Jay Evensen
  • Front Page
  • Opinions
  • Second Thoughts
  • Portfolio
  • Awards
  • About

Millennials have the wisdom of the Depression generation

9/23/2014

0 Comments

 
Picture
We’re living life in the breach these days, as in the Home Depot credit card breach, the Target breach and the Neiman Marcus breach, etc.

You may even have heard some old-fashioned thinking around the water cooler lately, stuff like, “The best thing may be to just pay cash.”

Of course, this is usually followed by a bit of self-conscious laughter. I mean, everyone knows that’s impossible, right? Who carries cash these days?

Well, Millennials do, apparently, and it eventually could screw up the entire economy.

Or not.

Think you have young people figured out? Let’s take a test. What percentage of Millennials, the roughly 18-29 age category, would you guess does not own a credit card?

Bankrate.com recently commissioned a survey by Princeton Survey Research Associates International to answer that question. The answer they came up with was 63 percent.

Bankrate.com quoted one 24-year-old New Jersey woman as saying, “The idea with a credit card is you’re essentially putting money down that you don’t have.”

Which is subversive talk, right? Wasn’t it just a decade or so ago that our leaders were urging us to go shopping to show terrorists we’re not afraid of them?

This, by the way, is the same group that is finding it hard to move out of mom and dad’s basement. A report from Trulia on market trends finds that 31.1 percent of them live with their parents, and many of those who move out just move in with other relatives.

What’s the matter with kids today? Well … take a deep breath. The answer is, nothing.

We tend to be schizophrenic in the wisdom we impart to the young. Not long ago, I was writing columns chastising young people for getting credit cards too soon. In 1999 I went after Visa and MasterCard for targeting colleges, tossing “money around like bread crumbs in the park.”

In those days, kids were charging pizzas, for heaven’s sake. Didn’t they realize they would have to pay it all back some day?

Now we hear the opposite. Pundits and experts are wringing their hands over the inability of young people to obtain credit cards, failing, as one columnist recently said, to act like grownups.

Don’t they understand that you need credit to survive in the adult world?

It’s slowly dawning on me that maybe older people, like myself, are just grumpy old frumps with false memories of our own youth.

And get off my lawn!

Here, in a nutshell, is the complaint: If you don’t have a credit card, you’re not building a credit history. That means when you want a mortgage or car loan, banks won’t lend you money.

Ergo, you will fail to launch as an adult and become lazy, self-indulgent and not likely to amount to much.

Which paints a perfect portrait of a generation viewed without any context, including the times in which they live.

Many Millennials have dealt with a poor national economy since junior high. In order to obtain a college education, they had to acquire student debt. Then, when they graduated, few jobs were waiting, and the ones they found didn’t pay much.

Is there any wonder these folks have been reluctant to borrow even more?

Recent news from the automotive industry shows that Millennials finally are buying cars but, according to Automotive News, they tend to “value cost-effectiveness and convenience.”

Which, if you step back a moment and examine it, along with everything else, means they are practical, prudent and frugal. They even, according to a recent Gallup poll, would like to get married, although few of them have so far.

It’s as if we’ve just raised our grandparents, the ones who lived through the Great Depression.

Maybe the real problem is with us older folks. Maybe, as Mike Sullivan of the debt counseling agency Take Charge America told Bankrate, credit bureaus should begin counting things like rent and utility payments when figuring credit ratings.

Maybe all that talk around water coolers deserves more than laughter. We should take notes from a generation that, through necessity or otherwise, has learned lessons the rest of us should have taken to heart years ago.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Search this site


    Like what you read here?

      Please subscribe below, and we'll let you know when there is a new opinion.

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Picture

    The author

    Jay Evensen is the Senior Editorial Columnist of the Deseret News. He has nearly 40 years experience as a reporter, editor and editorial writer in Oklahoma, New York City, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. He also has been an adjunct journalism professor at Brigham Young and Weber State universities.

    Archives

    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    November 2012
    October 2012
    September 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012

    Categories

    All
    Campaign 2012
    Congress
    Crime
    Culture
    Iran
    Oil And Gas
    Poverty
    Steroids
    Taxes
    Utah
    Washington
    World Events
    World Events

    Links

    Deseret News
    Newslink
    Marianne Evensen's blog

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.