Yes, Being a Young Adult Is a Financial Nightmare

And the hits just keep on coming, as they say on the radio, though these feel more like body blows than musical interludes.

Young people's mobility (eg, ability to pick up and move to a new location for education, work or whatever) is at a 50 year low. 41 percent of young adults will spend at least a year earning less than 150 percent of the poverty line, which is a polite way of saying they'll be subsisting on Ramen noodles and Taco Belle Ten-Packs. And on the data goes.

So, to bring it home in a real way, back in 1963, when people wore skinny ties and snap-brim fedoras without the irony - or the tattoos - it was easier to get around the US of A by bus and train to start a new life than it is today.

To what do we attribute this diminished sense of opportunity? Let us count the ways: a generation's worth of stagnant household incomes, the absence of private sector hiring (or public and not-for-profit, either), impossible-to-achieve job specifications, dramatic inflationary increases in the cost of food, shelter, transportation and any other Maslowian necessities and, if we are being truthful, globalization, technology and the end of the US' thirty year WWII winner's advantage.

The problem is, as eons of boring graduation speakers have been fond of intoning, these people are the future. Being young has always been a bit of sleigh ride; getting started at anything, especially adult life, is rarely smooth, but from an historical standpoint, we appear to be making things particularly tough for exactly the people on whom society will depend in the future. And that's not smart. JL

Jordan Weissman reports in The Atlantic:

Poverty is an astonishingly common experience here in the world's richest country. Almost 40 percent of American adults experience it for at least a year by age 60.
But you know who poverty is especially common among? Young adults.
Based on the data which were given to me by Washington University in St. Louis professor Mark Rank, I've pulled together a few graphs that I think illustrate the difficulty of making ends meet in your twenties and early thirties (particularly if you're not lucky enough to, say, have a college degree). Exhibit a) between the ages of 25 and 34, 41.3% percent of Americans will spend at least a year earning less than 150 percent of the poverty line, which is a technical way of saying "being pretty broke." By age 35, a little more than a quarter will have lived under the actual poverty line, which is the technical way of saying, "really truly broke."

Why are young adults so poverty prone? Partly because, by definition, they tend to lack work experience and earn less than later in life. But as a group, we're also prone to getting fired and laid off. Almost half of young adult households face a period of unemployment at some point.

Perhaps surprisingly, they're only slightly more likely than 35 to 44-year-olds to take advantage of the safety net. But that still means almost a third of young adults end up using a program like food stamps or Medicaid to get by for a while.

Mind you, these numbers aren't just a snapshot of today's economy, which has been notoriously dreadful for Millennials. Rather, they're drawn from an analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data collected between 1968 and 2009. So in a sense, they're a longterm assessment poverty through the American lifecycle. What they tell us, then, is that twenty and early thirty-somethings have lived financially wobbly lives in the U.S. for a very long time. Every generation has its horror stories about being young and poor.