“We think it’s important to point out that when we separate the responses by age, millennials still believe in owning their own home,” McBreen said. “Owning property as opposed to renting it is still a core belief among wealthy investors.”
The more wealthy the respondent, the more likely they were to consider home ownership important, according to Spectrem.
Coming in third, millionaires also credited work as important to their success, including work during their high school and college years.
“When we ask people how they became wealthy, 95 to 99 percent say hard work,” McBreen said. “Most wealthy households think that it is important to work during high school and college… the people who have been successful believe their hard work ethic was developed because they worked during their education.”
Mass affluent investors, with between $100,000 and $1 million in assets, were more likely than high-net-worth investors and millionaires to believe that children should finance their own education, according to Spectrem.
Ultra-high-net-worth millennials were the most likely out of all the groups to argue that a student should finance most of their education, while millionaire millennials were the least likely of all groups to agree.
All of the groups surveyed by Spectrem expressed some level of pessimism about their family’s financial future.
“We always like to ask them if they foresee that their children will be better off than they are,” McBreen said. “That’s one way to define the American dream. Less than one-third of our respondents, regardless of wealth, thought that their children would be better off. Either they’re depressed and pessimistic, or that’s no longer a component of the American dream, because they don’t think their children necessarily need to be better off than they are now.”