It’s a myth that the millennial generation doesn’t have any money to invest. Not only are older millennials entering their peak earnings years, they’ll likely be the beneficiaries of inherited wealth, which makes it important that they receive good investment advice.
Financial advisors need to reach out to this generation using appropriate language, said Curt Steinhorst, speaker from the Center for Generational Kinetics, who addressed attendees at the MMI Annual Conference in Chicago on Tuesday.
The millennial generation saves more than people think, have more assets and prefer to interact differently than any other previous generation, Steinhorst said.
“With this generation, we must understand what’s true and what’s not true,” he said. “You must think differently if you want to engage this generation.”
Millennials are having major milestones later in life, such as attending school, marrying, buying houses and having children, which he called “delayed adulthood.”
“Adulthood, as we understood it, is pushed back, and so is the perspective on retirement and what we’ll do during it. Buying and employment decisions are different for a generation that has a different view of risk or responsibility,” he said.
It’s a misconception that millennials are tech-savvy because they’re always on their phones. They’re not necessarily tech-savvy, but more tech-dependent, he said, because they’ve grown up with technology. That doesn’t mean they’ve learned how it works. Because of this misconception, older generations believe that millennials want something that’s high-tech. Rather, they’re looking for something that’s easy to understand.
“You might design products with a tech-savvy mindset, but anything that is complicated won’t be adopted. It must be in the most simple, clean and easy format,” he says. “Gen X is tech savvy.”
When it comes to communication, millennials want to communicate first by text message. Unlike previous generations that relied on phone calls, millennials see phone calls as an invasion of privacy. That’s why they don’t like to talk on the phone, and why they’re hesitant to make phone calls, too.
The second and third forms of communication are email and social media. However, they don’t interact with email the same way other generations do. Younger generations decide whether to open the email solely based on the subject line. That’s because they receive a lot of information and it’s a way to control what they read, he said.