Sara Rajo-Miller, financial advisor to Miracle Mile Advisors, joined Yahoo Finance Live to analyze the latest trends with Millennial investors.
Video transcription
[MUSIC PLAYING]
ADAM SHAPIRO: It’s time for our retirement segment, brought to you by Fidelity Investments. We invite Sara Rajo-Miller, who is a financial advisor to Miracle Mile Advisors, to the stream. And we want to talk about young people and what they should look for when investing in retirement. I’m talking about people aged 40 or under. Even the generation of the millennium, I am the generation X, so I think we are talking about generation Z that is before the generation of the millennium? What are the mistakes or the good things they are doing at this age?
SARA RAJO-MILLER: Hi, yes, so let’s see. When we talk about next generation investors, we are usually talking about the millennium generation that is now between the ages of 25 to 40 years old. I think it is very important, however, to note that we love to group them all together. And there is a big difference between, say, a 25 year old who has just left college and a 40 year old who may have more than 10 years of savings and investment on his resume.
Now it is an example that I am working with, I am going to give you three 30 year olds. One is going through an IPO event at his company. One is just leaving college and working with a 401 (k) economy, and the other is focused on a real estate investment they own. Therefore, they can be very different situations.
SEANA SMITH: Well, and Sara, going into different situations, I mean, I think that the millennial generation can often have a bad reputation. People compare them to previous generations and say: we are not up to date. I am a millennium. I’m curious to see how it compares, how the millennium generation compares to previous generations and where they were in terms of savings for retirement when they were that age.
SARA RAJO-MILLER: The millennium generation has a bad reputation. I’ve heard everything. And I think, from personal experience, what I have seen is that the millennium generation really cares about retirement savings. And they are working hard to build a nest egg. I’ll give you some important examples. Millennials, many millennials entered the workforce in 2008. Obviously, a terrible time to enter the workforce. It was not just a challenge for them, but many of them saw their parents go through retirement savings that declined because of the 2008 crisis.
Another big difference I saw is that Generation Y investors are much more independent. This may mean that they do not expect to depend as much on social security or pensions as the previous generation. Therefore, they are focusing more on retirement savings. But also, many of them are just making decisions on their own in a way that the previous generation was not. They often delay the decision to get married and have children, buy a first home. Therefore, they are making decisions for themselves for a long period of time.
I think the last big difference is awareness and access to information. I think that there is now much more access to information than in the previous generation. So, be it podcasts, online courses you can take at a university or something like Kaplan, or even Instagram. I had a client last week who told me that he attended a real estate investment seminar on TikTok. Certainly, this is probably not the best platform, or it may not be the best for that specific subject, but I think it’s great that there is so much interest and awareness out there.
ADAM SHAPIRO: I lost the computer for a second, but I want to thank Sarah Rajo-Miller, who is a consultant with Miracle Mile Advisors. And remind everyone that our retirement planning investment trends segment is offered to you by Fidelity Investments. We’re back.