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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 30 2021, @04:50PM
>Muh anecdotes about a nonsensical construct
Yeah, yeah... I lived in an unfinished basement to save up enough cash to pay for college outright and then some emergency funds on top. My friend is doing the same right now, sans college. Two other friends are living with their parents as well. We're all millennials.
The real fuckin' problem is the "American Dream" bullshit. Multigenerational households are the solution. This shit where you've got everybody running about trying to buy a fucking house but there's only enough to satisfy a fraction of the demand... Well that doesn't bode well. Of course thanks to the "American Dream" shit, none of the fucking houses built are suitable by default so that's nice. When and where they are, the costs are so exorbitant it's improbable for any working class schmuck to even consider, or be considered for the purchase with a small handful of exceptions. In the rare case you can find something tenable it's in an economically despairing locale. So you're left to the sharp teeth of the rentier, and they'll bleed you dry. But that's capitalism, you've gotta generate passive income for the idle wealthy minority so they can laze about playing golf and patting themselves on the backs, and patting the backs of their cohort for "added value" which is ultimately extracted from the reduced quality of life of the people which are their victims.
It worked for a momentary little blip, but it was such a visible, such an exploitable system - once the teeth were set in the parasite was as good as burrowed. Now you choose usury or poverty, play at lottery odds for sustainability in any meaningful sense, and if you're defined as a winner you're made to be a loser by systemic oppression until you reach the highest echelon of society, at odds with all probability, where your strata is so far above the others that the rule of the land is no longer applicable and all the worries of the mortal flesh, and the chains that bind are effaced as you soar above the deplorables.
"We may say, by the way, that success is a hideous thing. Its counterfeit of merit deceives men. To the mass, success has almost the same appearance as supremacy. Success, that pretender to talent, has a dupe,—history. Juvenal and Tacitus only reject it. In our days, a philosophy which is almost an official has entered into its service, wears its livery, and waits in its antechamber. Success; that is the theory. Prosperity supposes capacity. Win in the lottery, and you are an able man. The victor is venerated. To be born with a caul is everything. Have but luck, and you will have the rest; be fortunate, and you will be thought great. Beyond the five or six great exceptions, which are the wonder of their age, contemporary admiration is nothing but shortsightedness. Gilt is gold. To be a chance comer is no drawback, provided you have improved your chances. The common herd is an old Narcissus, who adores himself, and who applauds the common. That mighty genius, by which one becomes a Moses, an Æschylus, a Dante, a Michael Angelo, or a Napoleon, the multitude assigns at once and by acclamation to whoever succeeds in his object, whatever it may be, Let a notary rise to be a deputy; let a sham Corneille write Tiridate; let a eunuch come into the possession of a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch, let an apothecary invent pasteboard soles for army shoes, and lay up, by selling this pasteboard instead of leather for the army of the Sambre-et-Meuse, four hundred thousand livres in the funds; let a pack-pedlar espouse usury and bring her to bed of seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and she the mother; let a preacher become a bishop by talking through his nose; let the steward of a good house become so rich on leaving service that he is made Minister of Finance;—men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton, Beauty, and the bearing of Claude, Majesty. They confound the radiance of the stars of heaven with the radiations which a duck’s foot leaves in the mud."
-Victor Hugo, Les Miserables