Financial straits of millennials could linger for decades, analysts say

Statistically speaking, 28-year-old graphic designer Amy Norris is somewhat of an anomaly.

Twenty-eight percent of her fellow millennials don’t hold full-time jobs. But she has steady employment at Quartermaster Marketing in the Crossroads Arts District in Kansas City.

Nearly half of all millennials still live at home with their parents. But Norris and her teacher husband, Bryan, own their home.

And while studies reveal that many millennials are putting off big life changes – getting married, buying homes, starting families – because they’re paying off hefty student loans, Norris graduated owing less than $2,000.

The economic news for Americans ages 18 to 34 hasn’t been rosy for quite some time. As a group, millennials – those born in the 1980s and 1990s and part of Generation Y – are poorer than the young adults of past generations.

Census statistics show that a large group of millennials – about 28 million out of 70 million in all – are not enrolled in school and are making less than $10,000 a year at their jobs.

So how is Norris beating the odds?

“Luck, probably,” she concedes.

Well, that and the generosity of her parents, who helped support and house her while she juggled part-time jobs stocking shelves at 5 a.m. at Old Navy and folding shirts at Dick’s Sporting Goods – just like 40 percent of millennials who still receive financial support from their parents.

“If I had been on my own, I don’t know how I would have done it, and I don’t know how people do it without that kind of support,” she said.

Recessions tend to affect young people the hardest. But members of the country’s largest generation have been waylaid far worse than previous generations, and economists worry that those effects on a group just now starting careers could linger for decades.

“The financial crisis and the Great Recession and its aftermath are hopefully the most significant economic calamity that this generation will experience,” said labor economist and policy analyst Catherine Ruetschlin, a visiting professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

“We can cross our fingers and really hope that now that we’re climbing out of that experience, millennials have the opportunity for growth and improving living standards ahead of them. However, there are … things that really complicate that.”

Millennial 1 percent

Wage inequality is a particular scourge for millennials. It’s difficult to say why so much money rests in the hands of an elite young few, because there hasn’t been much study of it in this age group.

Earlier this year, the millennial-targeted website Fusion created a “wealth gap calculator” and concluded that young people are suffering from a level of wealth inequality more severe than previous generations.

Fusion crunched data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey and found that it takes an income of about $106,500 a year to be in the millennial 1 percent.

That’s rare air occupied by about 720,000 young adults who control about twice the income of the 14 million millennials in the bottom 20 percent.

Given that so many millennials are making less than $10,000 a year, a salary of about $60,000 – a typical starting wage for an engineering or computer science major – would place someone in the top 10 percent of potential earners among millennials, Fusion concluded.

It would take a baby boomer more than $90,000 to do that well among peers.

Tough competition for jobs

As a paraprofessional, 26-year-old Taylor Stoetzer of Mission spends his days working with special-needs children in a field he has long been interested in.

When he considers his 20-something friends, it’s a mixed bag – friends who have college degrees working in jobs with hefty salaries and “a good number” who don’t have either of those things.

Given that so many people are struggling to get by, “I would say I’m definitely not making a ton of money right now, but I’m definitely blessed to be where I’m at,” Stoetzer said.

His job doesn’t require a degree, just a number of college hours. But even millennials with degrees aren’t finding jobs, as a May headline in Forbes declared: “The 5.4 unemployment rate means nothing for millennials.”

An estimated 2.8 million university graduates entered the American workforce last spring as unemployment rates hit the lowest in nearly seven years.

Even so, millennials make up about 40 percent of the country’s unemployed.

“This misconception that we don’t want jobs or that we’re lazy and entitled is nonsense,” David Pasch, 26, a spokesman for Generation Opportunity, a conservative nonprofit that advocates for millennials, told Time earlier this year.

Millennials trying to enter the workforce or looking to move into better-paying jobs face stiff competition, Ruetschlin said.

“It’s kind of that last-in, first-out trend,” she said. “They have to heavily compete for jobs with people with much more experience in the workforce, which sets them back.”

High cost of degree

And the millennials who do have college degrees? They’re starting their careers with bigger student loan debt than previous generations: a nationwide average of $30,000 as of three years ago.

That cumulative debt rose above the $1 trillion mark for millennials last year, making it the group’s second-largest category of household debt, according to the “15 Economic Facts About Millennials” report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers.

Several factors bear the blame. There’s a larger number of students from lower-income families going to college who need to take out loans to pay for school. Financially strapped parents can’t as easily use equity in their homes to pay for college anymore. And students are taking longer to repay their loans, if they do at all.

According to the White House report, college loan defaults are highest among students who don’t graduate from a four-year institution and those attending for-profit schools.

But the cost is worth the expense, said 65 percent of all millennials surveyed in the Fusion report.

Though Stoetzer doesn’t plan to leave the special-needs field, he does want to someday finish the degree he started at Johnson County Community College so that he can take his career “a step further, make decisions, be in charge.”

A home of their own

Nearly every millennial plans to buy a home someday, the Fusion survey showed. But that’s another goal that appears out of reach for many.

For one thing, a growing overall demand for inexpensive starter homes has diminished the supply available to younger Americans with less money to spend.

“You’ve got the front end of a big wave of first-time homebuyers, but the supply of affordable housing is not there to meet that wave,” Sam Khater, deputy chief economist for CoreLogic, told Bloomberg News this month.

Ruetschlin believes that some millennials have been scared away from the housing market and are actually choosing to stay away. To them, “it just doesn’t seem like the kind of safe bet that it was back in 2001, 2002, 2003,” she said.

Even with the deck so perilously stacked against them, millennials believe they can be wealthy, even millionaires. In fact, more than 25 percent of them expect to be millionaires in their lifetimes, according to Fusion’s Massive Millennial Poll.

Keep in mind, a lot of those millennials are still living with mom and dad.

Millionaire status is far more doable for older Americans.

If you’re over 62, your odds of having at least $1 million in net wealth (total assets minus total debt) are about 1 in 7.

Under 40? Your odds are 1 in 55.

Over the past 25 years, the odds have gone up for older people, down for younger.

“Millennials are either impressively optimistic or blissfully ignorant,” Fusion concluded.

This story was originally published October 25, 2015 at 10:29 PM with the headline "Financial straits of millennials could linger for decades, analysts say."