00:00:00
Speaker 1: Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel and I am Matt, and today we're talking the myth of the broke millennial with doctor Gene Twiny.

00:00:27
Speaker 2: That's right. We are joined today by doctor Jean Twagy. She's a professor of psychology over at San Diego State University. I don't think there's a single expert who has researched and tackled the topic of generational change as well as doctor Twiny has written multiple books on the different defining characteristics of specific generations. She did that in her book I jen where she focused on gen z and then her latest book, Generations. It spans from all the way back from the silent generation all the way up to to polars not solar bears, right, no, no, yeah, polar Like that's the generation our kids are in. I learned. And an article that she wrote in The Atlantic really caught our eye because not only did she write about our generation, millennials, but she spoke directly to the personal finances of millennials. And that's what we're gonna mainly discuss today, and not only the financial reality, but how it is that we perceive and how we interpret that reality. And so today's episode is gonna be a little bit different, but I think we're going to have a very enlightening conversation today, Doctor Gene Twainy, thank you so much for joining us.

00:01:35
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me well, Doctor Twayny, you glad to have you. Yeah, it's going to be super fascinating. Like the way we think about generational differences is so interesting, and I think you're going to clear through a lot of that clutter. But the first question we ask anyone who comes on the show is what do they like to splore? John Matt and I we splore John Kraft beer. We're drinking one now. But some people would say you spent a lot on that, guys, but we're still saving the investing for the future while we're doing that. So is there something like that in your life?

00:02:03
Speaker 3: I would say it is our family vacations to national parks, all right. So we've got three kids, and when we started our national park obsession, at least it's my obsession that the kids and my husband are sort of along for the ride, but they.

00:02:16
Speaker 2: Usually like it.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: But yeah, when we started it, and my youngest was kind of just at the stage where she could go on longer walks and I realized we had a very narrow window between that and when our older kids wouldn't want to have anything to do with us. And we may have already jumped that shark. We're still going for it and trying to make some family memories. And you really can't go wrong with the National parks.

00:02:39
Speaker 2: There are all same, No you can.

00:02:40
Speaker 1: Well, you're on the West coast, which means you're a lot closer to a bunch of the cool ones. And okay, question for you. I've heard since COVID of course read a lot about how the national parks are packed? Is that true? How hard is it? How much harder have your more difficult have your vacations become?

00:02:55
Speaker 3: They are more crowded. There are a number of parks that have instituted time entry, so you have to, you know, pick a time when you're going to enter the park. And with five people and several who like to sleep in, that does make it a little bit more difficult for sure. I'm like, I don't know when my kids are going to get up, and I don't want to drag them out of bed. But that's only really the most popular parks we've found. There's some amazing places that are just not as visited. I mean, it's just one example. There's a park in Colorado called Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which was amazing and gorgeous and not crowded and you didn't need timed entry.

00:03:38
Speaker 2: Very cool. Okay, one more recommendation then, because yeah, I've been out to Yosemite a couple of times. I think it might be my favorite place in the entire world. But do you have maybe one more recommendation for me personally?

00:03:51
Speaker 3: Well, unfortunately, this is a place you eat time entry. Now, however, my favorite National Park has always been Arches.

00:03:57
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, it's pretty spectacular. Yeah for sure. I was lucky, fortunate enough to run a half marathon one time through It's called the Canyon Lands Half and it was right there.

00:04:07
Speaker 3: And okay, yeah, yeah that's the other that's the other National exactly.

00:04:12
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful so a great town too, right. But okay, doctor Gene, let's talk about the different generations, because the I would say, the generational stereotypes, they're pretty common, right, Like folks have a preconceived idea as to how somebody is going to act based on their age, but they're not always one hundred percent accurate? How is it the first got interested in generational differences and just parsing out the statistics. Was it partly to dissect the validity of those different stereotypes?

00:04:43
Speaker 3: It was in a way. I mean I first got into it as a college undergraduate. I was using a questionnaire and saw that my fellow undergrads were scoring very differently on it than the original sample from the nineteen seventies. And this was in the early nineties, but it made sense, you know, over that twenty year period, there was a lot of generational change. So that was one of my first publications. That happened to be around the time too, that there was a lot of media attention about gen X, my own generation, and it was very striking to me how much of it was guesswork and stereotypes and observations and unsupported statements. They'd say things like, oh, gen xers have low self esteem, Like, well, how do you know that? Do you have a bunch Did you give the self esteem scale to a bunch of people in Gen X and then compare it to boomers at the same age, And of course they didn't, But I did that and found out the actually the opposite gen xers have higher self esteem than boomers did at the same age.

00:05:46
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:05:47
Speaker 2: Gen X is the self esteem I'm special generation, as you've written about.

00:05:52
Speaker 3: Well, millennials take it next level. Yeah, but it did start. It started with boomers, grew to Gen X and then and then arguably reached to peak with millennials.

00:06:02
Speaker 1: Okay, so what are the biggest influences on generational differences?

00:06:06
Speaker 2: Then?

00:06:06
Speaker 1: Like, what what is what is it that's impacting these disparate outcomes for different age cohorts? So and even just kind of what these these generations are. You talk about how like Matt and I we are geriatric millennials, right, So Matt and I are geriatric millennials, and that that has its particular specific brand. I think it's it's even different than the rest of the millennial cohort. But what's impacting kind of how these generations are formed and stuff like that.

