{"id":1802,"date":"2020-08-18T14:23:51","date_gmt":"2020-08-18T22:23:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.checkworks.com\/blog\/?p=1802"},"modified":"2020-09-22T13:07:59","modified_gmt":"2020-09-22T21:07:59","slug":"financial-adulthood-what-it-is-how-its-changed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/financial-adulthood-what-it-is-how-its-changed\/","title":{"rendered":"Financial Adulthood: What It Is &#038; How It&#8217;s Changed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Financial adulthood. It\u2019s a term that\u2019s been circulating the internet for a while now. But what does it mean? What does it mean to be an adult in the financial sense? And how has our definition of financial adulthood changed from one generation to the next?<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">&#8220;Financial adulthood can come at any age,&#8221; says financial planner Sophia Bera, founder of Gen Y Planning. &#8220;It&#8217;s being comfortable talking about and taking ownership of your money. Instead of just letting your financial situation happen to you, you&#8217;re using your money to match your values and live your dream.&#8221;<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Still, our societal notion of financial adulthood has changed. Let\u2019s explore the concept of financial adulthood and what has changed in terms of how we define what makes a financially mature human.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What is financial adulthood?<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Of course, financial adulthood is a loose term that will have a different definition for each person. Yet, some accomplishments that signal a person is well-developed in terms of financial responsibility. Here are a few:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have a debit and credit card and pay your credit card bills on time.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have a good credit score and keep track of its changes.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have insurance.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have a budget and spend less than you earn.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You\u2019ve paid off debt or are actively working towards paying it off.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have a savings account and an emergency fund.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You are saving for retirement.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">You have financial goals and are actively working towards them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How our definition of financial adulthood has changed<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The milestones that made one an adult used to be pretty clear-cut. The notion of adulthood looked like a full-time job, a house, a car, a spouse, and a baby or two. All of this was expected to be achieved by or around age thirty. Back in the 80s, when the show <em>Thirtysomething<\/em> was released, that was all pretty attainable.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">But things have changed. These days, it\u2019s less common for young adults to attain all of these milestones (financial, personal, and career) within the time frame of previous generations. Why that is is a complicated question, but there\u2019s no doubt something has changed.<\/span><\/p>\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Younger generations are less financially independent than ever before\u00a0<\/span><\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Cornerstones of adulthood are increasingly being put on the back-burner, including marriage, kids, home ownership, and financial adulthood. But that\u2019s probably not because the younger generations have \u201cPeter Pan syndrome.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More likely, it is because of financial stress. NerdWallet reports that \u201cThe median net worth of millennial households was $12,500 in 2016 compared with $20,700 for baby boomers of the same age in 1983.\u201d This disparity could be because of today\u2019s higher cost of living and higher rates of student debt.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Twenty and thirty-somethings are less financially independent than ever before. This financial strain was present even before the pandemic set in. Millennials and Gen-Z are also less interested in achieving the traditional milestones of adulthood early on (or at all), instead forging their own paths and defining financial adulthood in their own terms.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Financial adulthood. It\u2019s a term that\u2019s been circulating the internet for a while now. But what does it mean? What does it mean to be an adult in the financial sense? And how has our definition of financial adulthood changed from one generation to the next?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1803,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[32,42],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1802"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1811,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1802\/revisions\/1811"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1803"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.checkworks.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}