Young Americans' Financial Struggles Compared to Boomers Revealed

[jeffandnicole]

Also how much is it related to a certain portion of  Gen Z not old enough to get credit and for people like me I have to pay the rest of my parents mortgage on a home I live in.

If you're 18, you can get credit. 

Credit lenders may not look favorably on youngsters though.  I think I was in my older 20's and still getting messages that I didn't have enough credit history, despite having credit cards since I was 18 or 19 and a friggen mortgage and car loan/lease.   

In today's age, it's a good thing to get a credit card or two when kids turn 18 and pay it off each month.  Or at least pay it on time if they carry a balance.  It takes a while but it helps establish that credit history that'll do them good later in life when they need to rent or can afford to buy.

[ZLoth]

A lot of potential first-time homeowners don't seem to understand the concept of buying a smaller/crappier house and using the equity built up in that one as a means to afford one closer to their desired dream home. We all want to live in our dream house in our favorite part of our favorite city but...if you can't afford it, it's much easier to achieve that if your housing payment is going toward a serviceable-but-not-perfect house rather than a landlord. My wife didn't seem to understand this until we started talking about moving and she was freaking out about the cost of housing. Then I showed her how much money we were probably going to have from selling the house. She seems to get it now.

Of course, this theory does you no good if you can't afford even the down payment on the starter home. My friends in California have just written off the idea of homeownership for good. They can't see any way they'll ever be able to do anything but rent in CA, but they're not interested enough in buying to make it worth it to leave CA to do so.

As someone who purchased his first home at the age of 49 five years ago next month, one of my biggest fears was purchasing a home and having the house own me (though the expenses beyond the mortgage and utilities) rather than I being the homeowner. One of the trends that I saw from other Californians moving to Texas is being able to afford a larger home with no personal income taxes and lower home prices but forgetting to factor in the higher property tax rates. Since I wanted a place close to work in a decent neighborhood, I was willing to pay a little more in the hope that the addition cost would be offset by not driving as much and the associated cost reductions from lower fuel consumption, lower insurance, and lower maintenance. Thanks to Covid and adult caregiver, my goal of actually walking to work has been placed on hold.

As has been stated at least twice, one of my pet peeves is when people crow about having been able to pay CA$H for their home, but when you look at the closer at the details, you can see some compromises were made to be debt free. The house doesn't serve the needs. They have to travel several miles to the nearest store, and the commute is at least 45 minutes each way which is a cost in both gas, wear-and-tear, and higher insurance costs based upon one-way mileage. The internet connectivity options are limited and, as a result, connectivity speeds may be more limited. The school district is a big challenged. But, they are DEBT-FREE and PAID CA$H. (sigh) No thank you. I'm happy with my small mortgage.

In addition, the home prices in my neighborhood have gone up almost 50% since my home purchase, plus those who got the low fixed mortgage rates are not willing to give them up easily.

[GaryV]

Newer credit score algorithms have nothing specific to do with denying credit. Back in 1981, when I was in my first year of marriage and 20-something, I was denied a regular credit card. I managed to get a Sears charge card, and a few months after that got a Discover card (relatively new then, and maybe they were desperate for customers). Once you have established some credit history, you can get more credit. But don't abuse it and charge more than you can afford to pay off.

[Scott5114]

Part of the problem began when the credit scoring system was invented in 1989.

The credit score system was better than what was there before—redlining. Still doesn't mean that it's great, though.

[vdeane]

(she was fired from her last one for reasons neither of us feel were fair; she was told in writing by her supervisor that it would be okay for her to miss work on a certain date and then was terminated for doing so, and HR apparently sees no problem with this)

Wow.  That would seem to be an open and shut wrongful termination case to me.

Right to Work State?

You mean "at-will employment" state. Right to work has nothing to do with that. Right to work means that you don't have to join a union to take employment with a specific employer or in a specific field.

And in any case, at-will employment doesn't mean that you can fire anyone for any reason - it just means that you can fire people for no reason.  All Scott's wife would have to do is produce the documentation that she was fired for missing a day of work that she had written permission to miss, and I would think the company should be in deep, deep shit.

[Scott5114]

The problem is that the only way to force said deep shit upon them is to take them to court. Lawyers aren't cheap, and we'd have to use our money for moving for that instead, with a "payout" possibly limited to getting to go back to working a $13/hour job in rural Oklahoma. We decided it'd probably be best to just take the L and move to Nevada sooner than we had planned.

We told the Unemployment Commission about it, but the company just disputed it with "No, she just had attendance problems" and the state took their word for it and closed the case. (Y'all see why I'm quitting Oklahoma?)