It’s no secret that today’s 20- and 30-somethings are skittish about the financial system.

Watching their parents and grandparents lose a big chunk of their retirement savings during the Great Recession has not exactly endeared them to the stock market. And they’re wary of asking financial advisers, for, well, financial advice, and instead turn to apps, blogs and social clubs.

But that fear apparently doesn’t extend to the alternative financial system. More than 40% of millennials used a payday loan, pawnshop, tax refund advance or other alternative financial product in the past five years, according to a survey of more than 5,000 millennials released Thursday by tax and consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center at George Washington University.

Millennials struggling with basic financial concepts: study

Though it’s hard to see exactly how this rate compares with the general population, it’s pretty clear young people aren’t alone in availing themselves of these products. Nearly the same percentage (39%) of U.S. households used at least one alternative financial service, according to a 2013 survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Consumer advocates have derided these products, saying they target the most financially vulnerable Americans, offering them quick cash and charging them exorbitant fees that leave them saddled with debt it’s difficult to climb out from under. But in many cases, frequent users of these products have few alternatives to bridge the gap between paychecks because they may struggle to get a loan from a traditional financial institution.

What’s particularly troubling about 20- and 30-somethings’ use of payday lenders and pawnshops is that millennials are better educated than previous generations and they’re tech savvy, so one might expect they’d research these products and discover their perils before using them, said Shannon Schuyler, PwC’s corporate responsibility leader and a co-author of the report. But it appears they’re desperate.

“They have already maxed out everything else and so they’re going to behavior that’s deemed even riskier,” she said. Nearly 30% of millennials are overdrawing on their checking accounts and more than half are carrying a credit card balance, the PwC report found. Of millennials with retirement accounts, more than 20% have taken out loans or hardship withdrawals in the past year.

While it’s easy to chide 20- and 30-somethings for financial behavior that would make personal finance guru Suze Orman shudder, millennials may be turning to these practices in part because they’re struggling financially. The combination of growing student debt, increased cost of living and sluggish wage growth means that many young people may be desperate to find financial resources anywhere they can.

“This is certainly a call to companies and schools and academic institutions, regardless of the level, that we need to educate people,” Schuyler said. “This is a fundamental life skill that needs to be taught consistently and throughout the learning experience.”

For millennials who are using alternative financial services regularly, Schuyler suggests they look back at each time they used one of these products to get a sense of how much money they might be losing by using one. That simple exercise could convince them to turn to another source of funds, she says.