Talk radio and financial podcasts can help stave off financial ruin for the country’s poorest generation.

Clark Howard. Source: WTMA

Millennials are at an economic crisis point. As the economy as a whole improves and perhaps begins to slow down, its youngest participants are still feeling squeezed. A recent Federal Reserve survey showed that millennials are by far the generation with the lowest annual income. As Slate’s Jordan Weissmann explains, frivolous spending is not the problem: “while millennials households are less wealthy and, by some measures, have lower incomes than previous cohorts, when it comes to spending and saving they aren’t all that unique.” The millennial generation has a high rate of education, but their lower wages and greater job instability mean that they have a lower home ownership rate, and a higher bankruptcy risk, than any other age group. If the economy enters into a long-expected recession, they will certainly feel the most pain.

What is the remedy for all of these problems? The answer I have heard most often among millennials is political change. Millennials ridicule studies that suggest cutting back on lattes or eating less avocado toast will solve all of their financial problems. They point to privatization, globalization, and income inequality to explain their financial woes. To solve them, millennials support policies like those championed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, including Medicare for All and the cancelling of student loan debt. This effort, according to millennials and most economists, will do substantially more to help the younger generations than avoiding four-dollar cups of coffee.

Millennials are right in their assertion that political power will be the only force that can totally overcome their poor economic status. But political change does not come overnight. Until Sanders and a Democratic Congress can pass their programs, millennials will still face debt and meager wages. In the long term, political change is necessary. But in the short term, millennials need to turn towards education to show them the way out of their financial morass.

Millions of millennials are underinformed about the modern economy. They are guided by the same blatant misconceptions that cloud most people’s judgment about money. Many millennials still keep their savings accounts with large banks such as Wells Fargo or Bank of America, when online banks and credit unions would serve them better and pay higher interest rates. They remain at retail jobs when office jobs provided by employment agencies could bring in higher pay with less back-breaking labor. In a recent study by accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, only 8% of millennials rated “highly literate” on a test that gauged their knowledge of financial topics from mortgages to risk diversification.

How does one fix this problem without taking a class or spending hours trudging through boring finance books? There are no easy answers, but my suggestion would be for millennials to start listening to financial talk radio or podcasts on their daily commutes. Podcasts like Stacking Benjamins and talk radio shows like Clark Howard’s have a plethora of well-researched information. A 2013 Slate article described Howard

as a kind of economist folk hero — a polo-shirted intellectual who can communicate more useful, constructive policy analysis in one chapter than Thomas Friedman gets across in a year of Times op-eds.

Like his competitors, every Clark Howard show has caller questions about a wide plethora of topics, from the innocuous (how to save money on a Hawaiian vacation) to the serious (how to pay off a parent’s debts). Over weeks and months of listening, an individual will eventually hear about a wide range of financial tools, all explained without jargon or moralizing language. Tools like dollar cost averaging and debt laddering can save an individual thousands of dollars over a period of a few years, and learning about it can be as simple as loading up a podcast on a smartphone or tuning a dial to the right station on the way home from work.

Listening to a few hours of talk radio every day will not eliminate thousands of dollars in student loan debt or suddenly make a low-wage job more profitable. But over time, it will inform individuals about strategies they can use to save more on retirement or provide a college fund for their children. It will also present tools and resources, many offered by the federal government, that people can use to help pay off tax and credit card debts. The ultimate answer to millennials’ financial problems is in the halls of Congress. But financial talk radio is a step millennials can take to save their finances and stave off bankruptcy until the revolution.