CHAPTER ONE

THE MILLENNIAL PROBLEM

The year was 2003, a time when 50 Cent and the Ying Yang Twins ruled the Billboard charts. The place was Gainesville, Florida, a town where college dreams are made. Well, mine were at least. I showed up early to take summer classes and get a taste of independence. It was absolutely amazing. I could do whatever I wanted—assuming I made passing grades and didn’t get arrested. My first act of freedom brought me to the tattoo shop downtown, where I paid actual money to have a silver loop stapled into my left eyebrow. Rebellious, right? In all fairness, face jewels were marginally cool back then. And I ripped the thing out after just four days, when it started to itch.

Independence is one hell of a drug.

My four years at Florida were a dream, so great at times they did not seem real. Raised to have what our parents would call a “good head on my shoulders,” I was a good boy. I made good (enough) decisions, which led to my first hints of the Great Things in Life. I witnessed three national championships from the Gator football and basketball teams, made lifelong friends through my fraternity, received an early start on the career I love, and—most important of all—met my wife, Heather. It all plays back in my head like a slow montage to the tune of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life.” Sigh.

But as the eyebrow ring suggested, I was also a bit young and stupid. Even with a financial advisor as a father and an internship working in his practice, I was not mature enough to make the right decisions all the time. For one, I dropped out of the business school to pursue an easier degree in public relations, just because I didn’t feel like taking financial accounting. I heard it was hard. I borrowed student loans from a private lender for my rather small tuition payments. (Why didn’t Dad stop me? I don’t know.) And I dumped a disproportionate amount of cash into spiffing up and tricking out my 2004 Subaru Impreza WRX. It’s startling how much money a cat-less exhaust system, sport springs, an STI bookshelf spoiler, 17-inch gunmetal Prodrive 10-spoke rims, painted side skirts, and a custom front mesh grill could cost. Not to mention my weekly trips to the local “dent specialist” at 20 bucks a pop. The Campus Lodge parking lot was treacherous for my baby.

In a sense, each one of these gaffes stemmed from my lack of financial literacy, and with some basic calculations, I could have done better. Even when my choices were poor judgment calls rather than outright mistakes, if I had been equipped with more knowledge, maybe I would have chosen better. And my decisions had little consequences. Others—including Heather’s—could affect the rest of your life.

WE ARE FINANCIALLY ILLITERATE

The financial issues of all living generations are cut from the same bedrock: a lack of financial literacy. When asked questions about their retirement in a 2014 survey by The American College of Financial Services, only 20 percent of retirement-age adults received a passing score.¹ These people are about to retire. They can’t afford to make new mistakes, let alone pass them down to their children (us). The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) asked 25,000 Americans of all ages five questions covering everyday concepts like compound interest and inflation. Sixty-three percent got three or less correct.²

There’s more statistics to go around, but you get the gist: no age group knows it all when it comes to financial wellness. We could all use some work. Hell, if my dad was not a financial advisor who engrained personal finance in my brain, I would be just as bad. Put aside the coursework I took to become a financial advisor myself and not a single class in two decades of schooling would have provided me the tools to make informed financial decisions. I never received a proper lesson on cash flow, debt management, credit, or investments. And without understanding these topics, we only learn lessons by reacting to our lives’ choppy waters—correcting the mistakes that we’ve already made.

Without question, Millennials need to learn even more because our financial landscapes are more complicated today than those of our parents and theirs. In fact, we may be even less knowledgeable than our elders because coming of age this century hasn’t required the same level of vigilance to assure our survival.

Or maybe that’s just what we assumed.

The Greatest Generation was great for a reason. They worked incredibly hard so their children and grandchildren could live better lives. Many were immigrants, escaping religious, political, and ethnic persecution. As if that wasn’t enough, they lived through the Great Depression. They overcame historical obstacles and made the kinds of sacrifices I hope we never have to. I admire their legacy—including that of my grandfather, a true World War II hero—more than words can state here. But these difficult experiences shaped their financial behaviors. I used to joke about my grandparents hiding money under their mattresses, but the fear wasn’t funny to them.

When it came to managing their finances, their caution cut both ways. Their well-founded worry that everything could be taken away from them in an instant drove them toward prudent decision-making skills. The mantra was that you didn’t spend more than you had, and if you had to borrow, you paid it back as soon as you could. They had a healthy dose of skepticism, but you can’t blame them, given what they had witnessed.

At the same time, fear from their experiences may have limited how far some members of the Greatest Generation felt they could reach. But pairing a relatively less complex economy with their cautious approach to personal finance helped them build conservative and stable lives for their families.

