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from the would-you-like-fries-with-that? dept.
More than half of American millennials, the generation of people born between 1981 and 1996, believe that they will one day be millionaires; one in five think they will get there by the age of 40. These are the findings from a survey conducted in 2018 by TD Ameritrade, a financial-services company.
But a working paper by the Brookings Institution, a think-tank, offers a sobering antidote to this youthful optimism. It finds that millennials are less wealthy than people of a similar age were in any year from 1989 to 2007. The economic crisis of 2008-09 hit millennials particularly hard. Median household wealth in 2016 for 20- to 35-year-olds was about 25% lower than it was for the similar-aged cohort in 2007.
[...] But all is not lost. Millennials are living longer and are the best-educated generation in history. Taken together, this could yet mean that the youngest millennials, who have been less scarred by the crisis, could contribute towards their retirement pots for longer. Then there is mum and dad: even if they don’t become millionaires, millennials will one day inherit from their parents, and that may help redress their relative poverty.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday April 23 2019, @05:44PM (1 child)
I always liked George Carlin's formulation about it: "It's called the American Dream because you have be asleep to believe it."
Even as one of the older Millennials who got his career started before the 2008 crash, with significant inheritance, no student loan debt, an in-demand profession, and no kids to drain my money away, my net worth is about $150K, and I highly doubt it will get above $500K in today's dollars. That puts me far better off than the average American, but I don't expect to be a millionaire.
Another classic quote attributed to John Steinbeck but quite possibly not him: "Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires." That's how important the myth of the American Dream is to the social control mechanisms in the US.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 24 2019, @12:54AM
> career started before the 2008 crash, with significant inheritance, no student loan debt, an in-demand profession, and no kids to drain my money away, my net worth is about $150K, ...
So in the last 10+ years you've managed to squirrel away something around $10K-15K per year. You couldn't have lost too much in the 2008 crash, since you had just started working at that time. What do you spend all your money on? Hope at least some of it is spent having fun.