The dramatic turnaround in millennials’ finances

livemint.com:

Millennials are now wealthier than previous generations were at their age. They can’t believe it either.

Fifteen years ago, Andy Holmes was a college graduate living with his parents, mowing lawns and digging ditches for extra income. He and his college pals who could only get low-paid jobs wondered if they would have a shot at the success their parents had.

Today, Holmes is a chief financial officer in Kansas City, Mo., on track to retire at 52.

“I’m in a place financially that I couldn’t have imagined coming out of college," he said. “At age 37, my net worth is closer to what I thought it’d be at 47."

The change in fortune for Holmes’s generation, now between 27 and 44 years old, was recent and swift.

The median household net worth of older millennials, born in the 1980s, rose to $130,000 in 2022 from $60,000 in 2019, according to inflation-adjusted data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Median wealth more than quadrupled to $41,000 for Americans born in the 1990s, which includes the generation’s youngest members, born in 1996.

The turnaround has been so dramatic that millennials—mocked at times for being perpetually behind in building wealth, buying homes, getting married and having children—now find themselves ahead.

In early 2024, millennials and older members of Gen Z had, on average and adjusting for inflation, about 25% more wealth than Gen Xers and baby boomers did at a similar age, according to a St. Louis Fed analysis.

Ana Hernández Kent, a senior researcher at the St. Louis Fed and a millennial herself, spent years examining whether her cohort was a “lost generation."

“They’re no longer lost," she said. “They’re found."

In the first quarter of 2024, the collective wealth of millennials and older Gen