The Romans predicted the future by watching birds fly and examining sheep's livers. We've come a long way in 2,000 years, with surveys, statistics and … potato salad!
Zack Brown, a twenty-something Web designer from Columbus, Ohio, made a pitch via the crowdfunding website Kickstarter seeking $10 to cook a batch of potato salad. His tongue-in-cheek video stood out on the site, more typically filled with proposals for product launches, indie films and charitable causes.
Brown's deadpan sendup of business bravado hit the right note of irony: "To make the familiar cutting edge and the cutting edge familiar … and vice versa … We set out to redefine what a side dish could be." It coaxed $55,492 from nearly 7,000 people in a few weeks. Riding on the wave of potato salad mania, Brown announced that a "significant portion" of the bonanza will be used to fight homelessness and hunger in central Ohio.
This whimsical saga illustrates how technology used with imagination and humor can create expectation-busting outcomes — while pivoting to tackle serious issues. It's an attitude often associated with millennials, those born since 1980.
But numerous studies have criticized this generation's self-absorption and cited its parsimonious spending habits, such as renting rather than buying houses and avoiding big-ticket purchases like cars, as key factors holding back the pace of economic recovery. Meanwhile, a pair of recent surveys measuring Americans' financial attitudes paint millennials as a generation of "super savers" burdened by a "Depression-era mentality."
Molded by the financial crisis
The Transamerica Center for Retirement Studies reports that millennials start saving for retirement (mostly through 401(k) plans) at a much earlier age, 22, compared with older workers. Like their older Gen-X siblings, but unlike their boomer parents, two-thirds of millennials expect to self-fund retirement, not believing Social Security will be available for them.
Meanwhile, UBS Wealth Management describes this generation as "permanently scarred by the 2008 financial crisis," insecure about job prospects and uncertain about future earnings potential. As a result, millennials take an "extremely conservative" approach to finances, holding 59 percent of their assets in cash and fixed income instruments rather than investing in stocks — just like their Depression-era grandparents.
The UBS survey makes the important point that holding nearly 60 percent of your money in cash might be appropriate for a retiree, but makes no economic sense for a young person, given the long-term wealth-building record of equities. Millennials' bias to saving rather than investing, if not the wisest course, is understandable, however, given the parade of Wall Street scandals, market meltdowns, burst bubbles and flash crashes we have witnessed over the past decade, which brings us back to potato salad.
