The hyperbolic stereotypes that surround millennials — that they are entitled, pampered, narcissistic and suspicious of anyone besides other millennials — fall apart once you listen to them and do your investment homework. Then you realize that practically from day one of adulthood, a great many millennials have been shoved up against a financial wall.
Take soaring student loan debt. As of June, when the youngest millennials graduated college, it was $37,172. That’s up more than 20 percent from 2012’s $30,000, an astronomical figure in and of itself.
And here’s the bottom-line impact: PwC’s 2016 Employee Financial Wellness Survey found that 42 percent of millennial employees shoulder student loan debt, with 79 percent saying their loans have moderate or significant impact on meeting financial goals. Meanwhile, 63 percent of employees with student loans have saved less than $50,000 for retirement. That’s a long, long way from the $2 million or so they’d need to retire comfortably in 2050.
[See: The Top 10 Investment Portfolio for Millennials.]
You can only imagine what this means for millennials with part-time jobs, low-paying service jobs, or no jobs at all. And yet baby boomers — who some would label the original entitled, pampered, narcissistic generation — are growing old and getting ready to pass on considerable financial resources to their millennial progeny.
Make no mistake: This transfer of wealth will be unprecedented, unlike anything in the last century of American history.
“More than 75 million millennials born between 1981 and 1997 are ready to take over estimated $30 trillion in wealth from baby boomers,” says Christopher Ma, director of the George Investments Institute at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
That’s reinforced by AARP statistics, which show that people older than 50 hold 80 percent of America’s household wealth.
Jeff Kelley, senior vice president of Westlake Ohio-based Equity Institutional, puts it like this: “So long Woodstock. Hello Lollapalooza.”
Addressing this transfer of wealth means tremendous opportunities for financial advisors.
“Emphasizing how millennial investors don’t have to go it alone,” Kelley says, “can go a long way.”
Yet other issues abound, particularly when it comes to mistrust of the advisory industry. Older millennials, after all, watched in disbelief as countless investors (including family members) were fleeced by the financial chicanery that spawned Great Recession. Many Americans who’ve since rebuilt their nest eggs may opt for blissful ignorance. They don’t.
“The bottom line is that millennials do not trust conventional financial advisors,” Ma says. “They were all raised in the tech age. They believe everything can be self-taught without human contact.”
To be sure, millennials have fed an explosion in digital robo-advisory tools such as Betterment and Kapitall, a drag-and-drop investment site that resembles a video game interface. And the 2017 FIS Consumer Banking Pace Report found that over a typical 30-day period, 49 percent of millennials used a mobile device to pay a bill, while 46 percent transferred funds between bank accounts.
“Robos woke the industry up to the need of a full on embrace of technology,” says Jack Sharry, executive vice president of strategic development at LifeYield, headquartered in Boston. “For millennials, an easy user experience is table stakes. … We are moving from advisor-led or technology-led to the access to advisors and easy-to-use technology.”
[See: 7 Stocks to Buy for the Baby Boomer Retirement Wave.]
Sharry has a point. Robo tools mark a quantum leap forward. But they don’t offer human advice: a tough sell for those who’d rather text than talk, perhaps, but something millennials crave based on survey after survey.
“Technology may help control costs and achieve diversification, yet only human advisers can appropriately react to changing life circumstances,” says Michaeline Gordon, a trust and estate planning attorney with Chicago-based law firm Ginsberg Jacobs. “A robo advisor isn’t going to respond, for example, to job uncertainty or an illness in a family — or provide a sounding board and objective advice about major life events.”
As for the boomers, quitting the day job may pale in comparison to the big job of getting their millennial children ready.
“Boomers can help prepare their inheritors by initiating the conversation early,” says Chris Wong, CEO of LifeSite in Mountain View, California. “Families can start by taking stock of key information including wills, health insurance cards and policy numbers, in addition to financial investments and account information.”
“For many retirement plan participants, the transfer from contribution to distribution will be the biggest liquidity event of their lives,” says Rick Frisbie, CEO of RobustWealth, a digital wealth management platform in Lambertville, New Jersey. “It’s often on the order of high six figures, even into seven figures, has tax consequences and needs to be used for future income and liability requirements.”
To that end, Frisbie agrees that robo advisors work well in tandem with their human counterparts “by handling, in an automated fashion, the rebalancing requirements of the advisor’s clients to make sure their accounts adhere to asset allocation and income-generating goals.”
Yet in the end, “every family’s situation is unique,” says Jared Feldman, partner at accounting firm Anchin in New York City and co-practice leader of the firm’s private client group. “Some families educate children early on to better inform and prepare them for the responsibilities of great wealth. Others feel that they must protect their young and don’t disclose much information to their children.”
[See: 10 Skills the Best Investors Have.]
“There is no single solution,” Feldman says. “But preparedness is essential in case of any significant life-changing events.”
And so, much will depend upon whether millennials and/or their parents are entitled, pampered and narcissistic — or transcend stereotypes as they gratefully live up to the worth of wealthy types.
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Will Millennials Be Ready for the Great Wealth Transfer? originally appeared on usnews.com
