One thing I’ve noticed among professional Millenials in my office is that they’re loading up their credit cards to “earn points” on other things. It’s the old “I have to spend money to make money” mentality, and it’s getting worse.
I had one co-worker spend $2500 on an Apple laptop which he didn’t need (he has a corporate-issued Mac Book) so that he could get points to fly to Vegas “for free.” I was dumbfounded by the logic, but this is how they think.
Why not? Uncle Sam is setting the example..........
What about the lesson now being taught by the Leftists running the country: Why save? We are just going to take it from you anyway and give it to someone we determine is more deserving?
I don't think it's astounding at all. Government education, tax structures for the 'working' - those privileged users of public aegis in all things, those uncaring unfeeling automatons - are all collectively aligned against self-sufficiency (which brings the ability to be individual, singular, and free to choose). This government and its entitlement society WANTS them to end up in a position with no choice whatsoever but theirs - complacency and capitulation to the greater good. That's why
The Millennials have to now support criminal illegal
aliens, their healthcare, their education,
while THEY WORK for the rest of their short lives,
controlled by the EXEMPT and the DeathCARE panels.
The huge problem with this anti-savings attitude is that the greatest gains are made on the money that’s invested earliest. For example, a dollar invested at a 9.6& rate of return will double in about 7 years. If someone 25 years old invests that dollar and retires at age 60, it will have doubled 5 times to $32.00 Thus, “pensions are for the young” because the really big returns on a long term fund only occur at the end of the holding period. IOW only the early investors make the really big bucks.
BTW the term, “pensions are for the young” is a direct quotation from a presenter at a forum on pension law that an employer sent me to when I was 27 years old. That old fart, probably in his 50’s at the time, said it at the beginning of his presentation, pulled out his charts and absolutely proved it. I sat here shocked, seeing how easy it actually was to provide for my retirement, and followed his advice ever since. Now I’m comfortably retired, in good part because I took that advice. Tragically, most Millennials probably have never even seen a presentation like that.
My son is in this demographic.
He has friends who max out their credit cards, then just pay the minimum payments each month. So if the have a $2500 limit on a card, when they use that up, they don’t think “I owe someone $2500”. They think, “I owe $x as the payment each month”.
They have no intention of ever repaying the principle.
Then they go and get another card. Rinse and repeat.
Most of what I got, I got from my folks (though they would’ve have given me any of it if I wasn’t hard-working), but I own my own house, my own car, got almost five grand in the bank and sixteen hundred in a mutual fund with EG (was almost seventeen hundred, but it’s lost a bit). I make about fifteen grand a year, but I’m very budgeted, plus I might be getting a second job soon that will help bump me up to twenty grand a year.
Am I on the path to a good retirement if I keep it up (looking to bump up how much I put into the mutual fund next year. Right now, I put in fifty dollars a month)?