Not investing earlier in life is the single biggest financial regret Americans name, according to a Clarify Capital survey of 1,000 adults — ahead of overspending and taking on too much debt. Among the specific investments people wished they had made sooner, retirement accounts topped the list: nearly half (48%) said they should have started saving earlier. Bankrate’s 2025 nationally representative survey corroborates the pattern: 22% cite not saving for retirement early enough as their top financial regret. On the action side, Bankrate’s data shows that credit card debt (15%) is the second-most-common financial regret, while pure investment-loss regret does not even rank as a standalone category. Among investors specifically, 66% report regretting at least one impulsive or emotional decision — but this is execution regret (buying meme stocks, panic-selling), not regret about participating in markets.
The distinction between regretting that you invested and regretting how you invested is critical here. Most investor regret is tactical — wrong stock, wrong timing, wrong amount. This is qualitatively different from the inaction regret, which is existential: “I missed a decade of compound growth.” Gilovich’s temporal theory predicts exactly this pattern: action regrets (buying a bad stock) generate a specific, bounded pain that fades as people adapt or recover losses. Inaction regrets (not investing at all) are open-ended and grow with time, because the counterfactual return compounds.
The major caveat is market regime. These surveys were conducted during or shortly after a long US equity bull run that delivered historically strong returns. In Japan’s post-1989 market or the US post-2000 dot-com crash, the inaction-regret rate would look very different. The 48% figure from Clarify Capital (the share who said they should have started saving for retirement earlier) is more conservative than the previously cited 77% from MagnifyMoney, which inflated the rate by including timing regret among people who did eventually invest. The current 33-point delta is still directionally robust — not investing generates more lasting regret than investing — but the magnitude is era-dependent.