sections. The design and delivery of the BFY gift likely shaped their feelings of certainty (Gennetian et al. 2023). Mothers did not have to seek out this money in the first place, and they did not need to verify eligibility, update contact information, or complete paperwork to continue collecting it. Mothers received the BFY money, deposited onto their card, from the time that they agreed to participate in the study. This differs from other benefit delivery mechanisms, such as the stimulus payment, that mothers received via check or direct deposit and had to wait for. For example, when we asked what day of the month her BFY money arrived on the card, Krista, a twenty-three-year-old White mother of two, provided the exact hour of the day that the money arrived: “It’s usually at 7 o’clock on the 11th.” For Krista and others, there wasn’t a question of whether or when the money would arrive. In contrast with some other safety net programs, the BFY cash gift was not disrupted during the pandemic, so certainty about BFY receipt persisted throughout the crisis. Across the 12,000 monthly payments that BFY disbursed over the first year, 98 percent were delivered on time (Halpern-Meekin et al. 2024). This did not vary between the mothers in the high- and low-cash-gift groups, although the different gift amounts are obviously distinct in their utility.

Gennetian and colleagues (2021) outline program design components that may shape recipients’ certainty regarding cash transfer receipt, such as (un)conditionality, frequency, predictability, timing, duration, and amount. In BFY, the frequency, timing, and amount are consistent and unconditional, creating a predictable source of income every month for mothers, about which mothers felt certain of receipt. These features of the cash transfer could contribute to mothers’ confidence in depending on the BFY money to come through. This is consistent with Natalia Rojas and colleagues’ (2020) finding that the predictability of a cash transfer allowed mothers with low incomes to prospectively include this money in their budgets. For the mothers in the BFY:MV study, the BFY money was a unique resource during the pandemic because they could depend on it arriving consistently without them having to engage with an administrative system. This made it easier to plan on receiving this income and to mentally allocate it to certain expenses before it was in hand.

When asked how she spent her high cash gift, Yesenia, a twenty-seven-year-old Latina mother of two in New Orleans, responded, “Every time it comes, I buy his two packages of Pampers … and I pay the phone bills from that.” Yesenia’s response demonstrates how mothers often had typical purchases that they planned to make every month using the BFY money, since they assumed this money would arrive. This reliability throughout the onset of an economic crisis may have been especially important. Yesenia and other mothers could plan the timing of their expenditures to align with their receipt of their monthly cash gift because they felt confident that this resource would show up on time. In the following sections, we hear notable uncertainty in mothers’ descriptions of UI and stimulus payments, which contrasts with their experiences with the BFY cash gift. We make these comparisons to highlight how mothers talk differently about their financial planning strategies for resources about which they feel certainty versus those they do not.

Unemployment Insurance

Twenty-nine of the forty-three mothers lived in households that were eligible for pandemic UI due to loss of income or loss of a job.³ While mothers may have experienced job loss before, this did not mean they would necessarily gain familiarity with the UI system because many individuals with low wages are not eligible for UI under normal circumstances (Goger et al. 2020). Further, overwhelmed state UI systems had slower processing times and drastically higher wait times for customer service assistance during the pandemic (Acs and Karpman 2020), meaning previous experiences would not have been mirrored during this crisis. Of these twenty-nine eligible mothers, eight had begun receiving their UI payments at the time of their interviews, and four had someone else in their household receiving UI. When mothers’ partners lost their jobs, some mothers described trying to figure out the UI system with their partners. Because mothers often shared income with partners, they saw this as a joint process. Even when they successfully applied, many mothers did not know whether or when they would begin receiving their benefits while they were waiting. This meant that they did not feel they could engage in financial planning with these funds.

