Leigh, a 27-year-old in Maryland, first saw her parents’ income statements when she was a child and quickly realized something wasn’t adding up. Though her parents were trying their best to be financially responsible, their bills were too high compared to their unstable income, and they were spending too much on everyday purchases and shopping splurges.
She had always been good with numbers, so Leigh, who requested her last name be withheld for privacy reasons, made a budget for her nine-person household when she was 13 years old. Despite that, it wasn’t until she was an adult that she finally stopped imitating some of her parents’ bad money habits.
“I do believe that my parents try their absolute best,” Leigh says. “They didn’t have the personal finance foundation because their parents didn’t teach them. It’s a very heavy generational issue. One person needs to realize, ‘This is a problem, I can learn,’ and then you can literally change the rest of the generations beneath you.”
Today, many young Americans are navigating adulthood using only the financial guidance they received from their parents, which poses a significant challenge for the millennial and Gen Z adult children of Gen Xers and baby boomers. These adult children often encounter outdated or inadvisable financial advice, if any at all.
For example, baby boomers are less likely than younger generations to move their short-term savings to an online savings or money market account, according to Bankrate polling.
Despite the benefits of a high-yield savings account, baby boomers cite feeling comfortable with their current financial institution (50 percent) and preferring having access to a local branch (53 percent) as reasons for not switching, according to Bankrate polling. Additionally, 39 percent of those baby boomers are worried about the security of their money, despite the fact that most online savings accounts are FDIC-insured.
Without actionable advice from their…
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