Direction (): Read the given passage carefully and answer the questions that follow. Certain words are printed in bold to help you locate them while answering some of these.
The Financial Times with a survey concluded that millennials are prioritizing short-term spending over long-term saving. According to one calculation, the average 25-year-old should be saving £800 (or about $1,146) a month over the next 40 years, in order to retire at 65 with an annual income of £30,000. That piece went viral for all the wrong reasons. As millennials who responded angrily
to the article noted, they’re too busy buying groceries or paying rent to even think about being able to have that much money to allocate to a savings account. But ignoring the tone-deafness, there is a real problem here. A recent survey found that on an average, while millennials are doing a good job of budgeting and say they have increased their savings in the past 12 months, their
actual savings rate is about 8%. Financial planners can puff and huff about results like that. They can argue that millennials don’t realize how much they need to save; that they are succumbing to one of those behavioural finance phenomena by
failing to appreciate that yes, one day they, too, will be 65 and need a retirement nest egg. For their part, the millennials might well argue that the rest of us simply don’t understand their new normal. There are too many other factors stopping
millennials from making that decision to save. They have got the millennial paradox to contend with. In 2014, the average college student graduated with $33,000 of student debt, according to one calculation. Do you want to be one of those students who defaults on her student debt, just in order to have a few extra bucks to put into her retirement account? Really, not a viable solution; those payments have to be kept up, even if it means there’s no money for a retirement account. The cost of living is climbing, too, led by
rental costs, which hit records in many cities last year. On average, millennials who rent nationwide would have had to spend 30% of their monthly income to their landlords. Health insurance? If your company offers it, odds are it’s a benefit that requires you to shoulder a greater portion of the costs of these days.