Is It Too Late For Young People To Get Ahead Financially?

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Edited By: Andrew Gonzales

Music Courtesy of: Epidemic Sound

Select Footage Courtesy of: Getty Images

All materials in these videos are for educational purposes only and fall within the guidelines of fair use. No copyright infringement intended. This video does not provide investment or financial advice of any kind.

#career #business #finance

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The biggest financial mistake you will ever make was being born after 1980, homes are unaffordable, you need a loan to go to college, jobs are scarce and financial meltdowns are common. If you are a young person you have to ask yourself, is it too late for me to ever get ahead financially?

Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Steve Balmer, Eric Schmid and Vinod Khosla all have some things in common. These men are all tech billionaires who were born in 1955. According to the author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell this is no coincidence. Gladwell argues that Bill Gates wouldn’t have founded Microsoft if he wasn’t born at just the right time. 1955 was the right time to be born if you wanted to be a tech billionaire because you would have been the right age in 1975 to capitalize on the personal computer revolution right as it was beginning. If you were born after 1980 you were the right age to start paying five figures for college tuition, six figures for a basic home and entering the job market after the dot com bust, the global financial crisis or the Covid-19 Pandemic. Gladwell noticed that people ascribe Bill Gates's success to being "really smart" or "really ambitious". He noted that he knew a lot of people who are really smart and really ambitious, but not worth sixty billion dollars.

Tech billionaires are not the only group this happens to. A common and seemingly unavoidable problem with online Role-Playing Games is that long term players who started the game when it first launched have had time to level up their characters, collect the best gear and build in game fortunes. The game developer needs new players to join the game to grow their revenue base or at minimum replace players that get bored of the game and cancel their subscriptions. New players will be competing with existing players have more actual experience behind the keyboard and have higher level characters in the game that new players just can’t compete with. Nobody wants to spend their free time getting PWNED on an old video game, so developers must choose one of two options. Option one… reduce the gap between new players and old players and risk making their most loyal customers angry, or option 2, let the level gap grow so new players can’t compete and let the game slowly die as it loses players.

Back in the real world we are being faced with exactly the same challenges and there are four big reasons why young people may never get ahead financially.

The first reason is job opportunities.

Working a job is how most people build wealth. Even people who go on to be successful business owners normally get their start in a professional career where they can build up skills, gain connections and earn enough money to go out on their own. The average age of retirement has been slowly increasing in America for a long time now, and that isn’t just affecting people at the end of their careers it’s also effecting young people. If people have to work for longer before retiring, then there is less room at the top of the corporate ladder for young people to move up into.

Despite this, millennials make more money than any other generation did at their age, but they are less wealthy because to access most high paying jobs they have been forced to work in high cost of living cities. Here they are competing with senior professionals in the penultimate years of their careers but still aren’t quite ready to retire yet. These are people who were able to buy homes in these cities before they became unaffordable. When baby boomers were around the same age as millennials are today, they controlled 22% of the nation’s wealth, compared to just 7% controlled by millennials. It’s a chicken and egg scenario, older generations need wealth to retire, and younger generations need older generations to retire in order to build wealth.

Nobody wins but young people lose.

So it’s time to learn How Money Works to find out if you’re a young person if it’s too late for you to ever get ahead financially, or if you were born before 1980, to find out how long your children will be living at home.

[lonelychameleon]

Being born is the worst financial mistake you can make

[alphasia]

Boomers: When life gives you lemons, make lemonade
Gen X: When life gives you lemons, start a business selling lemonade
Millennials: As if life would just HAND you lemons

[ROVA]

My biggest financial mistake was not investing and buying a home in 1998 when I was in middle school

[patriciaa]

"You will never afford to buy a house. This is the deal you made by being born after 1988." -John Oliver

[rileyketvirtis]

My biggest regret is being 7 in 2008. I was in third grade when I should have been buying real-estate.

[EventHorizon_Alex]

I’m glad to say that this channel has always given me high quality content in crushing any remaining hope and dreams I had with economic reality. I give it a perfect 10/10.

[andrewfriedrichs]

10 years ago when I started my job I was told there was great room for advancement because so many people were 5 years from retirement. I'm still waiting

[Mike-ddbd]

Most of my friends who are doing well today have had massive help from parents. Paying for college, letting them live at home until they have money saved (or just never leaving), having connections at big corporations etc. Even just growing up in a nicer place that your parents put you gains friends who help you later in life. From my perspective parents role plays a huge part in your success. If you struggle good chance your kids will also, sadly.

[zimbu_]

Well, to become a billionaire like Gates you also needed to be the son of multi millionaires when you were born in 1955. Preferably one multi millionaire parent who could help you make useful contacts in your chosen field of computer technology by giving you access to people like the CEO of IBM, and then the other multi millionaire parent could preferably be a famous lawyer who can help you negotiate for good clauses on contracts that allow you to sell the operating system you're making for IBM to its competitors.

[justinfowler]

I was born in 1981. Since my working career started there have been

4 recessions
4 "Once in a lifetime" Events
2 unpaid for wars
And everything is designed to fail.

[idiotengineer]

My aunt bought a 4 bedroom house in Seattle in the 80s for around 180k out of college and it's worth millions when she sold it this year. She literally did no saving or extra investing and was able to retire this year, moving into her husband's inherited family home. My parents lost their house in 2008 and I make multiple times what she did and am not even close to a home ai 30

[moneysins]

Remote working solves so much of the problems; there are so many wonderful and affordable cities that people can’t move to because companies force them to be in office for a job that’s all emails and spreadsheets anyways

[moneysins]

All these new sca- I mean alternative investments are just preying on people’s financial insecurity

[BrianM]

Millenial: **is born**
"I'll never financially recover from this"

[Catata]

Only 3 minutes in but I can say that it certainly feels impossible. I graduated college in the aftermath of the Great Recession. There were no jobs. Anywhere. Anywhere except the minimum wage service sector. Now a pandemic. It's not all bad though. Giving up on traditional retirement inspired me to get into better shape because hey, I'll have to work this body until they put it into the ground!

[willlive]

My dad worked in HVAC for almost 40 years. He was able to buy two homes and own a business all with a massive drinking problem.

I went into HVAC also, after 3 months in the field I started making 25 dollars an hour. I can barely afford basic necessities. The world is not the same.

[ROMANTIKILLER]

The fact that as a manager in a big company in my late 30s I still cannot afford what my blue collar parents born in the early 1960s could speaks volume of how things have shifted, especially on the subject of owning a house.
As for retirement, that word is now simply referring to an utopistic golden age that only those born before the 1980s can ever experience.

[me]

I'm 25, still in school, and I'm doing my best, but I really am worried for the future. I'm keeping total spending below 40%, and I'm still behind. I have a second job, I'm moving to cheaper housing, really anything I can do without compromising my studies.

I want to have kids in my 30s, but I'm really worried I won't be able to afford caring for them properly, let alone buy a house to raise them in.

[wrongtime]

My biggest financial mistake was allowing every teacher I've ever known since middle school pressure me into going $35k into debt over college.

[duo]

Oh boy, a new "how money works" video, can't wait to feel existential dread on a wednesday again