For many young Americans, achieving the financial stability of their parents’ generation feels impossible.
The price of starter homes has skyrocketed. So have college loans and child care. Meanwhile, older generations are living and working longer, limiting younger workers’ chances to advance their careers and boost their salaries.
Two-thirds of Americans believe younger people face hardships today that previous generations didn’t, and 65% of Gen Zers and 74% of millennials say they believe they are starting further behind financially than earlier generations at their age, according to an online survey of more than 2,000 U.S. adults conducted exclusively for USA TODAY by The Harris Poll on Aug. 25-27.
All the while, younger Americans are coming up against unprecedented challenges such as a climate crisis and unseen levels of political divisiveness.
“They’re telling us they can’t buy into that American Dream the way that their parents and grandparents thought about it ‒ because it’s not attainable,” said The Harris Poll CEO John Gerzema, who thinks there’s “an entire generation that feels like they’re coming of age in sort of this fractured, divisive world” where traditional systems no longer work for them.
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The anxiety around money is intense right now. Nearly 70% of Americans say the economy is getting worse, according to an exclusive poll from the Suffolk University Sawyer Business School and USA TODAY taken Sept. 6-11. They described the economy with words like “chaotic,” “disastrous,” and “dismal.”
To adapt to these new challenges, young Americans are redefining what it means to be financially successful. For many, their hopes and dreams no longer mean owning a single-family home with a white picket fence.
USA TODAY spoke to nine young Americans – Gen Zers and millennials between 23 and 39 – about their finances and the future.
Here’s what they said.
Rising cost of living. High inflation. Even higher mortgage rates. No more pensions.
These are a few of the ways New York City-based Matt Marino, a 27-year-old teacher, believes his generation faces “exponentially greater” financial hardships than previous ones.
“I think maybe for (older generations), they focused more on … having a job where you can have good money, support yourself, support your family, and even have more leftover or plan ahead for the future for retirement,” he said. He thinks its “a little different now for, for me and my generation.”
Marino said his generation views homeownership as “impossible.” His age group would rather have “more freedom,” such as having a job they really enjoy or a remote job, over one that just pays the bills, he said.
His goal is to support himself in New York City, where he was born and raised, and also have leftover money to spend on fun, recreational things.
His views reflect a larger feeling among young people. Three in 4 younger Americans said their financial goals are different now than those of past generations, according to USA TODAY’s Harris Poll survey.
Brandon Davila, 26, of Texas, graduated college in 2021 with a business marketing degree but has struggled to get a job in that field.
“It’s been hard trying to find work without getting ghosted,” he said.
While he said he’s happy to have two retail jobs, he also feels like he’s “not making enough to get by.” One of his jobs pays $10 an hour; the other $25 per hour but with fewer available shifts.
For now, he’s living with his parents until he can save up enough for a place of his own.
After going to school in the global pandemic, struggling to find work and seeing rent prices in the Dallas-Fort Worth area spike 21% since 2019 (per data from CoStar), he feels like older generations have had it “a lot easier.”
He pointed out wage stagnation specifically, which has dented his purchasing power as inflation drives up prices. (While the gap between wage growth and inflation is narrowing, it isn’t expected to fully close until the fourth quarter of next year, according to a Bankrate analysis.)
With “baby boomers, I hear how they just worked a simple job for the summer and they saved up money to go to college, to essentially get their lives started: Like get married, have kids, buy a house,” Davila said. “Something a lot of people in my generation, myself included, find so impossible now.”
Honolulu-based Audrey Alessi, 31, feels good that she doesn’t have to deny herself little purchases or skip meals out.
But homeownership is a different story.
She and her generation are “in the same boat, where the only home I could afford would be a small condo … and it does just make more sense to rent at this point,” she said. “It sucks because I’m a realtor and I’m pushing homeownership, but I can’t do it.”
Urban Honolulu is a notoriously unaffordable market where the median sale price for a single-family home reached $1.1 million in 2022. That’s a nearly 600% increase from 1985, according to the Honolulu Board of REALTORS.
Alessi sees many of her first-time homebuyers get help from their parents, like an early inheritance for the down payment. A 2022 Realtor.com survey found that 85% of newlywed couples would rather have cash gifts to go toward a down payment than the standard registry gifts.
Despite this, Alessi doesn’t think the current state of the economy should stop young people from adapting and continuing to strive for their financial goals. She hopes to someday have a passive income source, like a rental property, to help supplement her realtor’s income, which can be unpredictable.
“People who have a better outlook on the economy do better in the economy,” she said. “I feel bad dumbing it down to a mindset thing but I see it often … it is what it is, and you can’t let it ruin your day and not buy a house. (If you give up) then you’re going to be one step behind.”
Ashley Parker feels stuck.
After high school, the now-23-year-old got an associate’s degree in baking. She found a job as a pastry cook, and shortly after she started, got a raise to $16 an hour, well above the $7.25 minimum wage in North Carolina, where she lives. She’s conservative with money, she said, and saves most of what she doesn’t spend on essentials like gas and groceries.
It’s still not enough.
Parker still lives with her parents in Raleigh because she can’t afford a lease in the city, where the median rental price has reached more than $1,800 per month, according to Zillow data. She doesn’t consider herself financially successful because she doesn’t earn enough to do what many other people her age do: live on their own.
“(It makes me feel) like I don’t have a choice. Like I’m not going to have the experience that most young adults do because everything is just too expensive,” she told USA TODAY.
