For millennials, financial security feels like a fairytale. What will the next 40 years look like?

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.

For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”

But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.

She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?

  • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
    101·
    6 months ago

    SSI isn’t set to run out. It will have to be reduced if they don’t take the income cap off of it, however.

    But all the other things you said will happen.

    • eldavi
      91·
      6 months ago

      SSI isn’t set to run out. It will have to be reduced if they don’t take the income cap off of it, however.

      that’s as realistic as single payer healthcare; or universal basic income; or sensible gun control legislation; or abolishing the electoral college, they all have super majority support of everyone in this country but there’s too much monied political interest against ever allowing it happen.

      • Upsidedownturtle@lemmy.world
        4·
        6 months ago

        Exactly. SS is too popular. There will be some sort of reform/funding, but congress will wait to the least minute to fix a problem. See any sort of continuing resolution government funding bill or the last time SS had problems back in the 80s. The '83 reform only occurred a mere months prior to insolvency. The fact that SS is still years/decades from major problems means it’s someone else’s problem to our elected representatives.

      • Triasha@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 months ago

        The one thing you can count on conservatives paying attention to is messing with their money.

        What happens might not be pretty, but if they try to day “fuck it, guess we are ending the program” there will be hell to pay.

        • eldavi
          11·
          6 months ago

          Considering how one party is hellbent on getting rid of social security and the other party just shrugs and let’s them get what they want; id expect the shrugging party to be left holding to bag and suffer the political consequences once the cut hits with nothing happening

    • AdolfSchmitler@lemmy.world
      3·
      6 months ago

      Correct. IIRC there’s an auto mechanism that will cut all benefits by 23% or something. So you’re mom/dad getting $2,000 a month would now only get about $1,500.