Kana Cummings, 26, started thinking seriously about money in 2020. She was in a student-led workshop in Cleveland during the coronavirus panic, and the world was kind of crumbling, as she puts it.
"It was such an inescapable time. I think people were like, 'We really need to be thinking about these things kind of early,'" she says.
That mindset carried over. She opened a Roth IRA, a retirement account where you pay taxes now and withdraw later tax-free, using internship earnings.
She added a 401(k), her employer's retirement plan, and now she funnels annual bonuses into her Roth IRA.
She keeps an emergency fund in money market funds, a low-risk place to park cash, plus a set-it-and-forget-it investment portfolio. What she is not doing is saving for a house.
Cummings wants an apartment eventually, dislikes paying rent, lives with her parents, and starts business school in August 2026.
The same group is less likely to see a house as a very good investment.
The Pew survey also found that Gen Z sees retirement saving, trading apps, and high-yield savings accounts, which pay more interest than standard savings, as the best wealth-building tools.
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Jeff Sharp, 28, is living that shift. He is a bartender and flight school student in Bend, Oregon, where the median home price is $700,000, up nearly 75% from 20 years ago.
Sharp began investing in his early twenties with Robinhood, then moved to Vanguard for index funds, which track the market index like the S&P 500.
He set up automatic contributions to a Roth IRA and a 529 education savings account for his daughter, and he uses Acorns to invest spare change.
"One of the things that my close friends and I talk about a lot is the difference between what the economy was like for our parents and what the buying power of the U.S. dollar used to be, and what we're looking at now," Sharp says.
"There's still a fair amount of anxiety about how we're going to be able to reach our financial goals."
Kana Cummings makes the same point.
"Compared to before when people stayed in their careers longer and companies offered pensions and things like that, I think people have to fend for themselves a little bit more."
Adam Benton, 23, is head of operations at Titan Dynamics. He directs part of every paycheck into retirement, a brokerage account for buying investments, and high-yield savings, and he uses Charles Schwab for index funds.
Benton saves aggressively and wants a house, but he sees it as a far-off goal. "It's so far away, it's like, what are the odds of ever getting there?"
"It is definitely not the same perspective that my parents have where they say, 'You have to get into real estate to really build wealth,'" he says.
Roberta Katz, a Stanford scholar and coauthor of "Gen Z, Explained," describes the generation as uncertain and adaptable. "For Boomers, there was a sense that you have your home, that you build your wealth, that you could build an estate," Katz said. "For Gen Z, when we did our study, they did not have any sense of that."
"One of the things our study found," Katz said, "was a very high value for Gen Z on flexibility because there was a belief that the world they were going to know was a world of change."
This month, a Gallup poll revealed that 81% of Gen Z adults are seeking financial guidance, and 75% obtain it online. They are not ignoring money, just learning about it in different places.
The next generation of investors is not waiting for a down payment. They are in the market already, building wealth one automatic transfer at a time, and that is a different path than the one their parents took.
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