They gave birth to the Baby Boomers, or as I see them, our parents. Mom and Dad were more optimistic than their parents, perhaps too much so. Like our grandparents, they were not immune to the effects of conflict. For many, the Vietnam War sent childhood friends to fight for “freedom” once again, and the Cold War reminded everyone that technology could be as terrifying as it could be exciting. The Civil Rights Movement further fanned the flames during an already tumultuous time.

Despite these obstacles, Baby Boomers had greater advantages. They found promising new opportunities by acquiring a finer set of skills from going to college and earning advanced degrees. They could apply their unprecedented access to information and education on top of the foundation their parents laid for them.

Our parents welcomed freer thinking. Armed with advanced degrees, they could afford to do things such as improve the family franchise, venture into cutting-edge industries, or be bold enough to embark on new business ideas that were once considered impractical. But in doing so, they distanced themselves from that cautious financial mindset.

Some Boomers couldn’t acquire the financial knowledge needed to keep up with an increasingly complex economy muddled by slippery new financial products. Although their willingness to experiment, carry a bolder attitude, and assume new risks expanded what was possible, Boomers, like their parents, still lacked that basic financial training. It would only be a matter of time before it caught up with them. By 2008, we all saw how over-levered people created, and fell victim to, the worst financial landscape since the Depression decades earlier.

Yes, I mean the housing crisis. So many people assumed mortgages they couldn’t afford and treated their homes like endless pits of money. Of course, banks as predatory lenders should not have been offering those terms in the first place. But I wonder: would people equipped with more financial knowledge have accepted terms to loans that seemed too good to be true? Would they have overextended themselves using the place that keeps them warm at night? Maybe a more informed public could have prevented such a major economic mess. I’m aware that it’s not that simple, but this much is true: a financially literate person makes more informed decisions.

Now this timeless issue has caught up with Millennials in the same way. Like our parents had over their parents, we have more advantages from our greater access to information, education, and technology. In a more peaceful America, our life experiences have been colored by far less adversity and conflict. But even if we experienced better childhoods, it took us one step further away from the lessons learned by our grandparents and even our great-grandparents.

Our cautions eroded, we’ve grown into ill-equipped young adults who are not ready to tackle the outrageous cost of the higher education we need to thrive. After graduating with unprecedented student loan debt, today’s unchartered labor environment then challenges our ability to jumpstart meaningful careers and our adult lives. This is the very essence of the Millennial Problem. It’s ugly and the obstacles we face are uniquely ours.

We can’t look to our parents for answers—they’ve got their own issues. They can’t make it all better, like we’re living some bad childhood nightmare. What does this mean in real-world terms? It means that when your parents put money into your bank accounts on an as-needed basis, it can temporarily help but will not solve your problem. Bailouts of any kind, whether from Uncle Sam or your rich Uncle Steve, do not solve anything unless they’re coupled with the education to avoid needing those bailouts again. To quote Fat Bastard from the acclaimed Austin Powers trilogy, “It’s a vicious cycle!”

When categorizing the moving elements of our lives, the most crucial are health, family, time, and money. They can be weighted in this order. Without your health, you can’t care for your family, or acquire and spend your wealth. Family or loved ones are a close second. They drive you to achieve, relish in your success, and satisfy your heart. Time is something we can’t get back, and finding ways to maximize it allows for a more fulfilling life. Money can’t be left off this list because it facilitates your ability to experience great material and immaterial things.

We are taught as children about the first three of these things. How to: (1) physically take care of ourselves; (2) share love with others; and (3) manage our time. Why are we not taught the final missing piece?

Financial literacy works to eliminate the phrase, “if only I knew then what I know now.” It’s a mission to provide financial knowledge and equip people with the information they need to be proactive instead of reactive. Being reactive makes people vulnerable to mistakes that they could end up paying for (or repaying) for the rest of their lives. It sets you up to inevitably fail somewhere down the line, or right at the starting line.

I don’t know about you, but failure has never been an option for me.

Schools have the best platform to start teaching young people about financial and economic issues, and they’re just not working fast enough. The Council for Economic Education’s 2016 Survey of the States showed that we weren’t doing any better in bringing these concepts into the classroom in 2016 than in 2014. Only 20 states require high school students to take an economics course (up two from 2014), and only 17 states require them to take a course in personal finance (the same as 2014). And despite the rising spotlight on financial literacy, only two more states have added personal finance into their required K–12 standards.³ Age-appropriate coursework in grade school would be the most ideal place to start financial education because it captures young people’s attention in a setting they are comfortable with, and presents the opportunity for kids to bring the dialogue home to their parents, encouraging a healthier financial lifestyle for the whole family.