While she’s concerned about her generation, noting that Gen Z “has it bad,” she also worries about the generations that will follow.
“I don’t think it’s going to get any better,” she said. “It would be amazing if it did. I just think that a lot of things are going on in this country, especially the economy. It just feels in the garbage. There’s so much unknown.”
While some grew up thinking that making it in America means homeownership, The Harris Poll survey shows younger Americans are starting to disagree.
Eli Jolly, a 24-year-old who works in software development in Virginia, said things like a house with a yard and 2.5 kids aren’t the goal for everyone their age. Partially because of shifting lifestyle trends, but also because of new economic circumstances.
This tracks with findings in USA TODAY’s survey, which found younger Americans were less likely to say financial success means owning a home (52% of Gen Zers agreed with this compared with 64% of Boomers) and having children that do better than you (38% among Gen Z versus 43% of millennials and 48% of Boomers.)
While Baby Boomers also dealt with high housing costs, with one report from Realtor.com noting the typical buyer in 1981 spent over half of their household income on their mortgage payments compared with nearly 33% in 2023, they weren’t straddled with the student loan debt and child care costs younger Americans face today.
“I think for a lot of people, your parents already have to be living that American Dream to achieve the American Dream, which isn’t the way that it should be,” Jolly said.
They said they believe people reach financial success when budgeting is a choice instead of a necessity.
“You are fairly successful if you don’t have to budget. When you’re walking to the grocery store, you don’t have to look at the prices as much,” they said, noting that they consider themselves to be doing “fairly good.”
“I don’t have any college student loans, so I’m pretty good in that aspect because I went to the cheapest university I could go to and got a partial scholarship and worked while in university.”
While Chloe Duncan believes the economy is “a bit of a mess” at the moment with high inflation and interest rates, she has faith that the U.S. will get through this rough patch.
The 39-year-old watercolor artist from Saint George, Utah, knows just how detrimental higher interest rates can be, having just purchased a house at a 6% mortgage rate – about double the average mortgage rate in 2021.
Even so, she said the purchase was worth it for her and her boyfriend.
“Every generation thinks they have it kind of really bad,” Duncan said, adding that she believes while the pandemic has “definitely” changed the economic circumstances young people face today, “some things have gotten easier and some things are more difficult.”
According to The Harris Poll findings, about 62% of Gen Z and millennials feel good about affording homeownership, but just 39% say that homeownership is “even a major goal in their life.”
Duncan also noted that saving for the future – whether through a savings account or 401(k) – has become more difficult amid high inflation rates.
“I think it’s really important to not only have money for today, but you have to have money set aside for the future. And I think that’s more difficult for the younger generation,” Duncan said. “Being self-employed, I don’t really have a company 401(k), so it’s definitely on me to try and save for the future.”
Alexandra Chipkin, 31, of New York City, said that up until last year, she had to make certain choices to keep within her means. With Manhattan cocktails easily surpassing $15, she said she couldn’t afford to say “yes” to every outing.
“If I wanted to go out for drinks with friends, I had to choose which group of friends (I was) going to hang out with because I couldn’t afford both,” she said.
She recently got a job in market research that has given her some more breathing room to spend money freely, she said, but she’s still frustrated by some of the challenges millennials and Gen Zers face, like the shrinking middle class.
“I don’t think that it’s good for anyone to have a society where a few people are doing really well, the winners, and then you have a lot of people who are really struggling,” she said. “It’s not sustainable to keep having these things out of reach for so many people.”
Although Megan Lee feels pretty financially secure at the moment, the 28-year-old from Hawaii still feels anxious about the future.
According to USA TODAY’s survey, Gen Z and millennial women “are less likely to feel good about their long-term finances” versus men.
She said she won’t feel financially successful until she can live without any support from her parents – and can support them instead.
“It would be better for my financial portfolio if I was a bit more strict,” said Lee, a director of advancement for a private school, where she oversees all aspects of fundraising, such as donor gifts.
Ironically, her money stress keeps her from budgeting. “I don’t want to face the fact that maybe I might never be able to afford my own house,” she said, pointing to the high cost of living in Honolulu.
Hawaii is considered the most expensive area to live in, especially when it comes to housing, according to the Missouri Economic Research and Information Center.
“So it’s a lot of anxiety to get a paycheck and split it in half and not use (it) for anything recreational that you want to do and just use it on rent and food,” she said.
For as long as she can remember, Aurelia Casey, 30, has had at least two jobs.
The New Yorker juggles a full-time time job managing environmental programming for youth at a nonprofit while babysitting part-time. To improve her credit score, she lives at home with family rent-free.
“I needed to open credit cards to be able to do things like, literally, get a (public transit pass) to get around my own city, to just get to work,” she says.
She and her brother also help out their mom financially.
“Race does take a part in it in terms that there’s no generational wealth in our family,” said Casey, who is Black. “I feel, compared to peers of different races, I am behind. Everything I currently own, I worked for it myself.”
She doesn’t want to leave New York City, but she’s not sure if she can ever afford to raise children there.
Her own family has been in the city for four generations, and her partner’s parents live there too. “Financial success to me would be making enough money to survive in my hometown,” she said.
Casey feels stressed that even though she and her brother have bachelor’s and master’s degrees – the first generation in their family to earn them – she isn’t confident she’ll ever reach her financial goals: a salary of at least $85,000 and a credit score of at least 700.
“The way that greed and capitalistic greed strives in this country, I’m not sure when us millennials will see that financial freedom,” Casey said.
