If you're a 30-something whose parents are still making your car payments or slipping you some cash for your internet bill, you're definitely not alone. In fact, two-fifths of millennials—the demographic currently between the ages of 26 and 41 or so—say mom and dad are ponying up cash for one or more monthly bills, according to a new survey by OnePoll drawn up for Chartway Credit Union. The largest expenditure that parents help out with is housing, digging into their wallets to pay the rent for 24% of this age group; 17%, meanwhile, say their parents pay their mortgage, notes the survey, which polled 2,000 Americans.
Other bills that parents assist their millennial kids with are groceries (22%), utilities (19%), car insurance (18%), car payments (16%), and the extras like streaming services (12%), per the Hill. "It's just really expensive to be a young person now," Kimberly Palmer, a personal finance expert at NerdWallet, tells the outlet, which notes that young adults have had to contend in recent years with inflation, spiking housing costs, sluggish pay, and hefty student-loan debt. The pandemic also sent many millennials back to their childhood abodes.
Interestingly, however, the survey found that only 12% of millennials said they accepted money from their parents because they absolutely had to—instead, they're mainly citing the fact that their parents are simply picking up the tab and can afford it. It's not just millennials who are being subsidized by BoMaD (Bank of Mom and Dad): More than one-third of adults overall in the survey said they had at least one bill picked up by their parents. Chartway CEO Brian Schools says the survey's findings overall suggest that financial literacy isn't the best these days, per Money. "A lot more adults could benefit from some form of financial education," he says in a release. (More millennials stories.)
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