Bad news for millennials: you’re doing way worse than your parents were doing at your age, monetarily speaking.
Despite having educations, the median household income of a millennial is $40,581, 20 percent less than what baby boomers were making at their age, according to USA Today. Their home ownership rate is also lower, while their student debt is astronomically higher.
Andrea Ledesma, a 28-year-old recent college graduate, says her parents owned a house and were raising kids at her age. Obviously things are a bit different for Lesema, who says that after moving through several different jobs, she now makes $18,000 making pizza in Milwaukee while sharing a two-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend and having $33,000 in student debt.
“That’s not at all how life is now, that’s not something that people strive for and it’s not something that is even attainable, and I thought it would be at this point,” Ledesma said.
Her mother, 55-year-old Cheryl Romanowski, said that at 28 she was making about $10,000 a year working at a bank without a college education. Today that amount would equal out to be about $19,500.
“I think the opportunities have just been fading away,” she explained. And there’s data to back up this statement.
When comparing 23 to 35-year-olds in 2013 to 1989, data shows that the median college-educated millennial with student debt is only earning slightly more than a baby boomer without a degree did in 1989. It also shows that the home ownership for this age group dipped to 43 percent from 46 percent in 1989 and the median net worth of millennials is $10,090, 56 percent less than it was for their parents.
According USA Today,
This decline has occurred even though younger Americans are increasingly college-educated. The proportion of 25 to 29 year-olds with a college degree has risen to 35.6 percent in 2015 from 23.2 percent in 1990, a report this month by the Brookings Institution noted.
So that’s fun! In other news, who wants to get hammered? Drinks are on my rich, baby boomer parents!