00:06:32
Speaker 3: Well, the traditional theory of generations is that people experience major events, things like recessions or wars or pandemics is at a certain age and that's what causes generational differences. And of course those have an impact, but not as much as technology. So that's the I think origin of so much cultural change and thus generational change, because that's what really makes living now different compared to living two hundred years ago or one hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, or even twenty years ago. And when I see technology, I'm not just talking about computers and smartphones. I also mean things like faster transportation and better medical care and air conditioning and labor saving device is like washing machines. I got a little obsessed with washing machines when I was writing this book because I just kept thinking, you know, a woman of my age with three children, how my life would be completely different if I had lived two hundred years ago. And one of the reasons for that is that back then, doing laundry took all day, and you would do it over an open fire, usually with a group of other women, and you'd use these harsh soaps. And you know, now you just throw your clothing machine and walk away. I mean, it's so different.

00:07:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's quite nice, even though it still takes I saw a meme recently, and it speaks to my generation and technology. I guess with memes specifically, but it's like, it takes five minutes to gather your clothes, thirty minutes to actually wash the clothes, but then seven days to actually put the the truth fold. That's the rough start.

00:08:06
Speaker 3: And I am waiting. I'm really really waiting for technology to get to the point when we have a robot that will take the clothes from the washer and put them in the dryer.

00:08:14
Speaker 2: That that would be the condo.

00:08:17
Speaker 3: That'd be fantastic.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: Well, didn't you You've also talked about how technology has fueled the growth of individualism, too, right, and so that and that's part of what kind of separates us as as generations.

00:08:28
Speaker 3: That's right, So you know technology has these downstream effects. To one of those is individualism more focused on the self and less on others. So that's one reason why self esteem grew over the generations, because that was more encouraged. And then the other downstream effect is what's called the slow life strategy. That development has slowed it every every stage of the life cycle. So kids are less independent, teams are less likely to do things like have a job or go out on dates or drink alcohol. Young adults take longer to marry and have kids and settle into careers, and middle aged people look and feel younger than their parents and grandparents did at the same age. So I think that that framework is so useful for thinking about generational change because it has affected everyone and it explains a lot with one theory. It also helps a lot of grandparents who are wondering why their twenty eight year old grandchildren are not married yet, that it's not just millennials or Gen Z, that this is something that's a broader trend in the whole culture.

00:09:43
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, Okay, So I've got one quick follow up before we before we stop talking about your generation Gen xers and dive and dive into millennials, our generation. I'm curious when it comes to technology and entertainment specifically too, Like you write about the shift towards unabashed materialism, You talk about the consumption that the shiny materialism in the eighties, right, can you discuss that? And then I guess I'm curious, like what kind of impact do you think that that had on future future generations pursuit of money and success. I guess basically, I'm curious if you think that that entertainment culture sort of set the stage, if it planted the seeds for maybe the model of consumption that we are experiencing. Today, it could.

00:10:28
Speaker 3: I mean, you know, it's interesting to look at the generational trends and how young people think about money. So there's a big survey of entering college students that ask about important life goals. And it started back in the late sixties when the college students were boomers, and there's been a big decline from boomers to Gen xers, to millennials to Gen z in saying that quote developing a meaningful philosophy of life is important because that's like this kind of squishy boomer thing. It's very abstract and very intrinsic. And what's gone up steadily over that same time period is the importance of being very well off financially. That has continued to grow. It grew the most between boomers and Gen x but then it kept going and it pretty much every year it ticks up just a little bit more to reach another all time high. And you know, it makes some sense given the trends over that time period, you know, starting in the early eighties, in particular, a big growth in income inequality. So the messages you either make it or you don't, So you better make it because the question says very well off financially not just okay, you know, but when you put it in the context of income inequality, it makes some more sense. And then, as you mentioned with gen X, gen X really kind of pioneered these ideas of you know, as high school seniors, for example, of saying, yeah, I want to have a boat, I want to have a vacation house. And that has backed off some for millennials and gen Z, but there was that kind of just very materialistic time, especially late eighties or early nineties that really shows up when you look at the surveys of young people, and it was Jeddaks who were the young people at that at that time.

00:12:30
Speaker 1: Well, okay, let's dive into our largest generation of listeners, the generation that Matt and I barely fall into, or at the upper upper end. But it feels like every headline about millennials and finances are dour, right, And I guess one of the biggest questions we have for you is the millennial cohort. Are they actually doing worse than previous generations? Everything out there in media would suggest that millennials are, you know, between a rock and a hard place, But you seem to kind of disagree a little bit with that.

00:12:57
Speaker 3: It's not just that I disagree, it's that the US this data proves it wrong. Now it's more complex than that.

00:13:03
Speaker 2: It's not a matter of opinion. It's fast.

00:13:06
Speaker 3: Well sorry, that's kind of like, you know, my little snarkiness when I go.

00:13:09
Speaker 2: It's true. I appreciate you.

00:13:13
Speaker 3: I mean, that's that's the thing. When people take issue with it, I don't like take it up with the Census Bureau, you know, or anyway. But and it is okay, So let's let's talk about what the what the stats show. So median household incomes for younger populations, this is going to be those who are now millennials, so we're what we're what we're talking here is look at two groups twenty five to thirty four year olds, thirty five to forty four year old. So I have the graph in front of me right now. I've got it updated to twenty twenty two because the Census released that a couple of months ago, and median incomes and those groups are at all time highs. And yes that is adjusted for inflation.

