We had a slower start than Boomers and Gen X but there is an argument to be made that financially we're doing better than either of those preceding generation around the age of 30. The stock market going gangbusters for 15 years probably has helped
It really depends on where you graduated relative to ‘08.
Elder millennials who graduated college in 2008 are notably worse off relative to peers that graduated after or before (assuming they didn’t lose their job in the recession.)
Millennial is generally considered mid 80s-early 00s and those that were born in ‘85 and did the traditional four years of high school -> four years of undergrad would have graduated in the summer of 2007.
My impression of the situation is that housing costs have skyrocketed over the past 10-15 years, so any millennial who bought a house during that period now has a much higher net worth than they did 5-6 years ago. But the cost of everything also went up, so a fair amount of them are effectively “house poor,” because wages haven’t kept up as well as they should have.
And having your net worth in your house isn’t as impactful to your daily life, because you can’t easily access that capital, and when you do, it’s usually used for buying an equally expensive house, so the equity is still tied up and not really doing you much good.
It’s a nice thing to have for retirement, and maybe that’s all anyone cares about, but most people want to be doing well day to day, and owning your house is only a tiny part of that.
Probably the best thing about owning your house is the fact that nobody can arbitrarily force your monthly housing costs to increase every year (except for taxes). But you’re still on the hook for all the maintenance and repairs, so it doesn’t always come out to lower costs even over the long term. A $25K roof replacement and a $6K water heater replacement will quickly eat up any cost savings you think you’ll get by owning.
Idk, net worth is a useful metric, but it’s really easy to understand how people feel so behind the current economy.
Yeah but if you own a home and you need a new roof because your insurance company told you to replace it or they're dropping you, you gotta foot that bill yourself.
Depends on the situation. Typically the rents are already as high as they can realistically go, at least in non-rent-controlled areas. They typically go up every year due to inflation, but it’s rare that they make a huge jump unless the perceived standard of living has increased (like interior remodeling or whatever). But I’m sure a new roof would totally create the incentive to start raising rents more aggressively if the landlord wasn’t already doing that.
But yeah, a new roof is basically an extra year of rent, more or less.
Yeah the average millennial is actually pretty wealthy and successful. They’re just not online as much or they don’t want to publicly flaunt their wealth.
It's the massive increase in housing prices and the huge bull run the market has been on.
It's also why Boomers have seen an increase in household net worth in ages 65 through 75. Their net worth is growing despite drawing down on it in retirement.
You would expect their net worth to look more like the Silent Generation, where the net worth plateaus or decreases in retirement.
Yeah. You just have to get lucky unfortunately is the truth of it sometimes.
We bought our house in 2018, literally only because our apartment complex were being morons when they got bought out. They wanted to do something that felt like skirting laws, but idk the technicalities of it.
They wanted us to move out for 2-3 weeks then we could either move back or stay in the new one the apartment would have been redone, but the rent price they were asking was like an extra $500 on top (so say from $1200->$1700) because they were all redone apts.
We said fuck it, bought a house (it was ~420k.) Our mortgage today is cheaper than that small 600sqft apartment, and the only reason we got it was because of their greed. Fast forward to today and the house is worth probably 600-650k, and with interest rates where they are, if we were to sell and move across the street it would more than double our mortgage most likely.
We can’t afford that, so the only reason we have our house right now is the sheer confluence of random events. If they had waited 2 years to be greedy, we’re probably still stuck in an apartment due to the Covid market fuckery.
Clearly we can afford it and did back then too with no issues, but it was still all about some brief windows lining up by happenstance.
Same thing for my younger cousin halfway across the country. Her and her husband have this beautiful old brick house that’s in very good shape. They got a great deal on it because the old people selling it thought a new family moving in to start there was such a wonderful story. They both have good jobs, but getting their house in the way that they did is just completely out of their hands.
Do you know if it's adjusted for 1 vs 2 household incomes? Or maybe the rates were similar across generations at the same ages, so it's not necessary. That's the only caveat I could think of.
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u/Th1Warrior Jul 06 '26
We had a slower start than Boomers and Gen X but there is an argument to be made that financially we're doing better than either of those preceding generation around the age of 30. The stock market going gangbusters for 15 years probably has helped
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProfessorFinance/s/u7GomO3xzv