In a period of their lives when young people are poised to make career leaps and earn more money, they are instead falling behind past generations on the path to growing their finances, according to the JPMorganChase Institute.
The slowdown does not bode well for young people, who rely on job hopping more than older generations to advance in their careers and accumulate wealth, according to George Eckerd, wealth and markets research director for JPMorganChase Institute and one of the report’s authors.
“We’re already seeing that young people are having a hard time getting a foothold on the homeownership ladder,” Eckerd told Fortune. “They’re delaying home purchases because they need to climb further up their career ladder to be able to afford it all, and that career ladder is getting flatter.”
“It’s not as steep a path as we would enjoy in the pre-pandemic hot labor market that prevailed kind of through the later half of the 2010’s,” he continued.
“People are accumulating stocks, even though valuations are high because they just don’t have enough money to get on the homeownership ladder,” Eckerd said. “So this is a change from prior generations.”
Eckerd, in part, attributes Gen Z’s retail investment fascination to the increased accessibility of technology and applications that have made it easier to pour money into markets. The generation also came of age in the pandemic-era saving boom that made investments—even speculative ones like cryptocurrency—a more attractive and accessible prospect than homebuying, he said. What Gen Z’s relationship to retail investment as a means of accumulating wealth means for their attitude toward the labor market remains to be seen.
“We’re definitely pointing in the wrong direction, so the labor market is continuing to soften,” he said. “That does not bode well for an increase in real gains.”
