If you’re a Millennial (like me), you’ve probably felt both richer and poorer at the same time. You’re likely ahead of where your parents were financially at your age, but behind them on other life milestones, such as owning a home or having children.
Last week I was part of a panel hosted by The Manhattan Institute titled Are Millennials Doomed? Stagnation, Success, and the Politics of a Divided Generation. A wide variety of cultural and political topics were covered during the discussion, but I want to dig deeper on the financial ones and why this feeling of “richer yet poorer” persists.
While money isn’t the only thing that impacts Millennials, it influences where they live, where they work, and what policies they support. And since Millennials are the largest generational cohort in America today, those decisions may impact how you live as well.
To start, let’s examine Millennial wealth and how being the richest generation for their age in history doesn’t solve all of their problems.
Absolutely Wealthy, Relatively Less So
In absolute terms, Millennials have more inflation-adjusted wealth for their age than any prior generation. You can see this in the chart below which shows the 90th, 75th, and 50th (median) inflation-adjusted net worth for households age 26-41 from 1989 to 2022/2023 (the latest data available). Households age 26-41 in 2022 correspond with individuals born from 1981-1996 (aka Millennials). By holding this age group constant over time, we can compare Millennials in 2022 to similarly-aged cohorts in the past:
As you can see, Millennials in 2022 had more inflation-adjusted wealth than prior generations going back to 1989.
More importantly, this pattern held across most of the wealth spectrum. You can see this in the chart below (similar to the one above), which shows the 15th, 25th, and 50th percentile net worth over time for households age 26-41:
All the way down to the 15th percentile, Millennials had roughly the same (or more) wealth than prior generations at the same age. It’s only Millennials below the 15th percentile that have less wealth than prior generations. These are the households that are struggling the most in the Millennial cohort and could definitely use some sort of help.
Why are they struggling? Higher debt loads (mostly from student loans) and incomes that aren’t keeping up with housing costs. The chart below illustrates that Millennials have much higher non-home debt (e.g., student loans, credit card debt, etc.) than prior generations. This is especially true near the extremes (i.e. 90th percentile):
Though non-home debt has come down somewhat in recent years, this is after rising consistently for the past three decades.
Outside of non-home debt, Millennials are also spending a bit more of their income on rent as well. As you can see, the rent-to-income ratio for households age 26-41 was at the highest recorded in 2022:
So, while Millennials are generally wealthier than prior generations, there are other factors that are holding some of them back.
More importantly, having more absolute wealth doesn’t always mean that you’re better off. Relative wealth matters too. Despite being the largest generational cohort in America today, Millennials only own 10.7% of all wealth as of Q2 2025, according to the Federal Reserve:
This is partially to be expected, since wealth is highly correlated with age (due to years of additional work, saving, and investing).
However, Boomers still control ~5x more capital than Millennials. Such a financial power imbalance will impact competitive dynamics for scarce resources such as housing. This partially explains why the median age of first-time home buyers is 38 and for all homebuyers is 56 (both at record highs):
According to the University of Cambridge, 62% of Boomers owned homes at 35, while only 49% of Millennials did. Some of this is due to different lifestyle choices made by Millennials. Settling down later in life or renting by choice are both impacting these statistics. However, having 1/5th of the capital of a typical Boomer doesn’t help either.
So, how can Millennials fix these problems? I see three paths forward.
The Three Paths Forward for Millennials
When it comes to improving their financial future, there are three paths that Millennials can choose from: reform, exit, and development.
- Reform: Reform is the process of campaigning for and enacting policy changes that would benefit Millennials. Such reforms include: reducing zoning restrictions (to increase housing supply), enacting stronger term/age limits for political leaders, and forgiving student loan debt (which weighs down a subset of Millennials). Whether or not you support any of these policies isn’t relevant, the main idea here is that Millennials would voice their opinions and enact change to improve their situation. Reform works by making modifications to the existing system through legal channels.
- Exit: Exit is the process of abandoning the existing system and building a new one that better suits a group’s needs. Politically, the rise of Democratic Socialism among Millennials and Gen Zers (e.g. Zohranism) can be seen as a form of exit. Financially, cryptocurrency is an exit from the traditional financial system. Whether or not you agree with exit as a philosophy, it’s always an option for those dissatisfied with the status quo.
- Development: Development is the process of ignoring the system altogether and focusing on how you can improve your own life. Instead of asking about the system, it asks you about yourself. What can you do to improve in the coming months and years? Can you learn new skills? Can you deepen your relationships? Can you better your health? Whatever it is, development is focused on things that you can directly control. Of all the ways that individual Millennials can try to improve their lives, development seems to be the one with the highest probability of success.
In full, you can fix the existing system (reform), find a new system (exit), or ignore the system altogether and focus on yourself (development). While there are pros and cons to each of these approaches, I have a strong preference for development. The reasoning is simple—one person is unlikely to make a difference when reforming a system or exiting to a new one.
However, your actions will have an undeniable impact on your own life. How you spend your time, money, energy, and effort will likely make a much bigger difference than any policy or system ever could. Don’t get me wrong, I support the political process and think we should try to make changes where we want them.
Yet, politics is hard and things don’t always work out in your favor. You can’t control elections. You can’t control other people. But you can improve your own life. That option is (and will always be) on the table.
I don’t believe that Millennials are doomed. Much of what we see today is, unfortunately, just a timing problem. More wealth will be passed on in the coming years and decades.
Some of this is already happening. As I’ve noted before, 50% of parents are financially supporting their Gen Z and Millennial children to the tune of about $1,500 a month. This isn’t helpful for the 50% of Millennials that are not getting financial support, but it is what it is.
I don’t know what the future holds for Millennials. I don’t know if they’re “doomed.” But I do know that those who focus on developing themselves unequivocally won’t be.
Thank you for reading.
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This is post 473. Any code I have related to this post can be found here with the same numbering: https://github.com/nmaggiulli/of-dollars-and-data