But we Millennials weren’t healthy as kids. We ate Taco Bell and all-you-can-eat pizza at Cicis; not organic produce and conversations about personal finance. We were devoid of all nutrition. I’d argue that even if one course on personal finance nudged its way into our high school curriculum, it would not have resonated enough to change things for our generation. Financial literacy isn’t gauged by how you answer one set of multiple-choice questions. It’s a litmus test on how ready you are to handle critical financial decisions as they arise in your life.

Older Millennials faced some of those decisions already, and many decided wrong. As you read this book, you may find yourself saying those infamous words, “if I only knew then what I know now.” And that’s okay.

Because as you learn, you’ll be gaining the skills to never say it again.

OUR $1.3 TRILLION BUBBLE

Imagine shopping for a new mattress at one of those mattress showroom stores. You know, one where the guy walks around in an oversized Joseph A. Bank suit, trying to sell you on the queen deluxe pillow topper with a hypoallergenic coating. You planned to buy a cheaper mattress and pay for the whole thing upfront. But the guy offers some pretty sexy financing on the deluxe option—zero percent down and zero percent interest for one year. You stand at the register rationalizing the decision: “Man, it would be awesome to avoid paying for this sweet mattress right now. I can get the 72-inch flat screen of my dreams today!”

But two years pass, not one. Now, a mattress that you could have purchased in full (had you not chosen the fancy pillow top) or you could have paid off faster (had you not sprung for the 72-inch flat screen) will cost you even more due to an exorbitant interest rate. Did you make the wrong choice? Probably, but only hindsight tells you that. Now, you’re stuck with a good that cost you more than it could have. That mattress store and its bank placed a bet against you, and they won.

Colleges are not mattress stores. Indeed, paying for college with student loans is not the same as buying goods that depreciate in value. The knowledge you gain from pursuing a college degree makes you appreciate in value. Without a doubt, educated people make our society better. But why are we financing our education the same way as mattresses? It feels like people placed similar bets against Millennials, hoping we wouldn’t win. And the stakes are higher than ever before.

The nation’s student loan debt has grown to more than $1.3 trillion. Truly, it took an entire generation to amass that many zeros. The average debt per college student in the Class of 2016 is $37,172, which reflects an increase of 6 percent per student from 2015.⁴ The trend is disturbing, considering that in a decade, the average debt at graduation rose at more than twice the rate of inflation.⁵ There are now more than 44 million student borrowers in this country, 90-something percent more than even 10 years ago.⁶

Most troubling is when people don’t repay it. The delinquency rate for federal student loans stands at 11.3 percent of borrowers. In case that figure seems rather small to be sounding the alarm, don’t be misled, because being “delinquent” is only one way to screw up your repayment. Lend Edu reports that 4.9 million borrowers are in deferment,⁷ which allows graduates to temporarily postpone their payments as interest continues to accumulate. It’s kind of like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound. These delinquent and deferred payments have collectively formed a student loan bubble that’s growing larger. And bubbles don’t deflate; they burst.

One contributing factor to this problem arose when President George W. Bush signed into law the Grad PLUS Loan Program as part of a deficit-reduction plan. Grad PLUS Loans allow graduate students to borrow up to the “cost of attendance” (as determined by the school) to fund what are often very, very fancy graduate degrees. Students are provided this option with little inquiry into whether they can repay the amounts borrowed. Often, graduate students borrow Grad PLUS Loans after they’ve hit their ceiling on Stafford Loans, a primary source of college funding, which we will discuss in detail later.

The reason Grad PLUS Loans are so significant is because the money borrowed by graduate students makes up nearly 40 percent of the entire $1.3 trillion loan portfolio, even though the graduate students themselves only represent 16 percent of all student borrowers.⁸

Why would the federal government give any student such sky-high access to borrowing? Is a 20-something-year-old recent college grad that much more equipped to make the better financial decisions than an 18-year-old rising college freshman? I refuse to think so.

So, why then? Try looking at the cost of these graduate programs. Some prestigious private institutions charge the amount of a mortgage for advanced graduate degrees. The only reason they can keep raising tuition costs is because Grad PLUS Loans are available to pay up to the “cost of attendance,” as the school determines. Make the money available and students will spend it, plus interest. They are placing the bet.

