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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 deimtee on Wednesday April 24 2019, @02:13AM
It is difficult to find exact figures, but some sites give the range of $90,000 to $180,000 as the cost of a typical US college degree.
That seems reasonable for someone who is ambivalent about attending college, they are not going to be brainiacs getting free rides at Caltech.
If they just stuck that money in an index fund how much would it be worth 40 years later? More than the million their degree would have earned?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.