50% Of Millennials Have Less Than A Grand Saved — It Gets Worse

Reality check: 50% Millennials have less than a grand saved in the bank.

51.8% of millennials have less than $1,000 in savings.

18% have $1,000 – $5,000 in savings.

7.3% have $5,000 – $10,000 in savings.

6.4% have $10,000 – $20,000 in savings.

16.5% of millennials have more than $20,000 in savings.

A few decades ago, you could work a part-time job and use that money to pay for your tuition. Not only could you pay for your tuition, you could also pay other bills. People born from 1980 and beyond would read that statement and laugh at me. It’s the same thing I heard when I was going through college and heard my parents tell me how they did this and that when they were younger and that my generation doesn’t work hard enough to get where they were at their age. Sorry, but that’s complete bullsh*t.

For my B.A., I went to a career college. Before that, I got my associates from Macomb Community College — one of the best community colleges in the country. It’s why President Obama spoke there twice. Coming out of that with an associates, I transferred those credits — around $110 a credit hour — to the career college to apply toward my B.A., but not every credit transferred. So, that means I had to retake the same classes I already took, but this time I had to pay more. So, estimate that a credit hour is twice as much as the community college, times that buy 4, and then do that 4 more times. 16 credit hours of class for a 1/3 of a semester. At around $210 a credit hour, that’s over $3,000. Add about $1,000 in books, and it’s over $4,000. Since a normal student can’t afford that, they take out loans. I took out loans. I took out a lot of loans. It got me a pointless degree in marketing that I have yet to use.

Do you think any millennial could afford to work enough to pay for that with a part/full-time job? Especially when you’d need a college degree level job to pay for that? But you need to get the degree. It’s a catch-22. You wonder why 50% of millennials have less than a grand saved in the bank? That’s just the beginning.

Inflation

One of the biggest things that hits millennials is inflation. Prices and cost of living has gone up, but the minimum wage has barely budged. You will hear rich people say that raising the minimum wage would hurt jobs, but if the minimum wage would have risen with inflation, we’d all be doing great. The minimum wage should have reached $21.72 an hour in 2012 if it kept up with increases in worker productivity, according to a study by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Since that never happened, the chance of someone working at a McDonald’s and being able to afford college out of pocket is laughable. Saving money while working a minimum wage job is almost impossible because all of your money is going to pay bills. But if you want to go to college, you’ll have to get some student loans. With inflation, it makes college cost a crap ton of money.

Student loan debts

Like I mentioned above, going to college costs a lot of money. Books and tuition have risen astronomically since your parents walked 50 miles in the snow with no shoes to attend college that they paid for. Tossing out a grand for just books alone every semester feels so damn stupid since most of the information in the books are the same because they simply change a few of the questions at the end of each chapter. Sure, Astronomy textbooks will be updated since we finally have pictures of Pluto, but most books don’t really have to be changed much at all.

What’s with the constant updating of books? Money! If you’ve been to college, you’ll know the defeated feeling of returning books at the end of each semester only to be told that you aren’t getting and money back because a new edition is coming out soon. I remember getting told every book for all of my classes are rejected. I walked right to a nearby trash bin and threw all of the books in there as hard as I could. Normally this would be funny, but all the students standing in line saw that they had some of the books that I threw in the bin, so they all threw their books in the bin. That’s all money you have to pay back because you bought the books with loans.



Here’s a tip: NEVER buy the books before the first day of class. Wait until the teacher tells you if you should buy them or not. A lot of times you can skip buying the books because the teacher won’t use them. Also, check online to see if you can find PDF versions of the books online. A lot of saints put their books online for free because we all know how much BS it is to buy an Algebra book for $250.

By the time you get out of college, you will owe so much damn money for a piece of paper that you need to get a job as fast as you can. I got 6 months of leeway before I started getting a $161 a month student loan bill every month. I have never used my degree for anything, so it’s a car payment a month reminder of how much time I wasted getting it.

Jobs, Relationships and the Cost of Living

More and more jobs are disappearing in a world where more and more people are being born. We’ve covered it on Social Underground quite a bit, but when it comes to jobs that you can get right out of college that will allow you to put money into a savings account, it seems less likely than it did in the past. I know people who have a big house, a few leased cars, a kid or 2, and what seems like the best life. Money saved? They’re in that 18% range of $1,000 – $5,000 in savings. Sounds insane that you could have all of that and not have that much in their savings.

Relationships and children cost money! A lot of money. I’ve heard this very sad statement from many guys who say something along the lines of, “I would love to have a girlfriend… but I can’t afford it.” It’s not that having a girlfriend is expensive, but it’s totally is expensive! This isn’t meant to sound sexist or misogynistic at all, but if I go out on a date, I know that I have to probably cover everything. Not only do I have to cover everything, I will probably spend more on nicer stuff rather than the cheap stuff I’m willing to put up with. Also, when you’re in a relationship, no matter who pays, you still go out and do more things that you normally wouldn’t do if you were single. Being in a relationship generally means that you will be spending more money. Why do you think married couples tend to stay in more? They already sealed the deal. Why go out and blow money on crap when you can do all of that stuff at home already. It’s to save money.

Then you have a kid, and it’s basically just a little human that sucks your savings dry. Diapers, baby food, doctor visits, new clothes, new clothes, more new clothes, more food, more time on the kid and less for you, and also more and more money.

Conclusion

All of these factors result in people not being able to save money in times like these. It’s no wonder that 50% of millennials can’t hold on to more than a grand. Money is going out too fast on all the debts we have to cover before we can even think of putting a few dollars away for the future. The people who call us “lazy” and “privileged” because we have better technology and access to information usually forget two things: they raised us and invented those things for us to have access to.

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Jeff Sorensen is an author, writer and occasional comedian living in Detroit, Michigan. You can look for more of his work on The Huffington Post,UPROXX,BGR and by just looking up his name.

Contact: jeff@socialunderground.com