Someone asked me, “What Gen Y has brought to the finance table?”.
My first response was: “No World Wars good, Pay Day Loans bad, but #ADDSociety is major thing”. This translates to they haven’t had a world war (yet). However, on their watch, Pay Day Loans have exploded as a concept. It seems all of society has Attention Deficit Disorder.
The finance excuses I continually get from Gen Y in specific, and Gen Y wannabes is:
- It’s too complicated, so I didn’t read it
- I have too many messages so I ignored it
- I can only read while driving, texting, drinking coffee, watching TV and shaving
- I can’t get anything done unless I am Multi-tasking (when in fact, it just means doing a whole bunch of things at the same time, badly)
- Yes, I do sound like a cranky old man.
What is to come for Gen Y?
I think Gen Y will have to deal with a very nasty time bomb as they age, namely, Boomers retiring and Gen Y having to support the aging “Greatest Generation Ever”(keeping their pensions afloat, as they live longer and longer). There is going to need to be a “paradigm shift” in how all these works, because it is pretty clear that all pensions (public and private) are in trouble, and barring a horrific plague there are going to be too many people trying to live on too little money (I may be proven wrong, but I doubt it).
Will Gen Y (in most Western nations) never see the Inflation and High-Interest rates that I grew up with? Maybe the days of Canada Savings Bonds with 19% interest rates are long gone. I believe 1981 was the last year with that.
Remember that the Boomers (and their parents to a lesser extent) are really the first generations that has ever had the chance to retire (folks died before retiring previously), will the following generations be able to do this? That remains to be seen.
I think it’s a little early to credit or blame Gen Y for anything if you mean those born between 1982 and 2002 or thereabouts. Almost half of them haven’t even finished their education and launched into their careers yet. The baby boomers have saddled Gen Y with a lot of financial challenges.
I blame everyone! 🙂 But luckily Gen Y will have to live with the consequences. (if I had an animated GIF of an angry old man waving his cane on his front grass wearing only a housecoat, this is where it would go)
So true so true big guy – you have a lot of material you can flesh out just from this one blog post – esp the one about our ADD society – when I was growing up I don’t think the term even existed!