Millennials are not doing too hot. Saddled with unprecedented amounts of student debt and facing an increasingly precarious job market, Americans born between 1981 and 1997 are experiencing chronic burnout, according to a BuzzFeed essay that went viral over the weekend. "We're deeply in debt, working more hours and more jobs for less pay and less security, struggling to achieve the same standards of living as our parents, operating in psychological and physical precariousness, all while being told that if we just work harder, meritocracy will prevail, and we'll begin thriving," wrote Anne Helen Petersen in one of many passages that resonated deeply with many millennials (including us).

According to a new data visualization comparing the assets and debts of different generations from personal finance site HowMuch, millennials are indeed doing worse than gen-Xers and baby boomers, with more total debt and a lower net worth than either previous generation.







If it seems like an optimistic exaggeration to claim that the average millennial has $176,300 in assets and a net worth of $91,700, then it's helpful to look at exactly where these numbers come from: a recent working paper from the Federal Reserve called "Are Millennials Different?" The authors of the paper, using results from the Fed's triennial Survey of Consumer Finances, compared the inflation-adjusted finances of people between the ages of 25 and 35 in 1989, 2001 and 2016 as proxies for millennials, gen-Xers and baby boomers, respectively. And though the average house value and financial assets for millennials in the above graphic may look higher than you'd expect, it's worth noting that only 33.9% of the millennials that the authors looked at owned their homes, and only 14.9% of them owned stocks. In other words, even though the average millennial's financial picture doesn't look too bad, it masks a large number of millennials who don't have any major assets at all.

[Read more at HowMuch]​