The question is next to impossible to answer, but we can still try. Older millennials graduated into the 2007-09 recession, and most of the generation was in their 20s and 30s during the Covid-19 pandemic. Boomers weathered an oil crisis, high inflation and high interest rates as they got their start in the 1970s and ’80s.
To see how the finances of two of the biggest generations in American history stack up, we looked at some key data points from when they were similar ages. (Yes, other generations, we know you exist, too.)
Let’s start with income. The oldest millennials are now 45, and these charts show the median individual income for them and for boomers in their early decades of adulthood, adjusted for inflation.
Millennials’ median incomes at these ages were roughly on par with Boomers’, and gains over the past decade put millennials in a better position than many recognize.
“I think that that bump up in the last 10 years still hasn’t been properly assimilated into the public conversation,” said Nathan Wilmers, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
At the same time, Wilmers thinks it is understandable that millennials would be frustrated that their incomes haven’t been keeping pace with GDP per capita.
“Let’s say you’re an American who expects that as our country gets richer, your income should be going up” proportionally, he said. “Millennials rightly perceive that that has not been the case, at least in the early part of their career.”
One major source of tension is buying a house, an area where boomers and millennials both have a point.
Millennials looking to buy a home in the mid-2020s after a steep run-up in prices have had a tough time. But so did the boomers shopping for a house in the early 1980s, when mortgage rates peaked above 18%.
“It was indeed more expensive in today’s dollars to buy a home during that period, and pretty substantially so,” said Odeta Kushi, deputy chief economist at First American, a provider of title and settlement services.
Meanwhile, the relative affordability during the 1990s and 2010s underlines the variety of experiences within generational labels that include tens of millions of people. Older and younger boomers started buying homes under very different conditions, just as older and younger millennials did.
“Housing is the middle class’s wealth engine—and many millennials showed up after the train already left the station,” said Ana Hernández Kent, who runs AK Research & Consulting.
As with housing, the costs of other individual goods and services change at different rates than overall inflation. Millennials’ incomes go further than boomers’ did on some of households’ biggest expenses, but not on others.
Given this variation, perhaps it isn’t surprising that each generation feels some living costs make it tough to get ahead.
In a WSJ-NORC poll last year, more than two-thirds of respondents—including majorities of each age group—said that the American dream doesn’t hold true today.
“The reality is this sense of two-way resentment is overblown,” said Bobby Duffy, author of “The Generation Myth: Why When You’re Born Matters Less Than You Think.”
That said, there is one area where millennials definitively have had it harder than Boomers.
The cost of college in particular shot up, which helped make student debt a ballooning line item on millennials’ balance sheets.
Paying back these loans dragged on millennials’ ability to build wealth, said Constantine Yannelis, an economist at the University of Cambridge. But the pay premium that came with bachelor’s and advanced degrees gave them a boost after leaving school.
“Millennials earned less and studied more in their 20s,” Yannelis said. “A large part of this cycle just has to do with the nature of making large investments in education, which on average pay off.”
Millennials are now years out of college and, lately, they have done so well that their household net worth exceeds that of boomers at similar ages, both on average and at the median, after adjusting for inflation.
“Many of them have been able to capitalize on the stock- and housing-market gains of recent years, and as a group, they appear to be in a relatively good place, financially speaking,” Kent said.
Of course, boomers also are doing just fine today. They are the richest generation overall, holding more than half of the country’s wealth, according to the Fed.
“That’s partly because they’re older, but also because they bought homes earlier and rode decades of asset appreciation,” said Kent.
Boomers are faring even better than their own predecessors. Their median household net worth in 2022 was significantly higher than that of Americans who were the same ages in 1983 and 2001, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Federal Reserve data.
And yet, when boomers were starting out, they were dogged by some of the same anxieties as millennials. In 1983, Money magazine teased a story about baby boomers on its cover by asking, “Can They Ever Live as Well as Their Parents?”