Graduate student debt is just the extreme end of the student loan scale, which is tipping in the wrong direction. For all student loans, devastating results can occur when you don’t analyze the risks and then borrow them in a careless manner. In collegiate terms:

financial illiteracy: student loans :: burning match: gasoline

Both are dangerous combinations.

This isn’t the first recent instance of Americans falling victim to their own poor financial decisions involving loans. In 2008, we also saw how bad our behavior can be when borrowing mingles with ignorance about the consequences of incurring debt. The housing crisis looked eerily like what’s happening with higher education: the private lender is now the government, whereas the white picket fence is a degree.

Student loans—like all loans—are just a tool. Tools can be very helpful when you know how to use them. But debt is a burden, often insurmountable. The cost of education is out of control and, therefore, student loans are here to stay until affordability becomes an honest priority of our government and institutions. In the meantime, these loans will continue to be sold as free money, enabling students to collect on their “right” to be educated however, and wherever, they desire.

Until students reach graduation day, when all bets are off.

A REROUTED LABOR ENVIRONMENT

There was a time when only the privileged went to college. Only those select few could afford to philosophize while everyone else learned firsthand about the world. Around the age you would graduate from high school, many of our elders faced futures that involved some element of conflict. World War II, the Vietnam War, and the Cold War focused the American people’s efforts for decades. Those who were drafted fought, especially during World War II, and many who stayed stateside supported soldiers on the battlefield through their professional work. They welded metal for bombers and filled factory molds for ammunition. Even less technical jobs such as selling war bonds involved learning a trade that fed a wartime demand.

In those times, much of American industry—and our economy as we knew it—revolved around our battles. Patriotism swelled as people did their part, recognizing that their sacrifices or commitments could be part of our country’s greater good.

During those times, people widely accepted that college, especially at four-year private institutions, was not for everyone. Vocational work (using your hands) carried great value. But with relative peace came a change. Technical skills decreased in demand, whereas theoretical skills increased due to advancements in technology, medicine, and science.

To further advance the progress being made in these areas, and to combat technical jobs being offshored to other parts of the world, Generations X and Y had to adapt. Colleges and universities offered the advanced training needed, and more high school graduates felt compelled to attend so they could compete in the modernized world. As more people sought to enroll, more programs emerged to satisfy the need.

The rest is history.

From the late 1980s through the 90s, a major shift in the labor environment was started. Investments in technology swelled, bringing computers into the professional lives of nearly one-half of American workers. Leading up to the infamous Y2K scare, the presence of computers in the workforce grew to make up one-fifth of businesses’ new capital investment. In turn, these businesses demanded more advanced skills from their workers, many of whom had specialized college degrees and were equipped to provide those skills in exchange for higher salaries. The competition was on.⁹

By the turn of the century, Americans were only starting to feel the change in their homes and daily lives. Most could not imagine the profound effect that it would have on their jobs. Better technology led to more efficient ways of doing things, and this allowed businesses to complete simple-skill tasks at a much lower cost. Between 1997 and 2012, the labor environment moved significantly away from manufacturing jobs, reducing this once-predominant domestic workforce by around 5.5 million.¹⁰ Technology was starting to make the world a simpler place.

It also bred new ways of doing business altogether, with the rise of e-commerce through online marketplaces such as eBay. Now, you could literally run a business from behind a computer. You could get rich in your pajamas.

As a hobby and then our first business venture, my brother and I spent our spare time fixing computers for people around town. I was raised in Boca Raton, a country club town in South Florida where people move to end rather than to begin, if you get what I’m saying. The senior citizens needed simple solutions to non-problems, like hitting the escape key or connecting to “the interwebs.” My favorite house calls were when wireless routers would go offline. You could tell by the red light glowing and saying, “Stop! No interwebs for you!” To fix them, we’d simply unplug the router and plug it back in. That was the birth of our one-hour minimum policy.

Millennials grew up along with the Internet—it was kind of like an older, much smarter sibling. We were spellbound by clicking through Microsoft Encarta and spending hours dialing up to AOL during peak times (it was always busy). Heather once told me she built her own GeoCities Website, filled with shout-outs to her friends and one image of a giant Nike sneaker. The Internet was a limitless space of possibility for her tween amusement. I was not quite as youthful about it, but still had no idea what it would become.

When I graduated college in 2007, the economy still appeared to be thriving in our eyes. Few worried about post-graduate employment because we were the ones obtaining the specialized degrees that we thought would meet domestic industry demands. Things looked rosy enough for many of us to extend our academic careers and attend graduate programs right out of college or soon thereafter.

