Moneywork

A term coined by sociologist Sandra Colavecchia and introduced to HCI by Perry and Ferreira, describing the often-invisible labour of managing personal and household finances. Moneywork includes practical tasks (paying bills, budgeting, shopping, filing tax returns) and the cognitive and emotional work of keeping financial matters in order — worrying about overdrafts, juggling fragmented analogue and digital tools, negotiating bills with providers, and maintaining boundaries with family. For accessibility, moneywork is significant because digital-financial interfaces externalise much of this labour onto users, and default designs often assume cognitive stamina, frictionless decision-making, and independence that exclude people with cognitive disabilities, mental-health conditions, autism, ADHD, or intermittent capacity.