From The Los Angeles Times: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-credit-cards-millennials-20130519,0,7517203.story
By Emily Alpert, Los Angeles Times
May 18, 2013
Ringed by the posh shops of Beverly Center, Tim Ratliff said no — he didn’t have a credit card. He didn’t need one.
“I just hear so many horror stories about people being in debt,” said Ratliff, 21, who studies psychology at Ohio State University. “When you have a credit card, you feel like you have a lot of money when you don’t.”
Ratliff is like many young adults, emerging data show. His generation, dubbed millennials by academics and marketers, grew up during the boom and bust cycles of the U.S. economy over the last decade and a half — crises that appear to have reshaped their attitudes toward spending and debt.
Millennials, who range from teenagers to people in their early 30s, are more financially cautious than the stereotype of the spendthrift twentysomething, several studies suggest. Many embrace thrift.
Some experts say their habits echo those of another generation, those who came of age during the Great Depression and forged lifelong habits of scrimping and saving — along with a suspicion of financial risk.
“Both generations had a childhood memory of wealth and then saw that wealth yanked out from under them” in or around their teenage years, said Morley Winograd, who has co-written several books on the millennial generation. Though the pain was much more severe during the Depression, “Both generations are very conservative spenders,” Winograd said.
During the economic downturn, while older households ran up credit card debt, younger households whittled it down, a Pew Research Center analysis of federal data found earlier this year.
More young households had no credit card debt in 2010 than was the case in 2001, the data show. Among those who did owe on their credit cards, the median amount fell from roughly $2,500 to less than $1,700.
Continue reading at: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-credit-cards-millennials-20130519,0,7517203.story
