From Forbes – Ask 5,500 Millennials about the state of their finances and you’ll get 5,500 reasons to feel a little depressed about the financial security of the largest generation in the U.S.
This is what global tax and consulting outfit PricewaterhouseCooper recently discovered when it surveyed 5,500 people between the ages of 23 and 35 about their personal finance knowledge, the state of their savings, the status of their debt, and their overall satisfaction with their financial lives. The results were not pretty.
Given the relatively derelict state of America’s personal finances, this isn’t altogether surprising. But the study makes the argument that Millennials’ small savings and high debt is compounded by their low personal finance IQ — and that this, in turn, could have a domino effect on other generations.
“Millennials owe a lot. They know too little,” says Annamaria Lusardi, the academic director at George Washington University’s Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center, which partnered with PwC to put out the research. What’s more, she says, Gen Y’s ”struggle with debt may eventually become our problem, too.”
