Retirement may be decades away for people in their 20s and 30s, but rarely has it been more important—or more difficult—to establish habits that lead to long-term financial success.
Thanks to the financial crisis, millennials are behind where their parents stood at similar ages, said Alicia Munnell, director of Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research. People between 25 and 35, for example, have less wealth compared to their income and millennial men have lower earnings as a percentage of median national pay than their baby boomer and Gen X counterparts did at those ages.
With higher debt and longer life expectancies, millennials also have less margin for error when it comes to saving for the future. In an era in which Social Security is underfunded and old-fashioned pension plans are falling by the wayside, they are also likely to bear a greater share of the responsibility for creating their own retirement security than prior generations.