Gen Z are dipping into their retirements, skipping meals and selling their belongings just to get by, new reports find

lol right? Must be nice to afford to put more than your employer’s match into your 401k

Not if they're dipping into it at 30. That's going to kill any kind of compound interest.

Millennial here- I'm bout to not have retirement savings.

Until this year, the job market was surprisingly good for Gen Z.

14k would have been $132k in 45 years when you would have otherwise retired.

The power is in the interest. Even if you max out your 401k in the future it cannot make up for missing interest earnings on early deposits. Having to use it it now means nobody in this entire generation will ever retire, ever.

I had $20K a 401K and $15K in school loans when I swapped jobs in my late 20's. Guess what I did with it.

3 years later I was able to purchase my first house because I saved up money instead of paying the student loans.

Right now I should be maximizing my retirement savings according to all the advisors. Instead I am using the money to pay for my kids college so they can start off in life above zero instead of -$50k like my wife and I did.

I figured out a long time ago that there is no way in hell I can retire and remain in the U.S. The system is rigged against me. So my goal for the next 10 years is to learn Spanish.

14k is worth 14k, and you can live a very spartan year on it apparently.

Luxury, I had 9.5k and had to spend it to survive for 2 years while I looked for a job.

Vagrants giving up access to clean clothes, drinking water, and shelter against severe weather just to get by

Yeah what I said last time I saw this article.

Hey, you are responsible for MAGA. Be responsible and do what your forefathers did.

I pretty much said the same thing about my own experience then was downvoted to all hell and accused of being a boomer who caused all this. Wth is wrong with people, no wonder we can't escape this shit no matter the generation.

Late babyboomer and early genx are doing just fine for the most part. I mean they've spent the last 5 decades pillaging from their children and grandchildren's futures to keep the stock market booming.

If you put a $100 investment in the S&P 500 at the start of 1980, with dividends reinvested, it would have grown to approximately $17,427.60 by early 2025. This is the reason the vast majority of people who vote for Republicans are 55 and older, because they don't care about anything but securing their own bag.

Right? I'm in my 40s and I've razed every 401k I've had to survive and move between jobs.

Best America will do is feudalism

I don't know if universal basic income would really do anything in the long run. I don't think it would lead to overall run off inflation, but I dont doubt for a second that landlords would immediately increase rent.

We don't really need more money supply, we need more protections in areas of economics that should rightfully be considered natural monopolies.

If we didn't have to spend so much on essentials that should be subsidized or price controlled by the government like housing, food, utilities, and healthcare, then we'd have more to stimulate other areas of the economy.

Increasing the money supply without implementing mechanisms for regulation is just a complicated economic stimulus for landlords, produce markets, and utility companies.

Guillotine is nice.

People would need to stop using their social media, software, webstores etc.

Yes.

But: people still want to be billionaires, what if they became billionaires themselves after coming up with a new invention?

Have you actually read the other comments? Because the majority from what I can see are talking about their OWN experiences, and agreeing with the findings. I myself have done all three things in the headline in the past year.

I also noticed that the dichotomy is "luxury spending" vs. "paying off debt", but that debt could easily have come from prior 'luxury spending', lol.

The source cited in this article is a website that's shilling products, no methodology available at all, that I can see.

Valid

the media-spread call to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" was a call for the population to "unroot" and "weed out itself". The people give all of their life force to companies, and when late-stage capitalism ends, people will be laid off and thrown away like empty husks.

The last 20 years have lead to widespread social division [link], isolation ("atomistic society" is a term to refer to a society that consists of many individuals instead of being a cohesive fabric) and loneliness. I don't think people will form unions and fight back.

I think it would be very un-American to help the people in need. The american spirit is one of enterpreneurship and adventure, and standing still and being lazy is unacceptable. The american movement is like the wind, if it stops moving, it stops existing. (it turns into thin air). As long as there's progress to be made and big projects to be realized, people will have jobs and income. America can not last, it can only be first. America cannot stay, it can only go forward, it has to leave. It has to leave the world behind and venture into the stars. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Wait, do you actually have retirement savings?

I'm on the leading edge of millennial and my retirement plan is to die.

I learned this lesson when I was in middle school. Our school cafeteria sold students expired food. Not, "Oh it's a few days late, these dates are estimates so it's probably fine." I mean food several months past dates, with obvious changes to consistency and taste. Two examples I vividly remember were moist cheetos and ice cream that looked like foam.

I thought it was disgusting and unsafe. I personally stopped trusting all such school cafeteria food from that point (and never touched it again.) My friends, however, didn't seem to care? Somehow?

Every time a friend took a bite and asked, "Does this taste weird?" I'd examine the food. If it was a packaged food, I'd check the date. Every time, the expiration date would be from last semester. I know this, because at one point I started keeping records in a notebook about it.

