Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Debt and the Young

Two long-term trends are evident in a new study out from a researcher at Dartmouth: More and more kids are attending college, and college is getting more expensive. Ergo, more and more young people are in debt starting from their twenties.

The study found that 35 percent of Americans aged 24 to 28 have debts that exceed their assets, which is double the number that we saw in the late 1980s. A total of 75 percent of all younger Americans have some sort of debt, and 22.4 percent of them have education debt, as opposed to just 5.1 percent of late baby boomers.

Not surprisingly, today's younger adults are having trouble spending on other things. Just 19.8 percent of them have home-related debt. That number was at 29.9 percent in the late 1980s, and as high as 43.1 percent in the mid-1970s.

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