‘Millennials’ are the hardest hit by effects of recession.

Looking back this week on the effects of the financial crisis and the last ten years in the lives of the nation, it has become apparent to many analysts that it is the ‘Millennials’ who have been worst affected by the fallout.

Unfairly criticised.

Millennials, classed as anyone born after 1981, have sometimes been unfairly criticised for being more interested in “embracing the joys of life’ and spending their money on expensive gadgets, living in the here and now, instead of saving to become property owners.  The reality is very different.

For those who do not have financial help from their families to start them on the property ladder, saving whilst paying high rents is almost impossible.

One report states, ‘millennials who do not own their own homes have parents who own, on average, just £85,000 per child of property wealth. More than half of millennials who don’t own homes have parents who don’t own homes either.’

Even those who are on high salaries, who tend to be more centred in and around the capital, are finding it hard.  Property prices in London have risen by over 50% in the last 10 years and rents have soared. According to the ‘House prices report for London’,  the average price of a semi detached house in the capital in January 2007 was £459,881. By June 2018, that had risen by 83% to £842,400. Flats have seen an ever steeper rise of, on average, 95%  from £307,772 to £598,848.

Student debt a further burden.

For those who went to universities in the early 2000s they may still be paying off student debts.

Tuition fees were introduced across the UK in 1998, the time when the first millennials, born in 1981, were getting ready to go to university.

Although the fees brought in at the time were capped at £1,000 a year, they were lot more than the previous £0 charged. Younger millennials have faced far more costs.  Student debt is now at a level where, analysts say, most students will never be able to repay their loans. This means that many of those earning already depleted salaries will find their salaries cut even further by repayments to student loans.

Cold comfort, therefore, at the news delivered this week, that millennials really are the hardest hit by the financial crisis.

Lower wages.

Earlier this year, the IFS, Institute for fiscal studies, reported that wages for people in their 30s are about 7 per cent lower than they should be, based on pre-financial crisis growth rates, while pay for those in their 20s is 5 per cent worse. The over-60s got off relatively lightly, with earnings just 1 per cent lower.

For millennials, entering the workforce during one of the worst recessions the UK has ever experienced was always going to have an impact on their futures.

 Lives on hold.

It is obvious to many that millennials are doing most things later in their lives than previous generations. They are marrying later, having children later and for many home ownership is just a pipe dream.

Beginning work at a time of wage stagnation, low wages and low interest rates on savings doesn’t give people an incentive to keep money in the bank, even if they are lucky enough to have some left over each month after paying their essential bills. With lack of available properties fuelling ever increasing rents and prices rising, the ability to be able to save is severely curbed.

Millennials are also the group more likely to have unsecured debt.  They are not alone; many households are struggling just to pay for the basics. Earlier this year, household spending for the whole of the UK surpassed income. The first time in almost 30 years.

10 years of austerity.

There have been recessions before, generation X, those born just a decade or so earlier in 1970 and who came of age in the recession of the early nineties, were impacted too.  However, in the decade following that crash, the economy bounced back with the democratisation of the internet bringing with it massive opportunities.

This recession, still sees the UK trapped in austerity, 10 years after the financial crisis. Experts say that we are still not seeing the full impact of this one yet. Wages still haven’t returned to pre-crisis levels and Brexit is looming.

UK young people 2^nd‘worse off’ in developed world.

The Resolution Foundation, a non-partisan and award-winning think-tank that works to improve the living standards of those in Britain on low to middle incomes,say the young people in the UK are the 2^ndworst hit financially in the developed world. Only young Greeks have suffered more.

They say, Britons born around 1980 earned 13% less than those born around 1970 did at the same stage in life.

Britain’s millennial generation, born since 1981, have suffered a bigger reversal in financial fortunes than their counterparts in most other developed countries except Greece, according to the study.

What the Resolution Foundation report shows.

The report from the Resolution Foundation paints a gloomy picture for all young adults across the developed world – apart from the Nordic countries. It highlights how incomes are depressed, jobs scarce and home ownership is slumping for the millennial generation compared with the baby boomers that preceded them.

But it also reveals that on many measures – apart from unemployment – British millennials have suffered a more significant decline than those in other countries.

“The scale of the pay squeeze for those aged under 30 is surpassed only by Greece,” said Resolution. It found that in 2014, British people born in the years around 1980 earned 13% less than those born around 1970 did at the same stage in life. In Greece, this decline was 25%.

It also found that the pay squeeze on British under 30s was twice as big as the squeeze on those in their 50s – a bigger age divide than in any other country.

“Generation-on-generation progress has been all but wiped out for millennials whose home ownership rate in their late 20s, at 33%, is half that for the baby boomers at the same age (60%),” the foundation said.

The UK was ranked third worst among developed countries for high house prices in relation to incomes, behind only Denmark and Greece.