youthmoney

Young adults are largely ignored by the personal finance pages of newspapers.

This ignoral is widespread. Bizarrely, it happens even when the story is about them. Daily Telegraph’s story headlined “More than half of parents give almost £12,000 to their children” starts like this:

Scottish Widows said that adult children were sapping their parents and grandparents of large amounts of money, forcing them to cut back on daily spending and to take on more debt.

The piece, copied from a Scottish Widows press release, continues to talk about the burden on older generations of the hard economic realities facing young people.

Gordon Greig, head of savings and investments at Scottish Widows, is pompously dismissive of young people: “It’s questionable as to whether the current younger generation of adults will ever learn the necessary savings habit if their parents continue to bail them out in this way,” he says.

Here’s a bit of news for Gordon and Rosie Murray-West, Deputy Personal Finance Editor, who copied out the press release.

Many young people face major difficulties in reaching financial independence. Those difficulties are, arguably, caused by the older generation’s greed and lack of prudence. To switch it round so that older people are the victims and young people the cause of financial problems makes you look comical and quite a bit silly. The only savings saps in the story are you two.

The whole article and the research, incidentally, is a promo for savings and investments vehicles, particularly the tax-efficient ISAs. It’s understandable that Scottish Widows are desperate for the commission. But why might Daily Telegraph personal finance writers be calling for parents to stop supporting their children with cash and risk it instead on the markets at a time of deep crisis and collapse? Could this be the kind of thinking that got us into this mess?