The design and delivery mechanisms of UI shaped the uncertainty that mothers faced surrounding this resource. The UI application system did not automatically notify mothers of their approval or denial, so they had to wait for an approval notification in the mail (Foster 2020). If they were eventually approved, the application system told applicants what they could receive, but it did not clearly notify them about the amount that they would receive or when they would receive it (Foster 2020). This meant that mothers had to wait for their UI payment to come through to know this information. The overwhelmed UI system prolonged these wait times (Acs and Karpman 2020). Further, fluctuating maximum UI benefit levels amplified mothers’ uncertainty about the amount they would be receiving, as they did not know when these changes would take effect. Together, these features contributed to a system that fostered mothers’ uncertainty about UI receipt, which differed from their experiences with the BFY cash gift.

In her interview in August 2020, Isabella, a thirty-one-year-old Latina mother of five, shared that she and her partner had to wait “a couple of months for [the unemployment office] to get everything in order” when her partner lost his position at a refinery and applied for UI. After he had been approved and received UI (around $800 a week) for about a month, Isabella heard that the government might be ending the expanded UI program and that the UI payments would decrease. When we asked Isabella when that would happen, she responded, “We won’t know until he actually gets his deposit Friday.” The decrease in UI amount—from $800 to $500—would mean a substantial income loss for Isabella’s family. This was especially difficult because Isabella shared that the UI paid all of their bills, except for half the rent, which Isabella paid with her Supplemental Security Income (SSI) check. While Isabella felt that she could count on her SSI income to arrive, her uncertainty about the potential loss of UI meant that they could not rely on this income to plan bill payments until they had the funds in hand each week. Managing their finances was, therefore, beset with uncertainty.

Serena, a thirty-seven-year-old Black mother of three, also experienced uncertainty regarding UI receipt. She started a UI application after losing her job, but after struggling with the application process, she was unsure whether she had actually applied. Online safety concerns stopped her from following up to confirm her application had been submitted. Therefore, she did not know whether she would receive her UI check. She explained, “So, I kind of gave up on, like, if it’s something out there for me, it’s going to be sent to me because you have all my information, you have my home address. If there’s something, it’ll be sent to me. I’m kind of worn out.” Without knowing whether and when her UI benefits might begin, she approached making ends meet by taking it “day by day, you know. You got to figure out your next move,” which was difficult given her recent job loss. Lacking confidence that assistance programs would deliver resources, mothers like Serena might not be able to engage in consumption smoothing or other forms of financial planning, as they took things “day by day.” Uncertainty, therefore, may impede mothers from incorporating resources from safety net programs into their financial planning.

Nina, a twenty-seven-year-old Black mother of four in the high-gift group, described how her uncertainty regarding receipt of her partner’s UI left her unable to rely on this income to pay an overdue water bill. During her interview at the end of July 2020, she explained how her partner had recently lost his restaurant job, so he applied for UI, but the application was still being processed. They were waiting to find out about UI when they received an overdue water bill in the mail. “Right now, it’s pretty hard because we just got our water bill in the mail for like $275. … So, we’re trying to see how we’re going to pay that. I mean, I’ll have to pay it on the first and maybe on the 14th.” Nina grappled with how they were going to pay this bill and concluded that she would pay it on the first of the month, when she received disability benefits, and then pay any remaining balance two weeks later, when she received her monthly BFY cash gift. Mothers like Nina did not feel certain about if or when UI payments would arrive, and they did not discuss it as they described their plans for how to pay bills. Unlike UI payments, Nina felt confident that the disability benefits and the BFY money would arrive, so she did mentally allocate these income sources in advance as she figured out how to pay her bill.

In July 2020, Raven, a thirty-two-year-old Black and Native American mother of one in the high-gift group, described how her husband lost his job due to the pandemic, so he applied for UI. He was still waiting for the UI office to approve his application. She explained, “It’s been a waiting game forever for someone to call him back.” When we interviewed Raven again in October 2020, her husband had been approved for UI, and they were receiving it on a weekly basis. Because the receipt of this income became reliable and consistent for Raven and her husband, they were able to use their knowledge that this money would come through to financially plan. Raven was the only mother in our sample who reported a change in perceptions of resource certainty between her first and second interviews. She displayed similar certainty regarding receipt of UI and the BFY cash gift, and so she included both in her plans for how to pay their bills: “It’s like $220 weekly for unemployment, and [the BFY cash gift] comes on the 8th. So that would, when [both] come, that’s about 500 or so dollars, and that will pay for our electricity, rent, and—yeah, electricity, rent and the internet.” This shows how consistent receipt of a benefit may curtail the uncertainty that households may initially feel about the benefit coming through. While households may have had the opportunity to develop this certainty through weekly UI payments, stimulus payments were delivered less frequently, which may have shaped mothers’ ongoing uncertainty surrounding this resource.

