Scientists Discover That Money Can Literally Make You Age Slower. Here’s How.

They say money can’t buy happiness, but money strategically given to low-income parents might actually buy longevity.

According to a landmark study published in Nature Human Behaviour, a long-running trial that gave moms financial stipends showed that the babies of parents who received a no-strings-attached cash gift of $333 a month displayed signs of slower biological aging by the time the kids turned four.

Scientists have long suspected that growing up poor ages you on a cellular level. The problem with proving this through the scientific method is that countless variables are at play, making it hard to draw a clear line from cause to effect. The Baby’s First Years study aimed to do exactly that, giving low-income mothers either a $333 monthly stipend or $20 a month for just over 6 years of their child’s life.

Some earlier studies, as reported by the New York Times in July 2025, initially found that monthly payments didn’t do much to boost a child’s well-being. Things have changed since then.

When the kids turned four, the team swabbed their cheeks and checked their DNA for specific epigenetic markers to check their biological age, a more exact way of determining how old you really are down to a cellular level, which may not exactly match your chronological age.

Using a marker called DunedinPACE, which basically acts as a biological speedometer, scientists found that kids in the $ 333-a-month group were aging at a noticeably slower pace than those in the $20 group.

The money itself wasn’t boosting DNA metrics or turning the whole family into some kind of class of immortal super being, but the researchers think that having a little bit extra money a month helped slow down cellular wear and tear by reducing early life stress, thus giving a kid’s body a chance to grow without constantly being in emergency survival mode.

By now, the kids were only about seven or eight years old, so time will tell whether this head start lasts and leads to anything meaningful, but so far it seems like cold, hard cash given directly to underprivileged parents might be acting as some kind of cellular-level medicine.