At the end of last year, Statbel asked 5,000 people between the ages of 16 and 74 about their financial situation and well-being. It is also noticeable that more and more Belgians are finding it difficult to make ends meet.
Clear differences emerge according to income group. For example, the 20 percent with the lowest incomes have a significantly more difficult time, with 68.5% indicating that they are having difficulty, than the 20% with the highest incomes (21.6%). Yet the latter are also having an increasingly difficult time: in the third quarter of 2021, only 13.3% of people in that group had difficulty making ends meet.
The difficulties also have a (limited) impact on satisfaction with the financial situation. On average, Belgians gave themselves a score of 7 out of 10 at the start of the survey. That has dropped to 6.7 out of 10 by the end of 2022.
Again, there are differences according to income: the higher the income, the higher the satisfaction. For the lowest incomes, this score has remained almost stable between the third quarter of 2021 (6.4) and the fourth quarter of 2022 (6.3). Among the highest incomes, there was a decrease from 7.7 to 7.3.