[schiem]

I have anecdata #3 and #4. Both of these people are in their early 30s.

#3 - A friend who recently (within the last year) drained his savings to $0 paying for a trip to Europe. All of the money came from day trading stocks on Robinhood.

#4 - A friend who bought a house just over a year ago. The house cost a few hundred thousand, and he decided to put a >50% down payment on it, which he did by liquidating some (not anywhere close to all) of the money he has in index funds.

Those are probably the two most extreme examples, and I could provide more examples that are anywhere in between. I'm going to wait for a study that does some statistical analysis over the population before I draw any conclusions.

[AlexandrB]

Isn't #4 just moving money from one type of asset (equities) to another (real estate)? It's a bit of a gamble, but not crazy by any means.

[schiem]

I'm using #4 as an example of the opposite end of the spectrum from day trading in Robinhood - traditionally safe investments with little long term risk as a form of building wealth.

The point that I was trying to get across is that across the people I personally know around my age, I can find examples that run the gamut of financial risk - everything from "leave it in a savings account" to "YOLO on options." Because of this, I don't think it's particularly useful to draw conclusions about what the general population is doing based on anecdata alone.

[tombert]

I would like to think I'm closer to #4. I'm 33 years old. I didn't put a 50% down payment on my house, but I did a 15% down payment and locked in my interest rate when they were really low (2.75%). I think that's actually might be more fiscally responsible right now than a bigger down payment since risk-free bank interest is actually a fair bit higher than 2.75%, so the money I would normally pre-pay into it I put into Treasury Bills, which also have no risk.

I don't do index funds cuz there was some tax weirdness associated with them at some point and an accountant told me to do the ETF versions of them instead, but I do keep a large percentage of my money in low-risk ETF version of the normal index funds.

I bring all this up because I think part of a reason that a potential reason for why the next generation of men don't save (if that's even true) might not be "generational" so much as just being a product of being young.

I didn't take saving money terribly seriously until I was 25, and it wasn't because someone explained all the pros of having a nice savings account, it was because I was nearly homeless because I hadn't saved. The CEO of the company I worked for embezzled all the money and ran away, leading to about six weeks of no paychecks before I was unceremoniously laid off. It took almost three months to find a new job, I stopped paying my rent because I couldn't afford it, and my landlord drafted a lawsuit against me to evict me. Fortunately in this case, I was able to bother my father in law and he was able to get me enough cash to get the lawsuit dropped, and eventually I found a job and was able to pay him back, and it all worked out.

I sort of a swore an oath to myself that I will never, ever, ever be in that position ever again if I can avoid it, and once I was earning money again I started putting as much money as I could spare into savings of some kind, and this hasn't really stopped.

I wouldn't wish the depression I went through at that time on my worst enemy, but in a bizarre way I'm kind of glad it happened. It forced me to learn how to actually take care of myself, and how to be financially responsible, and that's what I'm kind of getting at: some of this stuff sort of requires you to fall on your face before you really understand it.

ETA:

To be clear, I'm not angry at my landlord for filing the lawsuit. I think that was totally fair all things considered, I wasn't paying the rent, they're a business.