How Baby Boomers, Gen-Xers And Millennials Would Invest $10,000
Let's say we gave you $10,000 cash, no strings attached. After thanking us profusely and promising to visit Digg.com every day for the rest of your natural life, what would you do with the money? Would you bet big on Bitcoin? Keep your cash safe and secure in a savings account? Pay off a big chunk of your college loans? Those were a few of the options given to 1,000 Americans recently surveyed by loan and credit card marketplace LendEDU. LendEDU broke down the results by generation and found that overwhelmingly, millennials, gen-Xers and baby boomers alike would use an unexpected $10,000 infusion to pay down debt. Visual Capitalist put together this chart to show the results:
Overall, 27% of respondents said they'd use the $10,000 gift to pay down debt. Of those, about 49% said they'd prioritize credit card debt, 12% student loan debt, 11% mortgage debt, 10% personal loan debt and 8% auto loan debt. (The remainder said either "other type" of debt or "not sure.")
After paying down debt, the second and third most popular categories were real estate (13%) and savings account or CD (12%). Savings accounts and CDs were particularly popular among baby boomers, a full 17% of whom said they wanted to put their cash in a low-interest, low-risk vehicle. But that's a pittance compared to the 33% of boomers who said they'd pay down debt.
For what it's worth, paying down credit card debt is a super-smart thing to do with extra cash, since credit card debt tends to come with astronomically high interest rates. But it's a sad reflection of America's economic well-being that so many people have to rely on credit cards to get by.
Read more about the survey — and feel silently superior to the 9% of millennials who would invest their $10,000 in cryptocurrency — over at LendEDU.
[via Visual Capitalist]
