Millennials Have No Money: Student Loan Debt Impact on Earnings

It’s the holiday season and all across America, a generation of Millennials is getting ready to trek to their spawning grounds, sit down to dinner with their relatives and parents, and grit their teeth.

• “But don’t you want to buy a house at your age?”
• “You need a new car, so why aren’t you getting one?”
• “Why aren’t you saving for retirement?”

Then they get ready for the chimes of, “When I was your age, I _____!”

Here is my trained legal and pro bono opinion on why Millennials don’t do all the things that the previous generation did at their same ages.

MILLENIALS DON’T HAVE ANY MONEY.

There you go. It’s just as simple as that.

When Generation X, now in their mid-thirties to late forties, graduated from college, they carried an average load of $20,000 in student debt. In some cases, Gen-Xers are paying off their loans while getting their own kids ready for college. A college education, once the ticket to a secure middle class existence, is now a multigenerational treadmill of debt with Millennials aged 18 to their mid-30s holding around $35,000 in debt. However, the vast majority of Baby Boomers graduated from college with no debt at all. The student may draw their own conclusions, but somehow I do not think this is what Lyndon Johnson had in mind when he signed the National Vocational Student Loan Insurance Act back in 1965.

Economic Time Bomb

Along with student loan debt, Millenials are hampered by exiting college into a Recession-hobbled job market, rising rents, and getting squeezed to the tune of $4,239 a year in repayment. This is what’s hampering Millennials and GenXers from being able to do all the things that the Baby Boomers were able to do at much younger ages – buying homes and cars, furnishing homes and starting families, starting businesses and saving for retirement. It’s also pushing up the age at which these grads can expect to retire to age 75. In an American Student Aid study, the problems are starkly laid out.

• 30 percent chose their career because of their loan debt
• 43 percent put off starting a family because of their debts
• 47 percent said that it was the deciding factor in starting a small business
• 73 percent have put off saving for retirement
• 75 percent have put off buying a home because of their student loan burden

Of even more concern are the 27 percent who report not being able to purchase daily necessities without difficulty. That’s when you need to get some professional legal advice and face your debt demon head on. There are options open to you to tame these loans into something that will not eat your life. We’ll help you to get out from under, and really start living the life that you had in mind when you went to college in the first place. Get your paperwork together and call us, and let’s get started on getting you your life back.