Gen Zers are becoming jet setters — even if they don’t have the finances to justify it.
According to a new survey from Morning Consult, more than half of Gen Zers aged 18 to 26 are “frequent leisure travelers,” meaning they take three or more trips for fun in a given year.
Despite being relatively lower income and having accrued less savings, Zoomers’ travel habits are neck and neck with their millennial counterparts, and outstrip Gen X and boomers—of whom 14% and 35% are frequent travelers respectively.
Of these regular Gen Z travelers, 61% are making less than $50k a year, and only 11% are pulling in 6 figures. It’s no surprise, then, that many of them are stretching themselves thin to cover all the expenses.
As a Gen Zer myself I’ve seen my contemporaries shell out on countless trips, whether it’s Spring Break, Coachella, or Paris.
While I can understand that losing out on formative years during the pandemic gave some Zoomers a travel bug, I worry that many of my peers are spending with little regard for their financial future.
In fact, according to a Credit Karma survey, 49% of Zoomers have even gone into debt to finance summer travel.
The bottom line: Gen Z is traveling far more than they can afford to.
Going into debt for travel is a trend that Gen Z finance influencer Queenie Tan, known online as @investwithqueenie says concerns her—but sadly doesn’t surprise her.
“I actually have a few friends that did something similar,” Tan, 26, told The Post.
She says social media — and a sense that everyone else is jet setting to fabulous vacations — could be a motivating factor for young people’s endless travel.
“On Instagram, I’m looking through and it seems like everyone’s in Europe,” she said. “But you don’t think that maybe some of them are funding it through credit cards and that sort of thing.”
Credit card debt isn’t worth the perfect Insta pic—but thinking that it is might be a consequence of our educational system’s failure to teach kids basic money skills.
Today, only 17 states require a personal finance class as a graduation requirement—including Michigan, Virginia, and Tennessee.
That number has grown considerably in the post-pandemic era, as more lawmakers recognize the importance of equipping young people with the skills necessary to navigate an uncertain economic future.
For instance, seniors graduating in Florida next year will be the first class to fulfill a financial literacy graduation requirement signed into law by Governor Ron DeSantis.
And yet, here in New York, schools are required to offer a course but students don’t have to take it.
In 2021, Democratic state senator Leroy Comrie proposed a bill that would have required high school seniors to take a finance course to graduate — but it never even made it onto the senate floor.
Any student set up for success will inevitably have to pay a bill and develop a credit score. The fact that schools in most states don’t even have to teach them the basics of personal finance is a negligence of their duty.
We teach plenty of skills in school that most people will never use in the course of their lifetimes — and yet we often neglect to teach one critical skill that everyone most certainly will.
And no doubt it’s contributing to Zoomers’ abysmal financial knowledge.
According to a study by George Washington University School of Business, Zoomers performed the worst of all on a financial literacy test, and only 46% say they feel confident in their financial knowledge.
As we face down a slowing economy and a cooling job market, Gen Z’s endless travel and disregard for future savings could come back to bite them.
According to Tan, blowing cash now and going into debt is “a missed opportunity” for the future.
“The younger you are, the more opportunities you have to work a compound interest,” she said. “The more money you can save, the fancier the vacations you can have later on.”
It should be intuitive advice, but for many young people, it’s not—thanks to our school system.
Zoomers know how to write in cursive and find a derivative, but they’d be hard pressed to define compound interest or explain the difference between checkings and savings.
For the sake of their futures, that needs to change.