Stimulus Checks

Nearly all BFY:MV mothers were entitled to receive the stimulus checks, yet only twenty-three mothers had received stimulus checks by the time of their interviews. Thirteen of these mothers were formally working when the pandemic began; therefore, the IRS had their information and could automatically send them stimulus checks. For mothers who had been formally employed, the administrative burdens were low, as they would receive this resource without needing to do anything. However, even mothers who had been working and filed taxes were not immune from feeling uncertain about receiving a stimulus check, for example, there were several who did not know whether their stimulus checks would be garnished.

The delivery system for the stimulus payments was intended to minimize administrative burdens because they were automatically delivered to individuals who had filed taxes in tax years 2018 or 2019. Twenty of the twenty-three BFY:MV mothers who received stimulus payments received them automatically. While some of these mothers were not working immediately prior to the pandemic, they may have worked beforehand and filed taxes in 2018 or 2019. Additionally, mothers’ partners, rather than mothers themselves, may have received these stimulus payments automatically, with the income shared within the household. Two additional mothers spoke about having received a stimulus check after filling out an application, and one sought help from a tax preparer. While mothers were aware of the stimulus payment program, most mothers who did not automatically receive the checks did not know about their personal eligibility or payment status. Like the UI system, there was no automatic notification about whether and when mothers would receive a stimulus check. To see this information, mothers had to look up their stimulus check status on the IRS website, a step that many did not know was available. Because of this design, many mothers did not know whether or when they would receive a stimulus payment. For example, Cassandra, a nineteen-year-old Black mother of one, said, “[W]e don’t know if Trump is going to give us those checks.” Likewise, Nakeisha, a thirty-one-year-old Black mother of two, said, “I wish I’d get … the stimulus. Yeah, I think they’re playing around. I don’t think nobody going to get it.” Such statements illustrate the distrust and uncertainty that many mothers felt toward some of the available resources during the early months of the pandemic. Mothers did not make financial plans with the stimulus check in mind because they were unsure whether it would arrive. This contrasts with how parents mentally manage money they are more confident will arrive, such as their annual tax refunds (Halpern-Meekin et al. 2015). While tax refunds often provide for debt repayment and asset building (Mendenhall et al. 2012), the stimulus checks were designed to address acute economic need; however, many BFY:MV mothers did not fully benefit from this design. Before they had the money in hand, the stimulus checks did not appear to ease mothers’ concerns about making ends meet because many were uncertain they would actually see this money. Therefore, mothers did not consider it a resource that they could financially plan around until they had received it.

As noted, some mothers had already received stimulus checks at the time of their interviews, but some still reflected back on the uncertainty they had experienced prior to their receipt. For example, Jade, a twenty-six-year-old Black mother of two, was surprised to receive her stimulus check in the mail at the beginning of May. “I honestly didn’t know I was getting one until I opened my mailbox, and my mom was like, ‘Ooh, you got the stimulus?’ And I was like, ‘Well, what is it?’ And she was like, ‘Oh, it’s based on your tax refund. If you filed taxes last year, then you should get it.’ … Yeah, I was kind of happy for it.” The unexpected nature of the stimulus checks underlines mothers’ uncertainty regarding this resource; even some mothers who eventually received their checks, like Jade, reflected on not having known whether they would come through before they received them. This meant they could not include these funds in their mental calculations for how to make ends meet prior to receiving the check. This illustrates how the psychological cost of uncertainty can create barriers to financial planning.