What makes generation x

From there on it was all down-alphabet. The generation following Gen X naturally became Gen Y, born give or take a few years on either end. The pair coined the term in when the impending turn of the millennium began to feature heavily in the cultural consciousness. Generation Z refers to babies born from the late 90s through today.

While some say Generation Alpha is named for the first letter of the Greek alphabet and denotes the first of a series of items or categories, Generation Alpha may also just be an easy way to round the corner into a new alphabet.

While all Millennials were born around the turn of the century, some of them are still in early adulthood, wrestling with new careers and settling down, while the older Millennials have a home and are building a family.

You can imagine how having a child might change your interests and priorities, so for marketing purposes, it's useful to split this generation into Gen Y. The younger group is just now flexing their buying power. The latter group has a more extensive history and may be refinancing their mortgage and raising children. The contrast in priorities and needs is stark. The same logic can be applied to any generation that is in this stage of life or younger. As we get older, we tend to homogenize and face similar life issues.

The younger we are, the more dramatic each stage of life is. Consider the difference between someone in elementary school and high school. While they might be the same generation, they have very different views and needs. Marketing to young generations as a single cohort will not be nearly as effective as segmenting your strategy and messaging.

Each generation label serves as a shorthand to reference nearly 20 years of attitude, motivations, and historical events. Few individuals self-identify as Gen X, Millennial, or any other name. Ten years from now, the priorities of Millennials will have changed — and marketing tactics must adjust instep. Remember, these arbitrary generational cutoff points are just that.

Whatever terminology or grouping you use, the goal is to reach people with marketing messages relevant to their phase of life. In short, no matter how many letters get added to the alphabet soup, the most important thing you can do is seek to understand the soup du jour for the type of consumer you want to attract. Before we dive into each generation, remember that the exact years born are in dispute, because there are no comparably definitive thresholds by which the later generations after Boomers are defined.

But this should give you a general range to help identify what generation you belong in. The other fact to remember is that new technology is typically first adopted by the youngest generation and then is gradually adopted by the older generations. This generation has begun to adopt more technology in order to stay in touch with family members and reconnect with old friends.

While this might seem counterintuitive, it can be explained by the fact that this generation has the most wealth and is looking to help their children with their student debt. They have a belief that you should take care of your children enough to set them on the right course and don't plan on leaving any inheritance. With more Americans outliving their retirement fund, declining pensions, and social security in jeopardy, ensuring you can successfully fund retirement is a major concern for Boomers.

However, they are also digitally savvy and spend roughly 7 hours a week on Facebook the highest of any generational cohort. They believe banking is a person-to-person business and demonstrate brand loyalty. These demands put a high strain on their resources.

They are looking to reduce their debt while building a stable saving plan for the future. Cord-cutting in favor of streaming services is the popular choice.

They typically have multiple social media accounts. They prefer to shop products and features first, and have little patience for inefficient or poor service. The financial well-being of Millennials is complicated. The individual earnings for young workers have remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Similarly, the household income trends for young adults markedly diverge by education. As far as household wealth, Millennials appear to have accumulated slightly less than older generations had at the same age.

But for Millennials with some college or less, annual earnings were lower than their counterparts in prior generations. The pattern is similar for those young adults who never attended college. This analysis is in dollars and is adjusted for household size. Additionally, household income includes the earnings of the young adult, as well as the income of anyone else living in the household.

The growing gap by education is even more apparent when looking at annual household income. While young adults in general do not have much accumulated wealth, Millennials have slightly less wealth than Boomers did at the same age. This modest difference in wealth can be partly attributed to differences in debt by generation. Compared with earlier generations, more Millennials have outstanding student debt, and the amount of it they owe tends to be greater.

The share of young adult households with any student debt doubled from when Gen Xers were ages 20 to 35 to when Millennials were that age. Millennials, hit hard by the Great Recession, have been somewhat slower in forming their own households than previous generations. The rise in young adults living at home is especially prominent among those with lower education. This gap was narrower or nonexistent in previous generations. Millennials are also moving significantly less than earlier generations of young adults.

For previous generations at the same age, roughly a quarter had. On the whole, Millennials are starting families later than their counterparts in prior generations.

This in part reflects broader societal shifts toward marrying later in life. In , the typical American woman first married at age 21 and the typical American man first wed at Today, those figures have climbed to 28 for women and 30 for men. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile.

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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Generation X, which is sometimes shortened to Gen X, is the name given to the generation of Americans born between the mids and the earlys. The exact years that comprise Gen X vary.

Some researchers—demographers William Straus and Neil Howe, for example—place the exact birth years from to , whereas Gallup places the birth years between and But all agree that Gen X follows the baby boom generation and precedes Generation Y or the millennial generation. Though it's more useful for marketing than sociology, generational theory—the assumption that people born within the same time frame can be considered a group with similar views, values, tastes, and habits—and the idea of a generation gap has gained broad acceptance in the U.

The American generations covered in the theory are:. Those born after are considered Generation Z or post-millennial. Gen X numbers around 65 million, while the baby boomers and the millennials each have around 72 million members.

Like the silent generation, Generation X has been defined as an "in-between" generation. The group's earning power and savings were compromised first by the dotcom bust , and second by the financial crisis of and the Great Recession.

In terms of social and political power, Generation X is sandwiched between the baby boomers, who came of age during the Vietnam and Reagan eras and the millennials of the Obama era. Gen X overlaps with another group called the sandwich generation.

Each modern generation has gotten its time in this slot, which is used to characterize middle-aged individuals who—due to longer life spans and having children later in life—find themselves supporting both aging parents and growing children simultaneously.

And they're going to need it. Nine percent of Gen Xers have no retirement savings at all. This falls far short of what the generations each expect they will need to retire. On average, Gen X households began working, saving, and investing during a period of lower investment returns than the baby boomers.

Many Gen X households began building their savings in periods of high market valuations, such as the technology bubble and dotcom bubble of the lates and in the run-up to the global financial crisis of The effects of the ensuing bear markets still weigh heavily on their portfolios.

Additionally, today's especially low-interest-rate environment has also had an adverse impact on their ability to increase financial assets. Meanwhile, the early experiences of Gen X investors with major market declines seem to have made them more risk averse. Gen Xers' relatively lower levels of wealth will make it difficult for them to maintain their parents' consumption patterns, rising costs of education, healthcare, and property. And then there's the sandwich syndrome—the fact that this generation has reached the age when they are supporting and educating children while also providing care for aging parents.

Gen Xers now have the highest average debt of any generation, according to research by LendingTree. The retirement landscape is different for Gen X than for their parents. Once common, pension plans in the private sector are rare and have been replaced by defined-contribution plans, such as a k.