Kevin Crouch.
Kevin Crouch | Director, T garage
Think of financial resilience as the reserve fuel in your tank. You can ignore it for a while, but once the light flashes red, every kilometre feels risky. Right now, 37% of Australians are already running on fumes. That’s about eight million people with no more than a few months’ essential costs saved.
And most won’t pull over to ask for help.
At T garage, we’ve been tracking consumer sentiment for several years now, and one thing’s been consistent: Australians have been living under a prolonged period of uncertainty and challenge. Apart from a few green shoots of optimism, the pressure has barely let up.
Having worked with brands in UK for a number of years to understand financial wellbeing, I wanted to take a deeper look to see how Australians are currently feeling about their financial security - what that mean for us, as marketers, and as providers of products and services?
Resilience is the real consumer metric
Forget income brackets or neat demographic slices. What really matters today is financial resilience — whether people have enough in the tank to absorb life’s bumps.
Our research shows it’s not just low-income households running close to empty. Even those earning $200K+ can find themselves exposed, weighed down by mortgages, lifestyle pressures, and “keeping up with the Joneses.”
Resilience cuts across postcodes. It’s not fringe. It’s mainstream.
Life doesn’t respect your budget planner
In the past year alone, our June Sayso research found that 20% of Australians were hit by a negative life event that dented their finances, illness, job loss, relationship breakdown. These are the potholes in the road nobody plans for.
That’s why resilience matters more than raw income. Because when the unexpected happens, people fall back on the brands they trust to keep them moving. Or they stay silent.
Silence isn’t golden
And here’s the uncomfortable truth: people rarely raise their hand when the tank runs low:
- Only 32% of those who suffered a negative life event contacted their provider.
- Just 16% with a health-related vulnerability reached out.
Why? They assume nothing will change. They don’t trust the system. Or they’re simply too busy, too stressed, or too ashamed.
For brands, this is the blind spot. If you’re waiting for the distress call, you’re already too late.
Support is equity in disguise
In finance, telco, and energy — the low-trust categories — support is too often treated as compliance. Tick the box, meet the regulations, move on.
But here’s what our data says: support is a brand asset, waiting to be unlocked.
Australians respond strongly to:
- Hardship arrangements that don’t destroy credit scores (78%).
- Specialist support teams for tough situations (72%).
- Proactive tips based on real account data (65%).
- Recording customer needs once, so they don’t have to relive them (63%).
These aren’t obligations. They’re opportunities to build equity in the hardest moments of people’s lives.
The four plays smart brands are running
From what we see, the brands who win do four things well:
- Design out friction — auto-migrate customers to better plans, strip away needless complexity or barriers.
- Dignity in every interaction — empathy, specialist teams, case-by-case relief.
- Act before the ask — early identification, plain-English guidance, proactive nudges.
- Proof beats promises — show support up-front, with evidence customers can believe.
That’s not corporate social responsibility. That’s strategy.
The choice ahead
Australians don’t just want cheaper bills or shinier products. They want to feel secure, in control, and respected.
Brands that deliver that, especially when times are tough, earn something no media plan can buy: trust.
So here’s the choice: you can treat support as obligation, buried in the fine print. Or you can see it for what it really is — a new battleground for brand differentiation in low trust categories.
Because in an era where millions are already running on fumes, the brands that top up the tank will be the ones people stick with for the long road ahead.