00:13:57
Speaker 2: So this is so.

00:13:59
Speaker 3: Contrary to what you read on social media and in news articles that when that Atlantic article came out with this graph based on the census data. People who are online, who of course didn't read the actual article automatically because that's how it goes automatically, assumed that it could not possibly be corrected for inflation. So their theory was that the Atlantic, with all of their fact checking, publish this without a correction for inflation, and of course that's not the case. It is adjusted for inflation. And then people started arguing about, you know, whether the inflation adjustment was correct, and to that it's taken up with the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So it's true, you know, you could make arguments about how it's adjusted and so on. But media incomes are at all time highs Now, why is that not necessarily the best thing in the world? For some interesting reasons. For one thing, almost all of those income gains have been for women, and that seems like it's great news, and it is. It also, though, means that then when a heterosexual couple wants to keep both of those high incomes that they might have, they have to pay for childcare exactly. So that's one definite reality that has to be acknowledged in these stats. The other one is almost all those gains have been for college educated people and there that's actually one of the reasons why the incomes are so high for millennials is because more millennials got a college education than any previous generation. Even though those who didn't get a college education are not doing as well, their incomes have actually gone down slightly. There's been gains for those with college incomes and so many more have college education.

00:15:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, and we definitely want to ask you some follow up questions about college about some of these different changes that in particular millennials have experience. But like regarding what we're talking about here, just as general attitude towards the way that millennials perceive their finances, the commenters, non article reader people know exactly like like the perception it kind of feels reality to a certain extent, and it's it's almost as if there's like a reality distortion field that you know, has millennials feeling worse about their actual situation. And so can you speak to that. Why do millennials feel poor than they actually are?

00:16:22
Speaker 3: And there's a number of reasons. I think one thing is that early on there were there was, you know, actual data showing that millennials weren't doing as well so the Federal Reserve of Saint Louis, you know, put out a study that got all kinds of press and twenty fifteen maybe saying oh, millennials might not ever catch up and so on, and that you know, got a lot of attention, and I think it kind of put people in that mindset. Of course, then the Saint Louis FED updated that later on and with the most most recent data, turns outllennials are neck and neck with Gen X and on track to catch up with boomers in terms of their wealth building. So even with college loans and all that taken into account, millennials are still doing pretty well, you know, with with wealth building. But so I think some of it is that the perception got stuck at that previous point where recovery from the Great Recession was taking a long time, particularly for younger people. I think some of it is what I mentioned, that the income gains have not been even across all groups. I think another big part of it is simply that negative news cells.

00:17:39
Speaker 2: Yeah, whether that's the report.

00:17:42
Speaker 3: Saint Louis FED being, you know, the one that was more negative versus more positive, or just the way people interact online. I mean nobody goes on Twitter and says I'm doing really well and so is my generation, and we rock like it just doesn't really happen. It's much more the focus of you know, everything is terrible. That's what it's likes and clicks.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, the medium matters. And again people are just knee jerk like, oh no, that can't be true because that's good news, and good news can't be real, not in today's environment. Well, and you mentioned the Great Recession. Do you feel like the Great Recession and kind of the ensuing financial haboc had something to do with this this pessimistic view. I know it impacted obviously a lot of people negatively, a lot of millennials. They saw their parents struggle during that time period, did that kind of like I guess, sway how they thought about the US economy.

00:18:30
Speaker 3: It certainly could be a case. I think what is odd though, is if that had such a big effect, why didn't the huge comeback of the economy after the Great Recession have an equal effect, Because it doesn't seem to have.

00:18:43
Speaker 1: That's actually a really good point, and again, we just have a more of an ability to digest bad news. It's the focus on the bad news. I supposeessimists sound smarter. The optimist sound like don Quixote. Whatever. Right, But okay, we've got more questions to get to with Eugene. We want to we want to dive down specifically into a bunch of different aspects of millennial finances and how they're impacted these days. Well, we'll get to some more question with doctor gen Twangy right after this.

00:19:16
Speaker 2: Right, we are back from the break with doctor Gene Twingy, and we you know, we basically we set the stage as to perhaps why it is that millennials in particular view their circumstances as not quite as great. Things aren't going as great as maybe they envisioned their parents histories in past. Part of that, I'm sure some of it has to do with just like everything looks better in retrospect, right, like you remember all the positives, and even if you're talking to your parents, I think they're oftentimes recounting all the great things that they're able to do, as opposed to being able to kind of filter out some of those negative aspects of life. We live in an era of nostalgia. Yes, yeah, it's funny because on a personal level, nostalgia reigns supreme, But when it comes to news like we were talking about before, we are immediately drawn towards the, I guess more than negative side of things. But doctor Jeene, what are some of the biggest differences between the financial obstacles that our parents had to deal with and then the ones that folks in their twenties and thirties have to deal with now? And I'll say in forties as well, because millennials are now in their early forties. Homes they're vastly more expensive these days, it seems. And so where's the distinction between some of those facts versus the narrative that has sprung up.

