Delaying Car and Home Ownership Has Helped Millennials Dramatically Reduce Their Debt

Prior to the recession, a lot of us binged on things we had no business buying, like big houses and second cars and smaller luxuries affordable only with credit card debt. In the process, Americans – and young Americans in particular – became an impressively (and historically) indebted lot.

In retrospect, this wasn’t such a sustainable masterplan. But there are already signs that Millennials – if not their parents – are starting to seriously offload that debt. A report released today by the Pew Research Center reveals that households younger than 35 have shed substantial debt since the start of the recession. And that has largely occurred as they’ve backed away from owning two big-ticket items cherished by their parents' generation: cars and houses.