Gen Zers and millennials have it harder than boomers did with college debt and buying a home—but they're much better about saving (2024)

I didn’t figure out how to start saving for myself until I started becoming an expert on saving for other people. It wasn’t until I started understanding why I, and so many others, have problems saving, that I started putting into place some of the strategies and systems that are now commonplace in the retirement industry. Saving for the future goes against every impulse most of us have to grab what is in front of us now instead of delaying gratification for some vague “future” that may or may not ever arrive.

It took me multiple false starts over about 15 years to start saving for retirement. I made about every mistake I could—including running up credit card debt, and not saving for retirement. After I finally starting a 401(k), I borrowed a bunch of money from it to replace our roof in an emergency. Except, even though I made every mistake in the book, I had it relatively easy. The truth is, young people today don’t have the same luxury for multiple do-overs like I did.

Take John, for instance, a twenty-nine-year-old living in Brooklyn. He works at a start-up and lives in a three-bedroom apartment he shares with roommates. He does his best to budget, but after factoring in student loan payments, rent, taxes, subway fare, and bills, at the end of each month there’s almost nothing left to stash in his savings. Over Thanksgiving, after a few glasses of chardonnay, John’s grandfather turned to him at the dinner table and said, “You know, by the time I was your age, I was married with two kids, and I owned a house. When are you going to start getting serious about your life?”

John wisely didn’t take the bait, but the thought gnawed at him for weeks. Why wasn’t he further along? Why didn’t he own a house yet? And why did he have barely anything saved for retirement? The thought of buying a house, raising children, and retiring at sixty-five on his current trajectory seemed about as likely as winning the lottery. John is far from alone. According to surveys by the National Institute on Retirement Security, 72 percent of millennials are concerned they won’t be able to live comfortably and achieve a financially secure retirement. Indeed, in 1989, when baby boomers were roughly the same age as millennials today, they owned over 21 percent of the national wealth. Millennials today own just under 5 percent.

Talk to a typical boomer, and they’ll rehash all the tired old clichés: young people these days fail at adulting, they study worthless subjects in college, they don’t value hard work, they blow all their money on avocado toast and lattes. If you listen to enough Dave Ramsey, you’d probably come away thinking that millennials and Gen Z are too coddled, too addicted to card-swiping, and simply lack the self-control to save for retirement. If they could only be like John’s grandfather—you know, responsible and frugal—they’d be in much better shape.

Except, here’s the part Grandpa conveniently left out. When he went to college in the 1960s, his tuition was just $270 per year. He made less than $12,000 per year during his twenties and thirties, but that was easily enough to buy a home, raise a family, and send his children to college. John’s grandfather never had to think about retirement because his job provided a pension that paid a guaranteed 85 percent of his salary at age sixty-five. In fact, as late as 1990, nearly half of the private sector workforce had access to a pension.

Here’s the real kicker: young people are actually much better about saving than previous generations. A recent Bank of America survey found that millennials began putting away money for retirement at age twenty-four, whereas Gen X started at thirty and it took until thirty-three for boomers to get their act together. Meanwhile, data show that Gen Z are saving even earlier than millennials, setting themselves up to become the most accomplished savers in history. You might not feel like the most accomplished saver in history, no matter how hard you’re trying. Whether it’s due to student loan debt, sky-high housing costs, inflation, or stagnant wages, there’s no sugarcoating it: most young people simply aren’t saving enough.

You don’t get cheap college, cheap housing, cheap gas, and cheap health care like previous generations did. Instead of guaranteed pensions, you get a DIY 401(k), and it’s up to you to keep it funded and keep it growing. In a time when it costs so much money to simply exist, you don’t have the luxury of making the same mistakes I did. As the Washington Post reckoned, you are “the unluckiest generation in US history.”

With all these headwinds, there’s a good chance you don’t trust the system. After all, the system brought you the Great Recession, which crippled career prospects for millions of college graduates. But the party was only getting started for Gen X and boomers, who already had stocks, and for the next ten years enjoyed one of the longest bull markets in history. Millennials, who owned very few stocks, largely missed out. And just as Gen Z were dipping their toes in the water, they were hit with the COVID-19 pandemic recession, record-high inflation, and the crypto crash. In a time when the world careens from one catastrophe to the next, when you’re struggling to put down roots while billionaires pay a lower tax rate than you do, you have every right to think the system is rigged.

But, in spite of these headwinds…you’ve got this. You can do it. Instead of avoiding the system, you need to hack the system. If you’re in your early twenties and just starting out, you’ve already got enough time—your rocket fuel in the tank—to ensure a secure retirement. If you’re a jaded elder millennial who has already lived through two crippling recessions and is only now able to start saving, you might need to get a little more creative—but you’ve got this, too. Take it from David, who didn’t open a retirement account until his thirty-eighth birthday. Yet, in just two years, he has made more progress toward his goals than in the previous two decades. By far the biggest obstacle David had to overcome was pushing aside that little voice in his head saying, “You can’t do this. It’s too late. You have too much debt. You don’t make enough money. You don’t deserve to have a secure future.”

You do deserve a secure retirement and a secure future, even if it seems out of reach. You deserve to have bigger goals than finally paying off that art history degree. If you’re in your twenties or thirties, you have an ace up your sleeve that no hedge fund manager can rival. You have the ability to put just a little bit of money away each year and watch it slowly grow into a nest egg that will allow you to live anywhere and do anything you want.

Excerpted from Your Best Financial Life, provided courtesy of William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. Copyright © 2024 by ALT AUT LLC.

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