00:20:24
Speaker 3: Well, I think there's a mix here of things where the narrative hits on some truth and then also where it maybe doesn't come as close to what the stats are telling us. So there's definite truth in college loans, you know, being a big burden, but that's also qualified by the fact that, yes, you might have those loans, but you're going to be making a lot more money over your lifetime than if you didn't go to college, because in most cases that loan is going to pay off in terms of more come out. Always unfortunately, but usually it will. Then the other truth is what we mentioned about about childcare, that women's incomes have just grown so much, and so for families to keep up their earnings, then we have to find somebody to take care of the kids. And then that's you know, childcare costs are just astronomicals. So that's definitely a concern. Where I think the narrative has not been as accurate is in terms of housing. So there's a couple of really interesting stats. So one is that at least as of twenty twenty, the home ownership rate for millennials was virtually identical to Gen X and boomers at the same age. It lagged by two percentage points, and that's it. So it was about fifty among twenty five to thirty nine year olds for Gen xers and boomers, now about forty eight for millennials. Really not that different, you know, especially considering that more millennials went to college and thus you know, put off their earning years for longer. So that piece isn't as accurate. The other thing, that's that's you have to keep in mind about housing prices. There's a couple of things. So first, so your group, you know, called elderly millennials. You could say you're not elderly millennials or geriatric millennials. Instead, you are the group of millennials that potentially, if you bought a house, you're the housing lucky millennials. And I know nobody sees it that way, but I have in front of me a graph of the share of household income that goes to housing over time, and that was actually at all time lows since you know, tracing from nineteen seventy five to the present, in the twenty tents, and that's when a lot of millennials born in the eighties bought their houses. And you can see that in housing prices too, because you know, there's huge drop the you know, that horrible drop in housing prices for anybody who bought before housing crashed in two thousand and eight. A lot of those folks were Gen X and they had to wait ten years for their house to be worth what they paid for it. But then if you were lucky enough to buy a house in their early twenty tens, the gains that you saw, especially post twenty twenty were incredible. Where there is truth, though, is sense about twenty twenty one. You know, twenty twenty two when interest rates started going way up. So the folks who have not bought into the market yet, so that a lot of that, you know, on average, is going to be younger millennials in gen Z. They're in a very difficult position because housing prices are still high and interest rates are so much higher. Because that's the piece that's often left out of the conversation in terms of housing prices going up. Well, they can say, oh, you know what boomers bought this house for, you know, seventy thousand dollars in nineteen eighty two. Well, the interest rate in nineteen eighty two to seventeen percent for a mint hunch.

00:24:06
Speaker 1: Well, and houses are a whole lot different now too. We're kind of comparing apples and oranges because the size of homes has grown a lot. And yes, of course the price of homes has skyrocketed, especially over the past or the cost to buy a home with rising prices and interest rates has gone up quite a bit. But you're right, we're still like talking about different things because the advertise of a home when of that seventy thousand dollars home was a whole lot smaller back then too.

00:24:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, because if you look at the housing the sorry, the mortgage payment, it's actually pretty similar until just about a year and a half or two years ago. That's when things really started to get out of whack because yeah, prices went way up, but interest rates had been so low for so long that the mortgage payment actually wasn't tremendously different. Now the down payment, that's a whole other story. Then, of course that is going to be more of an issue. But what I have heard, and I'd love to see better data on this, is a lot of people say that their parents helped them out with it. So there's a well transfer from boomers to millennials going on with down payments for houses.

00:25:12
Speaker 2: It's almost not fair to say to draw these lines like we have when it comes to some of the different generations and say that, oh, generally speaking, millennials are right on track when it comes to home ownership, because like you said, it really does have so much to do with where it is that you fall within that cohort. Because so like Joel and I, we were those older geriatric, lucky millennials, or I like to affectionately call us, what is it, the Oregon Trail right right there on the cusp between Gen X and actual millennials. But we were able to purchase homes while things were at all time Not only were housing prices at all time lows, but interest rates were crazy low. And I remember talking to my wife after we purchased our first home back in nine, thinking, man, we've got friends that are just a couple years older than us, and they are in a much more difficult situation. And it's honestly just by by luck of the draw that they happened to have their act together. You know, if in some respects they were ahead of the ball, right, they were only two years older than us, but in some respects they were looking it seemed like that they were five years older than us, because they were thinking about buying a home even earlier. But because of that, they bought close to the peak, and like you said, saw there, it took them nearly a decade in order to see those values recover exactly.

00:26:30
Speaker 3: And you just don't see that discussed. I mean, it's the just the millennials and the never own houses narrative that seemed to take up, you know, all all of the space and that dynamic, which is pretty easy to document when you look at housing prices that it was actually Gen X who got screwed the most that you never hear you never hear about that.

00:26:53
Speaker 1: Okay, So in your opinion, doctor Toynie, are there any economic headwinds that face kind of millennial in particular more so than other generational cohorts or is there any like the student loan thing even right like that is feels very specific to the millennial generation, but like you said, their earnings are also more than making up kind of for the student loan debt they've taken on. But are there any economic headwinds that are just like specifically millennial related and they get coverage and it's spot on.

00:27:23
Speaker 3: I don't know. I just haven't seen a whole lot that has been spot on. There's been so much out there that just has been you know, so off what the what the stats actually show. It's it's hard to pinpoint. I mean, did you have a particular thing in mind?