Unfortunately, we weren’t the ancient Mayans. We couldn’t have foreseen what lurked at the tail end of our first year in the “real world.” After just settling into our new careers and programs, we were submerged into the deep-end of an economic cycle, trying not to drown.

Much of what we thought we knew about our respective professions vanished. Layoffs took hold over anyone and everyone. For managers and bosses, 30 years of loyal service resulted in a severance package, a proverbial high-five, and a premature retirement party. Raging holiday parties and plump bonuses vanished into corporate folklore. All the while, entire recruitment classes of Millennials lost their job offers, as firms across all industries actively slashed costs. Despite wanting to feel like special snowflakes, exempt from the chaos surrounding us, we learned a huge life lesson: it wasn’t personal. It was just business.

The Great Recession became the Great Accelerator for companies to harness technology to achieve dramatic cost-savings and salvage what they could. Employees scrambled to stay involved and on the payroll, assuming unfamiliar tasks or working extra hours. More people than ever felt expendable until proven otherwise. It was a matter of survival that started an evolution. Many industries felt the change, but here are just two relevant examples.

Let’s first look at the rise of new media and its profound effect on traditional print journalism. Leading up to the Great Recession, more outlets were adopting digital platforms anyway, but a colossal change took place when the markets crashed. Along with the physical size of newspapers and magazines, mastheads were sliced in half. According to the American Society of News Editors, the workforce of daily newspapers diminished by almost 20 percent.¹¹

New Websites, blogs, and video content emerged alongside the digital content of preexisting print behemoths. This industry shift in how readers consumed their news left storied writers, editors, and photographers with the task of reinventing what the industry meant to them. Young aspiring journalists who could have secured entry-level roles in the past needed to generate their own value by producing original content or being proactive enough to learn new skills that fit today’s needs. That is how they could become indispensable. Publications hope to be nimbler by employing less of these folks full-time and offering competitive pay for jobs as needed. Without a doubt, the work isn’t as stable. But as more people specialize their skills and have the chance to freelance with more employers, they could enhance their bargaining power and commoditize their abilities in new ways. It appears to be a double-edged sword.

Another great illustration is law. For decades, “Big Law Associate” was the ultimate job for law school graduates. The position coupled high salaries with infinite hours of ministerial, but billable work: document review, legal research, privacy redactions, etc. Firms could charge clients millions for their team’s efforts because the model dictated that with expertise came expense, and clients could afford to pay for it. But the country’s top 250 law firms skimmed thousands of attorneys from its rosters in 2009 and 2010.¹² And that only represented the attorneys with jobs. Entry-level associate class sizes, once robust and an indicator of firm strength, dwindled to modest dozens, as clients refused to fund the expensive grunt work of underlings who were “too green.”

Firms needed to find more efficient ways to staff projects and bring better value to their clients. Business technology changed the game. Using e-discovery software, firms could sift through thousands of documents in a fraction of the time as a room full of attorneys could. Without the need to keep as many full-time associates on the payroll to handle these assignments, firms started creating more part-time, flexible staff attorney positions. They could fill these spots on an as-needed basis with less commitment on both ends. This generates revenue and reduces costs by embracing efficiency, rather than continuing with the outdated models of the past. The real question, then, is who wins and loses from this change.

This is why I’m not going to make a case that our generation is worse off than the 50-something career people who lost their pensions and can’t afford to send their kids to college anymore (at least not in this chapter). The Boomers are the ultimate victims of the shift in the labor environment because many of them are too expensive and too inexperienced with technology to adapt. Their institutions changed, leaving some of them in the dust.

Millennials never had an institution to begin with. We don’t need to reinvent ourselves to survive—we need to invent ourselves to thrive. No templates. No pathways to partner. No roadmaps for our voyages.

We are forced to pioneer our own careers, relying more on ourselves and less on the traditional corporate model. To gain the relevant knowledge in our fields, we start our own businesses and even engage in contract work. And when we do accept full-time positions at firms, we focus on engaging employers that best align with our personal and professional needs. If they end up not offering what we thought they would, we’re not afraid to leave.

Contrary to our critics, this is not because Millennials seek the Holy Grail of Jobs, unwilling to settle for anything less than sunshine, roses, and office beanbag chairs. It’s because in this labor environment, we know that our careers are curated by us alone—not programmed into a system.

