Us youngins have been berated, humiliated, and shamed for our alleged fiscal irresponsibility. Countless publications have roasted us for having less than $500 in savings and giving monetary preference to Clay Aiken concert tickets over a retirement-friendly Roth IRA. My response: IRAs are going to be around forever, Clay has about five more years of being the songbird of our generation.
Well, a new TransUnion study is here to dispel those irresponsible myths about millennials.
The study found that millennials are using less credit than their parents did when they were younger. The credit we’re using, however, is vastly different.
The study found that those ages 21 to 34 are opening more new auto and personal loans than Generation X (people born from 1965 to 1979) did years ago, Business Insider reports. But this isn’t because we’re gluttonous assholes, we have very similar desires as our parents did when they were our age and probably fucking each other.
It’s largely because the availability of products now are vastly greater and more accessible than they were years back (thanks internet!). Ezra Becker, senior vice president of research and consulting at TransUnion, points out that financial technology lenders granting personal loans didn’t exist 20 years ago and now they are marketed aggressively.
TransUnion also found that millennials are carrying two fewer bank carts than GenX.
Uh Oh here comes the bad news.
One potentially worrying trend is that many more subprime millennials are missing payments on personal loans than on bank cards, auto loans, and mortgages. Millennials with weak credit scores are ahead of Gen X by 12.4% in their delinquency rates on personal loans, compared with a 1.8% gap on late car payments. [via Business Insider]
The research then confirmed what we already knew: we’re taking out far fewer mortgages than our parens did at our age, leading to an overall decline in homeownership. It’s important not to discount the importance of student debt being at an all-time high contributing to homeownership decline.
[h/t Business Insider]