00:27:38
Speaker 1: No, I guess that's my question because it feels like from everything I've read from your perspective, and well not even your perspective, like you said, from the facts, that on the ground that like there's there are all these narratives that are spun and yet so little of it feels based in reality. But it's also dominated the psychology of the average millennial, feeling like the deck is kind of stacked against stacked against us from an economic perspective, from an earning's perspective, from student loan debt, and oh my goodness, well, I think I feel like that psychological weight has created responses like delaying marriage, delaying having kids, and stuff like that. But it's so interesting because it feels more psychological than economic reality.

00:28:17
Speaker 3: It is, but there's you know, there's other elements in there too, because it's not it's really not the economics that are pushing people to get married later and have children later. It's because that trend has been going on in a fairly linear way, not a cyclical way like the economy, in a linear way. Since the sixties. The average age of marriage has been going up, the average age you're having children has been going up, and that's due to this little life strategy. And it's because we live longer. I mean, it's for a good reason. Right now, people take longer at every stage because we live longer. I think the difficulty is you run up against biology that female fertility, or male fertility for that matter. It just hasn't changed yet. We're, you know, taking more years to get educated and then putting off getting married and having kids. And sometimes that can collide with the facts of biology.

00:29:20
Speaker 2: Sure, and you might, with medical advances scrape another ten years.

00:29:24
Speaker 3: Not yet.

00:29:25
Speaker 2: Oh really?

00:29:25
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, I guess.

00:29:26
Speaker 2: I'm taking up fertility medications and different things that.

00:29:29
Speaker 3: It doesn't help with age.

00:29:30
Speaker 2: Oh wow, okay.

00:29:31
Speaker 3: Yeah. In my other life, I actually wrote a book called The Impatient Woman's Guide to Getting Pregnant. It's my one book that wasn't based on my own research, but it was. I was inspired to write it kind of for similar reasons like what we're talking about today. The stuff that I read about fertility wasn't based in the best research, and there it was kind of a good news bad news story when you did look at the best research. The good news was the whole idea of like, you're not going to ever have kids after thirty five turned on not to be true at all. That there's more encouraging statistics on that. However, there is a deadline somewhere between forty and forty five for women. You're you're done and IVF and fertility drugs cannot overcome that.

00:30:15
Speaker 2: Okay, wow, So what we're highlighting here though, are just the just massive changes to how it is that millennials are living. There's living their lives and so do you think these changing factors right, like, so these external or I guess not external? Like these these are markers that oftentimes they're different milestones that we can tend to measure our lives by. Do you think that these emphasis on these things like getting married, like having kids? Do you think that some of the external factors that we're experiencing in the economy are legit reasons that millennials are doing things differently or do you feel that they're more basically like excuses and millennials, I think excuses. Yeah. So do you think they simply just have different priorities? Do you think they millennials just have different life goals than previous generations.

00:31:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that that's something that it's not necessarily unique to millennials. I think it's something that has been building since the boomers, and I think a lot of it is individualism, more of a focus on the self, less of a focus on social rules and the society much just nobody does anything for duty anymore. Now I'm not saying that's bad. That's probably good in a lot of ways, but I think that does bias people away from having children. Although I will say this, there's a big survey that I work with a lot of high school seniors and it goes back to nineteen seventy six and there's a bunch of questions on there about how many children do you want to have and even if things were ideal, would you want to have children. Millennials said they wanted to have children just as much as previous generations when they were eighteen, and so it's interesting that changed later. Where you see the change among eighteen year olds is in the transition from Millennials to Gen Z. Then it starts to go down. And so what that tells me is the birth rates never coming back up because millennials at eighteen said I want to have kids just as much as previous generations. But we know what happened with the birth rate. It went way down as Millennials transferred, he became the generation of child bearing age, and then as that baton has passed to Gen Z, they are not even saying they want to have kids. When they're eighteen.

00:32:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's interesting, as like societal wealth has grown, a lot of people predicted that it would lead to more procreation, more kids, but the exact opposite has happened, and we've leaned more into travel and experiences and stuff like that with a lot of the excess income that we've got with too high earning adults potentially in the same house, right, that's right, that allows for a.

00:32:42
Speaker 2: Lot more than that.

00:32:42
Speaker 1: I guess we were just talking about fertility and talked about declining birth rates. How is that going to impact future generations, like from an economic perspective, because yeah, it does seem like it's going to inhibit the US economy and potentially constrain finances in the future.

00:33:00
Speaker 3: Absolutely. I'm glad you asked about that, because mean that that decline in the birth rate has just really wide ranging implications and I think we don't even realize all of them yet. We can look to a country like Japan that's had a declining birth rate for longer than we have, and there's just massive problems. I mean, there's all kinds of things that that that are going to happen. I mean, just to mention too, you know, you got to wonder if Social Security is going to be able to survive, there's not going to be as many younger workers because that's based on there being a certain number of younger workers to support the retired people. Because it's a Ponzi scheme. Really, you know, it's not in real you know, it's not in real time, so you know, it's not that that stuff that comes out of your paycheck is exactly what you get later. You end up getting more because of inflation and other factors. So you need more young workers to support the older ones. And that's just not going to be the case. Plus, I mean there's just issue around elder care. Are there going to be enough younger people to take care of older people, especially as lifespans continue to Lengthen, I.

