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70% of Millennials Are Living Paycheck to Paycheck: Survey:
Millennials' wallets are rather skimpy.
Seventy percent of the generation said they're living paycheck to paycheck, according to a survey by PYMNTS and LendingClub, which analyzed economic data and census-balanced surveys of over 28,000 Americans. It found that about 54% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, but millennials had the biggest broke energy.
By contrast, 40% of baby boomers and seniors said they live paycheck to paycheck, the least of any generation. Living paycheck to paycheck reflects economic needs and wants just as much, if not more than, incomes or wealth levels, according to the report. Age and family status also factor in greatly. This explains why millennials, who turn ages 25 to 40 this year, are struggling.
[...] It doesn't help that millennials have faced one economic challenge after another since the oldest of them graduated into the dismal job market of the 2008 financial crisis. A dozen years later, many are still grappling with the lingering effects of The Great Recession, struggling to build wealth while trying to afford soaring costs for things like housing and healthcare and shouldering the lion's share of America's student-loan debt.
The pandemic threw yet another wrench into their plans by giving them their second recession and second housing crisis before the age of 40. The report acknowledges that the pandemic played a major role in that stretched thin feeling.
[...] It seems, then, that it's a combination of external economic circumstances, a precarious life stage, and some spending habits that are leaving millennials feeling strapped for cash.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by esperto123 on Wednesday September 29 2021, @01:25PM (7 children)
comparing millennials to baby boomers at the same point in time I think is a false comparison, one group had decades more time to work than the other. If they are comparing generations they should compare them at the same age, i.e., when the baby boomers were 25 to 40 did they had a better financial situation, did less than 70% live paycheck by paycheck?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 29 2021, @02:48PM (3 children)
When you do the same-age comparison, you find out that young people are absolutely screwed compared to older generations. In 1970, in today's dollars:
- Minimum wage was about $10 / hour.
- Lots of blue-collar work that required only a high school education paid quite well, e.g. untrained construction laborers got around $20 / hour. In addition, that high school education often included vocational training in fields like auto repair, construction, and industrial tool use so graduates were often well-prepared to start on those sorts of jobs without going to college.
- College students who didn't have rich parents were able to work their way through college doing burger-flipping and other crappy jobs, and then graduate with zero debt. Nowadays, if you don't have rich parents and want a college degree, you're talking about starting your working life $80-200K in debt.
- If you got advanced degrees and got into teaching higher education, the worst you'd be paid as an untenured lecturer was around $65K rather than the $14K adjuncts make today. And your odds of getting promoted to a tenured position were much much higher.
- If you wanted to buy a mid-sized home, you'd be spending about $95-100K, versus the the approximately $270K a home costs today. And your mortgage interest rate would likely be lower.
- If you had to rent, it was about $750 a month, versus $1100 today.
About the only financial advantage a Millennial American has over a Boomer when they were the same age, as far as I was able to find, is that you get paid a lot more for enlisting in the military than you used to, although my understanding is that military members also have to pay for a lot more things out of pocket than they used to.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:07PM (2 children)
Supply vs demand. There's a lot more people now. Technology has increased the supply for some things, but not others (in particular, space in areas many people want to live).
Citing minimum wage is not relevant. All minimum wage does is eliminate jobs which employers and employees want but fall below the arbitrary price cutoff. Minimum wage does have benefits in areas where a single job provider monopolizes the market and controls the price, but otherwise just interferes with the natural market.
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(Score: 5, Touché) by Thexalon on Wednesday September 29 2021, @11:31PM
You can make whatever excuses or explanations you want for why all my points are true. But no matter how you slice it, if you're a young person today doing the same kind of work as your dad did when he was young, you're making less money doing it, and your fixed expenses for basic survival have increased, thus making your budget tighter or even not making ends meet at all.
And the minimum wage is one of several indicators of the wage decreases going on, along with median incomes, mean incomes, and other averages and aggregations.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @05:34AM
Even in places people don't want to live there are price controls in place through zoning and property maturity that keep prices exceedingly high. There's also property speculation out the wazoo, and this is especially apparent at the moment. On top of that you now have commercial enterprise purchasing housing to do AirBnB shit, Zillow buying housing, Blackrock bought a shitload of housing (undoubtedly speculative purchasing). All of this serves to press not only housing, but rents up, irrespective of real value. Meaning cost of living gets driven up. Add to inflation compounding that. Real compensation overall sees a net decrement for most people.
Free markets don't exist, they never have. Get it in your head - the system is as broken as Marxism.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Wednesday September 29 2021, @03:17PM
"when the baby boomers were 25 to 40 did they had a better financial situation, did less than 70% live paycheck by paycheck"
Depends on which age range of "boomers" you're talking about. By brother and I are both considered boomers. My brother was born in 1951. When he was out of high school, you could get a union job in a factory. I was born in 1963, when I got out of high school, those factories had shut their doors, and America was importing what used to be made in them.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday September 29 2021, @05:26PM (1 child)
When the boomers were at the same age, some had a house (doable on a single income), decentish car, etc. Others were just realizing that their dream of a happy hippy commune weren't really shaping up very well. The big difference is that for them it wasn't too late to finish school, get a job, and start on that house. It was actually possible to pay for a good school with a starter job and graduate debt free. The oil embargo and the economic doldrums of the '70s were still a few years away. Companies still offered stable employment and a pension plan. You could still get medical care uninsured without taking out a 3rd mortgage.
There is some reason to believe that the big problem now is that there isn't much if any margin for financial error or a run of bad luck these days and most people have one or the other, especially as young adults.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday October 01 2021, @10:17PM
You might also add that back then the government offered "National Direct Student Loans" at 3% interest, rather than the "free market" loans today at significantly higher costs. Combine that with much lower tuitions to begin with, and even students who borrowed heavily could pay off their debt fairly quickly.