We’re thrilled to share our latest research drop exploring how young people across North America are thinking about and navigating their relationship with money.

Over the past four weeks, we've had the chance to sit down with dozens of young people from across Canada and the U.S., listening closely to their stories. What’s clear to us through this work is that there’s a wide and growing gap between the lived reality of young people, and how brands (especially in categories like financial services) show up in their lives.

If brands want to stay relevant, brands need to make realism their baseline for credibility. Young people don’t buy the optimism, and their lives feel increasingly heavy.

Young people are deeply skeptical of our financial system and our institutions. Some feel they're broken. Others that they're working as intended, but just rigged, and unfair.

But this is also the most financially active, and financially anxious generation yet. The data reveals paradox: A quarter of Gen Z investors began before age 18, but it’s taking place alongside rising credit card debt and a widespread use of services like Buy Now, Pay Later to live beyond available means.

This is a cohort that is simultaneously considering a distant future while struggling to meet the demands of the present. It’s not about aspiring to incredible wealth, but instead about a blend of autonomy, escape, freedom, and of course… survival.

In a lot of ways, the story is familiar. Every generation has had its fair share of conservative saver types and reckless spenders. People’s attitudes around money also tend to evolve as they age and spend more time in the workforce. Many of the things being said about Gen Z and money were said about millennials a decade ago. But, the world has also changed a great deal since then.

The story of young people and their relationship with money isn’t about meme-stock nihilism or this generation being 'better savers' than the last. It’s one of pragmatism in a world of deeply diminished expectations. Their engagement with finance is a, sometimes reluctant, response to a system they feel is stacked against them.

To understand what unites young people when it comes to money, we assembled a diverse group of youth across Canada and the United States. All between the ages of 19 and 29, which is the point in life when most people’s financial stories begin to really take shape.

We used a grounded theory approach to select people whose stories, taken together, reveal the critical tensions that define the Gen Z financial identity. We used the narratives in the media about this cohort as our starting point, and then went where the story took us.

We met young people who are into crypto and options trading; financial independence, retire early types; those who stand to inherit large sums of money one day; those who invest conservatively and follow traditional investment advice; and those who have ethical issues with the financial system and have actively resisted participating in it.

These are their stories. On the surface they're quite different, but as you dig into the underlying aspirations and motivations, remarkable similarities emerge.