00:34:07
Speaker 1: Mean japan is I feel like they've created robots and stuff right to help out in these nursing nursing centers because that's the future.

00:34:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it really really might be. Yeah, Well, doctor Geen, We've got more questions to get to. We've kind of picked apart millennials, but we're going to talk about I guess some of the other generations as well, talk about boomers. We'll get to all that right after.

00:34:26
Speaker 1: This, all right, we'll back we're still talking with doctor gen Twangy. We're talking about broke millennials or wait, actually maybe not. Maybe millennials are actually doing better than they thought, which is which is good news, and hopefully that creates like some psychological resolve to to not just lean into that doomerism and see the optimism. Right, and and there's still I think a whole lot of potential for the millennial generation. But doctor Chie, we want to talk about the baby boomer generation. Right, Like the folks who are reaching traditional retirement age, they seem to be sticking it out in the workforce a little bit longer. How's that impacting the economy right now? People remaining in the workforce into late sixties, early mid late seventies too.

00:35:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, So is that a way to combat the fact that there are fewer younger generations paying into something like social Security, the fact that there are old signers yeah who are working.

00:35:29
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that that is going to have you know, has already had a bunch a bunch of impacts. So there's both good and bad impacts of that. So one clear good thing is then yeah, we don't have as much of a worker shortage. There's you know, people are working for longer because they're living longer, they're healthier for longer. The downside of that we've seen in the housing supply because boomers are not selling their houses it's seventy like previous generations might have. They're often staying in those hows until they're much older, so there's kind of a bottleneck in the housing supply. Also kind of negative news, a lot of boomers are working longer because they have to. They just don't have enough saved up for retirement. And I think that, combined with a lot of other statistics, really go against the again popular narrative that boomers are all rich and doing really well, when in fact there is a lot there are a lot of boomers who are not doing well, particularly those who did not get a college education. Their incomes have really fallen behind. And a couple of economists got a lot of attention a few years ago for their paper showing that death rates for those who were in middle aged, which was boomers at the time, had been declining for decades and then started to go up, particularly for those who did not have a college education. And I found a similar thing in my book with Depression, that there used to be very little difference in depression rates in middle age between people with and without a college education, and then that really diverged starting with the Boomers, with those without a college education became much more likely to be depressed.

00:37:16
Speaker 1: That is so fascinating, and I feel like at different points in this conversation maybe we haven't like drilled down deep on it yet though, but college education, Matt and I feel like we're both college graduates. Well we've kind of started in some ways to sour a little bit as we see the prices rise of college. But I don't know, in the past like three months, I've started to kind of do a double take on that because and the American public is kind of with us on that. Fifty six percent of people say right now that a college degree doesn't make sense, that it's not as valuable as it used to be. But it sounds like they're wrong. Right in all the talk of student loan debt and how impossible it is, what an impossible hurdle it is to overcome, is setting people up to believe college is the wrong path. But from everything you're saying, it sounds like one of the most definitive things that's going to put you on the trajectory to have a successful financial future.

00:38:10
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, at least on average. Of course, there's exceptions. You know, if you're someone who really wants to go into construction, you can absolutely do extremely well. You know, as a general contractor say not everybody has to necessarily get a college education. But if you're looking at the overall average trajectory, it's going to make a big difference. You know, for your average person who you know, the choices maybe you know, working at a kind of regular corporate job, that college degree is going to make a huge difference in your income over time.

00:38:46
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, so let's go from from boomers to zoomers, which doesn't seem like that's taken quite as well as just gen Z.

00:38:53
Speaker 3: I kind of like zoomer.

00:38:54
Speaker 2: I like personally I like zoomers as well. I feel like fewer folks are you using that term. But earlier so you mentioned like that slow life strategy, that dynamic, that pattern, and as we've witnessed that when it comes to millennials, and basically it's a slow start, right, and so it's not there's no surprise that Oh yeah, net worth of millennials as they're entering the workforce, it's lower than prior generations because they've put off actually generating income because they've been they have been in college. Do you do you foresee uh, that same pattern that that slow life strategy. Do you do you foresee that continuing with future generations with with say gen Z, Is that something that you think is going to continue?

00:39:38
Speaker 3: It sure looks that way. I mean, okay, just you know, to look at gen Z says teens. They have completely next leveled those trends in terms of teens being less likely to adult things like get a driver's license, or have a job in high school, or go out on dates or drink alcohol. All of those have just kept continued to decline in that transition between millennials and gen Z being the teenagers, and the stats on say marriage, you know that at least by my calculations, the oldest gen Z is now twenty eight, So we're starting to see that transition safe for younger people getting married, and that median age at first marriage continues to go up. So it sure looks like gen Z is going to continue that slow life strategy trend.

00:40:27
Speaker 2: Yes, I guess the reason I'm pointing that out is because it seems that this is something that we can keep in mind as we continue to process the information around us, Right like, as we see headlines, as we see more headlines start to focus on not only we're millennials totally behind, and then they don't go and correct the story, where in reality millennials are doing just fine. Now they're shifting the attention perhaps to zoomers, to Gen z as well, because not only are they doing worse than Gen xers, oh, they're actually doing worse than than millennials. They're even more behind. But perhaps this is a pattern that we're going to continue to see.

