7 Worst States for Millennial Prospecting

If you are trying to help millennials set up life insurance, annuities, other protection or retirement savings products, you have a problem: More U.S. adults ages 25 through 39 may be using regular savings, retirement savings withdrawals and asset sales to pay the bills. The U.S. Census Bureau has found that the percentage of all U.S. residents ages 18 and older who say they or people in their households are tapping assets to pay bills in a given seven-day period has increased to 25% this summer, up from 20% in a comparable period in 2021. The number in that position has increased about 24%, to 63 million. For people ages 25 to 39 — what Pew Research defines as the millennial generation — the percentage of people who say their households have used assets to pay the bills recently has climbed from 23% to 28%, and the number tapping assets has climbed about 25%, to 19 million. At the state level, the percentage of millennials tapping assets ranges from 19.8%, in the District of Columbia, and 20.6%, in Louisiana, up to more than 45%, in one state, with a median of 28%. To see the seven states with the highest percentage of millennials tapping assets, see the slideshow above. For data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, see the chart below.

Survey Details

The Census Bureau has based the data on results from the Household Pulse Survey, which is conducted entirely through cell phone text messages and was started in early 2020, to give policymakers an idea about how the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting people's well-being. Bureau officials publish the data with many warnings about the reliability and precision of the data. One challenge is that the bureau is using a new question to determine where people are getting the funds they're using to pay the bills. Comparable numbers from years before the pandemic came to light, in January 2020, are not readily available. Another problem is that it's not always clear how survey takers might have understood the questions. Some prosperous consumers who have used savings accounts to pay for vacations might have said "yes" to the asset-tapping question, for example. Still another question is how representative survey data obtained through cell phones can be. We focus on data for the 25-39 age group here, based on the idea that people in that age group are likely to be finished with college and career training and may be more likely to have cell phones and participate in text-message-based surveys than older Americans. It's not clear whether differences between the figures for the 25-39 age group and the figures for all adults are the result of true population differences or differences between how people in different age groups respond to text-message-based surveys.

More Findings

Overall, survey participants are reporting that they are making less use of unemployment insurance and special COVID-19 pandemic aid payments to pay their bills this year, but also less use of the "regular sources of income they" used before the pandemic started. They also seem to be leaning more on friends and relatives for financial help: The percentage of all adults surveyed who said they are leaning on friends and family to pay the bills has increased 38%, to 31.4 million..

Use of Regular Savings, Retirement and Asset Sales to Pay Last Week's Bills