But before I started doing that, I encouraged the affected friends to tell the lunch ladies and ask them to exchange the expired package for a fresher one. They refused to. They were terrified of "causing trouble." I was like, "It's just a simple exchange. I'll go do it for you." But they begged me to just stay there and say nothing, like the rest of them. They were so scared to potentially upset someone.

Must be quiet. Must behave. Must not dare consider speaking up for our own well-being, even if it means we must literally eat garbage.

I'll give 'em this, the long-game authoritarians from the 90s and early 00s did a bang up job conditioning the kids to accept fascist rule in 2025. Want to know why so many Americans aren't fighting back? Because we've been raised to accept this abuse. Many are active enforcers at worst, or spinelessly compliant bystanders at best. Anyone outside that spectrum is a trouble-maker that the first group would gladly make suffer (while the second group "minds their own business.")

I'm currently downsizing homes, and while staying with family, doing the one thing I swore I would never do, paying for storage.

When we find our next place we won't be able to afford to refurnish if we sold all the furniture. I feel you.

And it's only going to be more beautiful once people are dropping dead due to medicaid and RFK Jr.

We're not and trying to stave off the urge

If you knew for a fact that you'd never retire, you'd go a bit insane as well

From me and my husband's family, 5/6 kids (late millennials and gen z) have absolutely fallen back on moving back in with Mom and Dad in order to made things work. Probably one of those could have made it work otherwise, and the one that didn't have help lives in a tiny house. We've all been working the whole time, it's just between crazy rent hikes, health issues, and hurricanes it just hasn't been realistic to thrive (or in some of our cases thrive) without help. There's no social safety net.

Most of my friends (we're in our 30s) really want to start families and genuinely just can't afford to. We couldn't if we weren't receiving support from family. Childcare is just prohibitively expensive (especially on top of rent and insurance).

I got to keep my retirement. But if I want a house I'm going to have to dip into it. If the goddamn bubble would pop it wouldn't be a problem, but here we are.

The NYT article that the one above alludes to also suggests Gen Z has generally very high savings rates, which of course makes it more likely for people to have to dip into these savings if there's no financial buffer.

Yes, really. The HAC/UnitedHealthcare obesity paper shows that diet is one of the root drivers of the epidemic, and even recommends employer interventions like making healthy, non-processed food more available and addressing social drivers of health. Skipping meals doesn’t mean obesity isn’t real, it often means people are forced into poor nutrition or cheap calories because of cost and access, which are major confounding factors.

Really? I voted for this 10 years ago when I was selling belongings to keep from going homeless? I voted for that at (lemme check) 17?

This isn't a new problem, this has been a problem since before Gen X was born.

The US is, and has been for decades, Absolutely Fucked™

I mean America didn't really vote for this. Between ramp and gerrymandering, election fraud, and a generally anti-democratic voting system, America isn't a democracy.

You know what? here in the late 1930's early 1940's boys were often sent away from home to live and work on a farm at the age of 12! And they often slept with the animals even through winter. These were not bad conditions for the time, it was normal!
But since then the wealth and living standards have increased tremendously.
There is no way it should be necessary for anyone in USA to skip meals today. But USA is such an unfair society, that some people have a million times more than others. There is no way that is socially justifiable. Nobody should be either that privileged or unprivileged.

No, it’s not.

Living conditions are getting worse, things are not as good as you had when you were younger.

We are the richest country in the world.

Is that not typical for every generation during and after their schooling years?

Only in a sense so vague that it loses all meaning. You can look up studies comparing the actual wealth of different generations at different ages. Millennials were worse off than Gen-X and Boomers were at the same age, and Gen Z are worse off than Millennials at the same age. The average wealth of the average 30 year old has, in-inflation adjusted dollars, declined markedly over the last several decades.

This should be common sense. Consider just housing. The median home price has gone up much faster than the median income. People who already own homes have benefited substantially from this. But the only way homeowners can earn above-inflation rates of return is if housing is becoming more unaffordable.

Uhm no? In most freaking countries you would have more money to spend during your school years or just after it. Either because school is cheap/free or it's cheaper because you can continue living at home, etc etc

Just because it was common, doesn't mean it can't get better.

"This was my experience so it must be everyone else's!"

The younger generation is already going wothout homes and healthcare. How much more do you think they should give up?

What are you, a paid shill? Shut the fuck up.

Our economy would collapse without this "needless spending".

Been watching Caleb Hammer’s financial audits. It’s amazing how much people spend on shit they don’t need, then find the credit card bills are so high they miss payments.

Basically every single guest walks out with a budget that gets their self-inflicted bad debt paid off in 2-10 years.