00:41:00
Speaker 1: Okay, so I'm wondering too, doctor Jane, Like the talked about the slow life strategy, is there ever like a boomerang or a whiplash effect that generations have where they kind of, instead of going further down into some of the trends that the previous generation succumb to, where they're just like no way and in fact don't need the new iPhone, I'm going back to a flip phone. It seems like there's a small subset of a small cohort of people in like gen Z or something that are doing that. But does that ever catch on and become like a phenomena in a generation that just kind of bucks the trend and moves headlong in a different direction.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: Only very rarely. So most of the things that we're talking about like this, the slow life strategy just seems to continue. It just continues going in the same direction. Individualism is another example. Gen Z certainly, you know, continues a lot of those trends toward individualism. You know, technological change, Yeah, there might be a small cohort or the flip phone, but that's going to be pretty rare. Where the one big exception is that in the transition between millennials and gen Z, there was a big decline in life satisfaction, happiness, self esteem, and a big increase in depression and anxiety. So that seems to be mostly due to our relationship with technology that for a lot of millennials just based on the technology they grew up with. Your smartphones were cool and fun, and social media, you know, was just kind of a way to connect with people. But if you didn't want to do it, you didn't have to, and it was had a different character there wasn't as much competition for for likes and followers, and it wasn't as negative and for gen Z it's unfortunately been all of those things. You know, it's moved from optional to virtually mandatory. There's a lot of pressure it you know, tends to tilt toward towards the negative. And also, and this is effective millennials as well, but even more with gen Z spending less time with their friends face to face.

00:43:09
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's almost like social media became the place to interact as opposed to a method.

00:43:14
Speaker 2: To like it didn't facilitate, yes, irl interactions and in fact replaced it. And so this this isn't even money related, doctor Jene, But like, what's your prescription here? Like is it for us to completely log out of social media? Is it to delete the apps from our phone and just try to hang out with our friends in person with the podcast apped around? Though?

00:43:34
Speaker 3: Right, Technology is not all bad. It's there's trade offs, just like with everything. And in terms of you know, smartphones and social media, I think it's the same. So if you kind of step back and think about it in terms of, you know, what should you do? You know, for people of different ages, and this is relevant to you know, listeners have children as well. Let's protect kids and teens as long as we possibly can, just put it off, like no social media until sixteen would be fantastic, and I and many other people are starting to advocate for that, you know, in terms of policy change. But as a parent, you can try to do that too. Same thing with the smartphone. Don't hand your nine year old and iPhone. Get them a flip phone or you know one of those kids' phones, gab phones, pinwheel phones, that type of thing where they can just call and text and there's no internet access and no ability to download social media apps. Because the problem is you need to hand the kid's a smartphone. Okay, maybe you try to put parental controls on it and stuff. But I hear stories all the time very enterprising eleven year olds who find workarounds.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: Those kids are smart. Yeah, they're smart, smart than their parents at that point.

00:44:45
Speaker 3: Yeah. So you know, if you're going to give them their own device, which is going to be with them all the time, make sure that device is locked down as you can possibly get it until they're old enough to handle it. So in my house, the rule is you don't get a smartphone until you get a driver's license.

00:45:01
Speaker 1: That way, if they want to delay the driver's license, like the generation currently wants to, they got to delay the.

00:45:06
Speaker 2: Social media and then they're just struggle home with you anyway. Well, I appreciate you you speaking to that. And again it's even tangentially, maybe barely related to money. But again, what we're talking about here is life satisfaction and happiness, and.

00:45:21
Speaker 3: That's connected the money.

00:45:22
Speaker 2: Yes, it's absolutely connected. Yeah, And the reason that we talk about money is because we put it in the framework that money allows you to pursue some of those things. Is the money isn't the goal in and of itself. It's the being able to live a fulfilling, happy life. And so the other.

00:45:37
Speaker 3: Thing is if you're not happy, you're probably also not going to do as well in your career.

00:45:41
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's all related, all interconnected, that's for sure.

00:45:44
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:45:45
Speaker 1: Well, doctor Gene Toygy, thank you so much for joining us today on the show. Where can our listeners find out more about you and find out about your book generations?

00:45:53
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I do a website. It's genetwiny dot com and that has stuff about all my books and so on. I also have a sub stack now, so I'm trying to post every two weeks or so just with new new findings about generational differences. And yeah, the new book has has all the updated stuff across all the generations. And really my goal in the book was understanding, you know, to take big data and crunch it and try to figure out what the real differences are as opposed to stereotypes and have us get along better and understand each other better. That that was really the goal behind the book.

00:46:35
Speaker 2: I love it. That's yeah, that's that's what we do. But with money, it's all the nuances and and the fine details that make all the difference. Doctor Gene Twangie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us today.

00:46:45
Speaker 1: Thank you all right, man, that was a that was a great conversation with doctor Gene twenty It was and just so different than so much of the stuff we normally talk about on the podcast.

