More telling from the standpoint of the financial services industry, "Given a hypothetical $100 to invest, millennials preferred saving in a bank or paying down debt to buying a home or investing in the stock market," notes Allstate.
"Buffeted by this tempestuous economy, many millennials are urgently seeking shelter from the storm," wrote Ronald Brownstein, political director of Atlantic Media, publisher of the National Journal. "Their generation is renowned for placing a high priority on personal expression, making a difference in society, and accumulating fulfilling experiences, and those instincts still resonate through the poll. But across a wide range of economic choices, the survey finds that the ferocity of the recession has left this generation with a powerful craving for certainty."
Lutz, who is 39, echoes the feelings of many of his Gen X peers about the diminishing opportunities for younger Americans. "The baby boom generation seems to want it all. They want the big house, the car, the vacation, the pension, Social Security, retiring at 62 - but not taking into account the long-term effects, and what that's going to do to our generation.
"We'll be the ones who will have to clean it up, most likely. We'll probably be the ones who will see the cuts in Social Security benefits and have to work longer. So I'm very distrusting of a lot of people, and I think I see a lot of that in the Generation X too," Lutz added. "We try not to rely on anybody, even the government, for benefits."
Indeed, both Gen X and the generation of Americans now entering adulthood have little faith in the ability of government to provide for their financial security later in life. "I'll definitely invest in my retirement," says Park, the Georgia Tech senior. "I'm not sure Social Security's going to be doing that great by that time, so I'm going to make sure I have an investment plan."
For Jon Dilling, a 41-year-old editor for Turner Cartoon Network, the meltdown in equities in 2008 "wasn't totally unexpected." But it did bring for him and his wife "this initial shock," he says. "In an abstract way, I knew that day would probably happen. But it was a little jarring to watch your account drop by nearly half its value in a short period of time, and be left in the position of [asking ourselves] 'What do we do now?'"
Luckily for him, he said, "Being the age we are, we're going to just ride it back up. But we have friends who are 20 years older than us, and we've seen their lives impacted in a much more dramatic way, where they're a lot closer to retirement."
Dilling says the meltdown in his equity portfolio has tempered the formerly high degree of risk tolerance he and his wife had for investing. "When you're young, you feel invincible and that you can weather any storm, and that you could start all over again from a zero balance," he explains. "But now that we have something to lose, I realize that safer investments later in life actually make a lot more sense, after having been through the recession. I understand the importance of maybe dialing it back later in life, when you don't have as much time to rebound from those downswings."
One financial counselor with a front-row seat on the impact of the Great Recession on the newest generation of adults is Deena Katz, who is chairman of Evensky & Katz in Coral Gables, Fla., and an associate professor teaching personal financial planning at Texas Tech. "This generation," she observes, "is seeing what's happening to their parents' retirement plans, and how that's become a real problem for most of them and how they need to change their expectations.
"A lot of the boomers today came through the '90s when you could invest in anything and it made money," Katz says, laughing. "But these kids have seen first-hand what deflation can do, particularly in real estate. They've watched their parents' homes diminish in value, and they've seen the lack of financial literacy in this country. They have seen firsthand what mistakes [our generation has] made, and they're not going to make those mistakes."