Millennials redefine risk and purpose in how we approach the workforce. Assuming greater risk can be very lucrative with the proper planning and securities in place. Being less burdened by institutional redundancies means our generation can be more creative and even disrupt markets by solving unique problems. We benefit from greater flexibility and work-life balance because we are entrusted with the responsibility to provide service and produce results from anywhere at any time. We understand the technology that drives our industries, and ultimately our careers, so we can always deliver.

Yet, the risks also expose our undeniable challenge. With less institutional backing, we miss out on access to job-related resources, human capital, and instruction. From a mental standpoint, discipline is huge, and some people just don’t have enough of it to stay off Reddit all day. With less performance benchmarks in place, harnessing healthy competition between peers (if you have any) can be impossible. There is also the very real, if not the realest problem of needing to hold down a steady income and being able to afford the significant cost of health insurance and other benefits.

Our passion means so much less if it does not translate to real dollars. We need both to bring us closer to financial independence.

THE MILLENNIAL PROBLEM IS EVERYONE’S PROBLEM

Make no mistake, Millennials matter. We are no longer those darn kids, mere children of the rainmakers and game changers. With Baby Boomers entering retirement, we are actually not kids at all. Our actions moving forward have an impact that cannot be ignored, and here’s why.

We are vast. There are more than 83 million Millennials in the United States. That’s more than one-quarter of the nation’s population.

We are diverse. A whopping 44 percent of Millennials are non-white, more than any past generation of Americans.¹³

We are the workforce. In 2015, Millennials became the largest share of the United States workforce at 34 percent.¹⁴

We (could) spend money. Millennials account for nearly $1.3 trillion in annual spending, and $430 billion of that money is on discretionary, nonessential goods and services.¹⁵

There comes a time when people begin to strive for the Great Things in Life, or “GTL.” No, not “Gym, Tan, Laundry,” for Millennials old enough to remember the MTV show Jersey Shore (we should all be lucky enough to forget it). I’m repurposing this term for the rest of this book and the rest of your life. It represents achieving many of the wonderful things we seek: owning a home, getting married, starting a family, traveling the world, launching a business, _______________ (you fill in the blank). One way or another, our ability to pursue GTL drives the economy. Our inability to do so will destroy it.

The Great Things in Life are linked to the circular relationship of productivity (producing goods and services) and consumption (spending money on things). The more we consume, the greater the demand is to produce. The greater the demand is to produce, the more people find jobs producing things. The more people find jobs producing things, the more people consume in the future. And round and round we go.

Plug Millennials into the housing market for a fine example. If Millennials cannot purchase homes because we are paralyzed by crushing student loan debt, then we are hurting a sector of our economy that contributes to nearly one-fifth of everything produced in our country.¹⁶ Taking it one step further, Millennials who cannot afford housing may also feel compelled to delay getting married or having children to put into those homes. A decline in birth rates could negatively affect production, consumption, and the replenishment of the next generation’s workforce.

Speaking of the workforce, even the most doubtful Baby Boomers need to consider how we affect their professional and personal lives. We make up a large portion of their talent pool, and recognizing our evolving skills and needs is imperative to the longevity of their businesses. At the same time, if the Millennial workforce does not thrive in the evolving labor environment, Baby Boomers’ retirements could suffer, too, because people who currently work are mostly the ones funding Social Security. If we fail, the system will also fail.

In other words, the Millennial Problem is everyone’s problem.

So, let’s recap it one more time. The bedrock of our problem is a lack of financial literacy. Millennials, like the generations before them, are not armed with the right knowledge to make informed financial decisions. Without integrating personal finance into everyday life from an early age, people will not understand the full consequences of their crucial life decisions, such as financing college or graduate school, until the repayment bills start rolling in.

One thing is certain: the cost of pursuing higher education has ballooned. And financing an education isn’t as simple as financing a home. Value, as you will see later, is subjective to each student. You can’t ask someone else to evaluate for you whether spending the money for a certain degree is worth it. You must have a deeper understanding of the numbers and your own goals to draw the right conclusions. And in some respects, the rapidly evolving labor environment has far outpaced the college education model, harnessing technology to achieve dramatic cost-savings and throwing out the rulebook on what traditional careers look like.

But this is not about feeling sorry, indebted, or lost.

Millennials and their expensive degrees need to be nimbler than ever because the future of this country will turn on our success. From the Baby Boomers hoping for a peaceful retirement, to Generation Z standing to be led into even more uncertain territory, everyone will be affected by what we do. Millennials must accept the huge investment in our education, embrace technology as it affects our workforce, and above all else, take ownership over our problem—even if we didn’t create it alone—and pursue the solution.

Time to get started.