Millennials in deep wealth hole

To catch GenXers, they need to triple their wealth in just four years.

Few things capture the precariousness of life for today’s young adults like a visualization of their wealth.

Economist Gray Kimbrough did just that, using Federal Reserve data to compare how generations fared financially at different points of their life cycles.

Wealth is a measure of what people own: their assets (which typically include homes, cash savings and stocks) minus their debts (like mortgages, student loans, consumer debt). Its importance to an individual, a nation or an entire generation cannot be overstated; it gives families a safety net during hard economic times, such as a layoff, and is intertwined with such milestones of adult life as buying a home, starting a business or retiring comfortably.

Baby boomers — those born between 1946 and 1964 — collectively owned 21% of the nation’s wealth by the time their generation hit a median age of 35 in 1990.

Generation X (born from 1965 to 1980) came of age during the era of wage stagnation and growing inequality ushered in by the 1970s and ’80s. When the typical GenXer reached 35 in 2008, his or her share of the nation’s wealth was just 9%, less than half that of boomers at a comparable point in life.

Millennials haven’t hit the 35 mark yet — that won’t happen until about 2023 — but their financial situation is relatively dire. They own just 3.2% of the nation’s wealth. To catch up to GenXers, they’d need to triple their wealth in just four years. To reach boomers, their net worth would need a sevenfold jump.

These generation-wide sums hide the considerable variation within each generation, which is a more familiar story: Wealth is highly concentrated among the richest members of each cohort, even more so than income.

One important caveat is that the three generations aren’t the same size, population-wise. In 1990, for instance, boomers accounted for 31% of the total U.S. population. In 2008, GenXers were only 22% of the population.