Nearly half of millennials say their financial situation has improved since five years ago — under former President Joe Biden, according to a new poll.
The sunny disposition comes after the generation, who are now between 29 and 45 years old, suffered through a series of economic blows — including the Great Recession, the student debt crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Forty-nine percent of millennials reported they are financially better off than in 2021, according to a survey of 3,000 US adults released by Chime financial services on Tuesday.
Only 44% of Gen Xers and 40% of baby boomers said the same.
And around a quarter of surveyed millennials said they were worse off, compared to roughly a third of boomers and Gen X.
Millennials are earning money at a faster pace — their net worth has grown 134% since 2021, versus 32% for boomers and 40% for Gex X, according a survey from the Fed Board of Governors.
They’re also turning to the stock market to generate wealth.
In the first three months of 2026, Millennials owned about $4.94 trillion in stocks, according to federal data.
But their overall net worth is still five times less than Boomers’ — thanks to lagging in home ownership.
Only 25% of Millennials own a home compared to about 40% of baby boomers, according to the National Association of Home Buyers.
The median age for first-time home buying has risen to the ripe old age of 40, the Association reported, and millennials are also slower to reach other traditional milestones representing financial security, such as having children, according to the Chime survey.
Millennials’ goals and financial philosophy seem to differ based on when exactly they were born.
“Where older millennials learned to survive, younger millennials are finding different definitions of success,” Chime wrote in a summary of its survey results.
Younger millennials are more likely to view renting as a freedom, not failure, and they have more faith in the traditional career paths, whereas more older millennials said they have given up on the idea of the “career ladder.”
One explanation could be that older millennials were finishing high school and college just in time for the 2008 crash and “Occupy Wall Street”-era cynicism.
Yet those jaded elder millennials are making money hand-over-fist.
“As long as you go to age 30 or higher, the incomes of millennials are higher than the incomes of any previous generation at the same age,” Kevin Corinth, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute’s Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility, told Bloomberg.
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