Many countries face reoccurring periods of public finance instability, stimulating research in political economy on the determinants of citizens’ preferences towards fiscal policies. While these studies focus mostly on contemporary variables, a growing multidisciplinary literature has shown that early adult life experiences shape contemporary individual political preferences. In this paper, I advance and empirically test the hypothesis that exposure to unsuccessful austerity during one’s early adult life negatively influences people’s support for consolidation later in life. Austerity represents a retrenchment of citizens’ entitlements and a deterioration of their economic standing. Citizens respond to these changes by updating their preferences. Moreover, previous exposure to austerity can shape preferences because of its impact on people’s trust in the effectiveness of austerity. Among those who have already suffered from austerity, when asked again to bear its costs, there will be a widespread lack of trust in austerity’s promise to generate future rewards, e.g., avoid future deeper consolidation, and thus lower support for austerity. To test the theory, I employ an IMF database of episodes of fiscal retrenchment and data on people’s living history and current attitudes towards fiscal consolidation from Eurobarometer surveys and an original survey carried out in Italy. The findings suggest austerity has a long-lived impact on individual preferences that can help explain contemporary variation in support for debt consolidation among citizens. Mediation analysis reveals that the effect is partially caused by lowered trust in austerity.