About 2 in 3 Millennials (aged 22-35) say that they know what their credit score is, an improvement from last year (61%), per results from Navient’s latest annual Money Under 35 study [pdf]. The report indicates that credit score knowledge is considerably above-average among Millennials with higher levels of education.
For example, 89% of Millennials with an advanced degree reported knowledge of their credit score, as did 76% of those with a Bachelor’s degree. But the figure dropped to 57% among those with a high school education or less.
Millennials with higher education levels also reported above-average likelihood of having a mortgage: almost one-third (32%) of those with an advanced degree have a mortgage, close to double the proportion of those (18%) with a high school degree or less. Not surprisingly, age plays a significant role in mortgage incidence: 34% of Millennials aged 31-35 said they have a mortgage, compared to 20% of those aged 25-30.
With respect to money management, 4 in 10 respondents use their bank’s website or app to keep track of their finances, while almost an equal share (39%). balance checkbooks by hand. Third-party apps are making inroads, particularly among the 28-30 bracket, almost 1 in 5 of whom are using them for money management.
Encouragingly, Millennials’ financial health appears to be increasing. Navient created a financial health index score based on 15 separate indicators, finding that 25% of respondents placed in the “excellent” category, up from 20% last year. The largest proportion (60%) were classified as “good,” while 15% were in the “poor” range, down slightly from 17% last year.
These results again mask some significant age-related differences, though. Young Millennials (22-27) were about equally as likely to fall into the “poor” bucket as they were the “excellent” bucket, while those aged 31-35 were more than twice as likely to be in “excellent” than “poor” financial health.
For more details on youth and money management, see MarketingCharts’ comprehensive report, Marketing Financial Services to Millennials.
About the Data: The Navient data is based on an online survey conducted in May 2016 among 3,069 adults between 22 and 35 years of age, using a nationally representative sample.
