That change in psychology has often been overlooked, he notes. "I think the asset management and financial services industry spent a lot of time talking about investing for your retirement. It looks like the terminology for [younger workers] may have changed to saving for retirement."

Since the oldest Gen Y individuals are 26 years old, what exists of their consciousness has been formed over the last decade. While the details in the psychographic portrait of these individuals have yet to be fully defined, certain issues are surfacing. Many in Gen X and Y are the offspring of baby boomer parents, who represent a larger, more dispersed demographic. As one observer puts it, their boomer parents got "the stuffing knocked out of them much later in their game" than their children.

Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, thinks these "modern-day  Depression babies" represent a silver lining for the economy and the financial markets. Like the grandparents of Generations X and Y who became the greatest savers of the last century, a whole set of systematic activities has shifted in short order, including more thoughtful attitudes toward credit card debt, down payments for mortgages and work.

Young people "looking for work today show a lot more appreciation and gratitude," Hobson says. There is a "Give me a chance, put me in, Coach" attitude she sees that could translate into "better careers" for many.

Hobson also views their skepticism toward equity investing as healthy. "They are so young they'll see all sorts of market cycles, and this may have been the worst market cycle they'll ever see," she explains.

Boomers received their first encounter with investment risk in the 1987 stock market crash, and with subsequent, less-dramatic corrections. But the real lesson many of that generation took away from swooning equity prices was that the stock market always comes back and reaches new highs. That was before the so-called lost decade when they learned the wait could be a long one.
More money is being squirreled away in banks and money-market funds than it has been for decades. "Eventually, savings will translate into loans, which will translate into jobs," Finnegan says.

A big question facing Gen Y folks is how much of their attitude will be shaped by what their parents wanted for them. Gresham notes that older boomers, enjoying both a bull market and a buoyant economy, "tried to make life a lot better for their kids," and ended up outdoing their own parents at pampering Generation Y. But events like the Great Recession have a way of overpowering parental aspirations and sobering a young generation up quickly.

For both Gen X and Gen Y, those events have spawned "a lot of mistrust" about investment advice and the counsel provided by the financial community, warns David Lutz, a certified financial planner with The Advisors Group of Pittsburgh. Along with that mistrust has come greater resistance to investing.  "Unfortunately, a lot of people have heard the stories about Bernie Madoff, and feel that every advisor is just like that. That is very hard to overcome," he says.

Faced with that degree of skittishness among younger investors, "You've got to build up that trust every day, because the generation is so skeptical of what people tell them," Lutz notes. "You've got to prove it to them, and show them that [investing for the long term] is the right way."

The impact is even more profound, he noted, for "anybody who experienced a foreclosure or a job loss. That will affect them for the rest of their life."