Now, as older millennials start families of their own, they are suffering through the aftermath. Not only are many still paying off their student debt, but they are also planning for their retirement as well as their children’s education.
It’s forcing them to make difficult decisions about their financial priorities: Due to student loan payments, for instance, 23% of older millennials have limited their retirement contributions, according to a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults ages 33 to 40. The survey, conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of CNBC Make It, also found that 27% delayed buying a home and 24% cut back on building an emergency savings.
While it’s not unusual at this stage of life to weigh your family’s financial priorities, older millennials are being “crunched from both sides,” says Cliff Robb, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who studies financial decision-making.
Millennials have “got to plan for their own retirement, which is less and less secure with less and less safety nets for them. They’ve got to provide for their children’s education, which is increasingly expensive, while they’re still paying off their own education, usually,” says Robb. “And they’re having to pay for higher costs of raising those children in a marketplace that isn’t rewarding them at the same level as it was in the past.”
A double whammy
When much of the older cohort of millennials went to college in the early 2000s, “they were right on the cusp of this significant rise in costs for higher education,” says Robb.
“It was less and less subsidized, and more and more you [would] use loans rather than grants and scholarships,” Robb says. “The millennial generation took the brunt of that shift.”
Now as many are still paying off those loans, they are also thinking about how to pay for their kids’ education, and not wanting their kids to end up with the burden they had.
In fact, 77% percent of older millennials said they would put off their retirement to pay for their kids’ education if they had to, according to the Harris/CNBC Make It poll.
Tanya Wells, 42, and her husband, Jeremy, 41, know that they will likely need to delay retirement as they pay off their student loans and prepare to take on more debt for their two children, ages 15 and 17, to go to college.
The Wellses went to college later in life, graduating in 2017 with $275,000 in student loans.
Though they are technically on the border between millennial and Generation X, the Wellses’ experience represents the impact this crunch has had on many older millennials. “We have this mounting amount of college debt and now both of our kids are in high school, so they’re getting ready to go to college as well. We’re thinking about how to juggle that and the idea of retirement,” says Tanya.
She says she plans to take out student loans herself to pay for her kids’ college educations.
Christopher “Topher” Flamini, 33, puts $100 a month in a Roth IRA to save for his 20-week-old daughter’s education.
Flamini graduated from Temple University in 2010 with roughly $45,000 in public and private loans but prioritized paying them off as quickly as he could.
“My average payment per month was somewhere around $500 or $600 per month,” he says. “I remember graduating and being like, what am I going to do?”
Flamini worked at Subway for just over $10 an hour right out of college, but in 2011 he got a health- care data-entry job that allowed him to work his way up and make steady payments on his loans.
He now owes about $7,300. His wife, Nicole, does not have any student loans.
“It’s really been a journey, and I look forward to trying to minimize student loans for my daughter,” he says.