00:46:54
Speaker 2: But certainly, yeah, I feel like we gave folks a little bit of the heads up at the beginning where he's like, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about graphics. Yeah, you know, like that's not normally something we talk about. But it is demographics's destiny, right, dude, It truly is, and I'm glad we were able to touch more on that towards the end of the episode here. But all of this is going to have such an impact on our futures and even the leadership of our country, right, like the future generations, I mean we are the future generations, but then also Gen Z and also our kids, the polars or Alpha generation or Gen Alpha. But all of this has an impact on the future of our country. Yeah, yeah, what was you have a big takeaway? Oh? Man? Okay, so I've had a lot of thoughts and a lot of interesting data, but not like hard practical takeaways. But okay, I think he's a couple of the biggest practical takeaway I have from doctor Gene Toyni's work and from this conversation is the necessity of optimism. And I think we've become so pessimistic as a culture. And yes, those initial reports at times of millennials and their financial success was like, hey, they might not do as well as future generations, But the facts on the ground changed, and we need to update the data, and we need to update the narrative. And I think if you are sitting back there saying I got Delta raw hand, it's really easy to just kind of wallow in that, not realizing that there's a lot of opportunity out there for millennials. And so.

00:48:15
Speaker 1: That's my big takeaway is that like optimism is a necessity, and even if some of those those facts and data are like, actually generation is not doing quite as well or something like that, it doesn't mean you as an individual can't too, right.

00:48:25
Speaker 2: That's true. You can stand apart from your cohort.

00:48:28
Speaker 1: Yeah, just like you can choose to use a flip phone and shoot the smartphones, and part of there's definitely a big part of me that wants to do that. I haven't necessarily taken that plunge yet, But you don't have to. You don't have to be a stereotype of your generation. But you can also you can also choose to disbelieve the popular narrative about your generation that might not be quite accurate totally.

00:48:48
Speaker 2: And it's not that some of those events that did actually happen in time. We're not denying that those had an impact on folks. Right, So we were kind of talking about the Great Recession and the impact on houses and kind of where you landed on either side of that had a large I had a lot to do with your net worth now when it was that you were able to purchase a home. And so now I'll kind of segue to my big takeaway, which was I like that she pointed out that it's not those external factors as much as it is our own decisions to not pursue certain things. And I feel that oftentimes what we see in any generation, not just millennials, but we're kind of picking on millennials because that's who we are, and that's certainly they're entering in their prime working years. The oldest millennials are now entering into middle age. But oftentimes we point at things and say, oh, that's I mean, come on, well, if that would have happened to me, sure I'd own a home, or if I was in a different position, maybe I would have a couple kids or wanted whatever, right, maybe I would be married.

00:49:45
Speaker 1: If homes were seventy K like the Boomers had. Exactly, you're not taking an account the other things.

00:49:49
Speaker 2: And it comes down to priorities. And I think what we need to do is just own up to the fact that we want to live different lives than perhaps the lives that our parents lived, but to pin it on the different life events that happened to us as opposed to making decisions for ourselves and to proactively make those decisions. I guess it's a small, little tweak, but I think that amount it just empowers you as an individual to make decisions that you know are going to be best for you, even if they are different. That's fine that they're different. Just own up to it rather than having a bunch of excuses to point back to.

00:50:21
Speaker 1: All Right, one more minor thing, the double edged sword that technology is and has become for people of different generations, Like the washing machine was this great labor saving device, and the smartphone had, especially in its infancy, these wonderful impacts.

00:50:36
Speaker 2: And now we're starting to.

00:50:37
Speaker 1: See the other side of the smartphone revolution, right, and how it's addicting people to a bunch of different things. But our attention has been sucked away at the same time. So technology can be really cool, it can fuel a lot of productivity, or it can suck it dry. But Matt, all right, let's get back to the beer that we had on this episode. This one is an Icelandic Arctic pale Ale by Einstock Old Geard, What were your thoughts on this beer?

00:51:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I'll say that you can certainly taste the hops in this compared to Monday's beer. Was that was a pale logger, right or Icelandic it was an Arctic clogger, that's right? But that one man that in my mind, that one drank a little bit fresher, a little bit cleaner, a little bit colder, whereas this one, I guess the pale aspect of it, so you could certainly experience and taste the hops a bit more. It was a bit more bitter than I was expecting. It kind of reminded me of like, is it the esb the was? Is that like extra special bitter? Yeah? It definitely. That kind of reminds me of one of those that's as compared to a pale but certainly still liked it.

00:51:36
Speaker 1: Would you think like a multi paale is how I describe this one? Which maybe that's the way the Icelanders do it, you know, which is which is cool. So it's always fun to to the.

00:51:44
Speaker 2: Sugars to keep them warm than those cold one, that's right, that's right.

00:51:48
Speaker 1: So yeah, It always fun to try a new brewery, especially one that's in a random, interesting country like Iceland. So cloud to try this beer. It wasn't it wasn't my favorite.

00:51:57
Speaker 2: I'll okay, I just really I just on the canus. This is trip hopped. Oh dang, all right. Sometimes you get double double hopped or double dry hoped. This thing was triple hopped.

00:52:05
Speaker 1: No, it has It doesn't taste triple hopped. Well, the mouths are overwhelming the hops in this one.

00:52:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, But the bitterness, the maybe that is from the hops is what I taste. It's not triple dry hops, because that's where we have more of that, you know, that fresher, drier, more herbal verbalness. This is just bitterness with yes, yes, that's true. That's true.

00:52:24
Speaker 1: All right, Well, Matt, that's going to do it for this episode. We'll put links to doctor Gene Twangies substack to where you can buy her book. Let's put that stuff up on the show notes at howtomoney dot com. But let's wrap it up now and until next time, best Friends Out, Best Friends Out,