Why Age No Longer Predicts Financial Behaviour with Farzana Botha

Yeah, it's so interesting.

As I was reading through the survey as well, it's mind-blowing.

I'm also laughing because I think we sometimes want to put people in a box You know, like there's this Generation Z and Millennials and Gen X and all of these.

And I've always held, like I'm not a psychologist or anything, like definitely not.

But I've always held like until the pressure is on, then I want to see if we still stick to those characteristics that we've got with the different generations.

And it seems to be playing out in a very, very interesting way.

So can you delve a little bit deeper if you talk about the youth? I mean, we talk very high level about youth.

what that was, but what are some of the things that surprised you specifically about the research and what it has revealed?

Yeah, it's interesting what you said, you know, when the pressure is on, you'll be interested to see how people are actually behaving and what the true nature of it is.

So if we look at some of the actual detail that informed how this change has happened.

I just want to toggle between screens because some of it's very data rich and I don't want to miss out on that.

But, you know, traditionally we've always assumed, and I mean, heuristics are helpful, right? Because they help us sort of create order when there's chaos in terms of the way we think.

And heuristics have guided how we've structured financial planning.

But we thought millennials, for example, and Gen Z, so those are people born 1985 and later.

So those people, we've always considered them to be the generation that live for experiences.

The YOLO generation is what they call them.

They're also nomads.

They like short-term experiences.

They prioritize things like travel, something that I think we all can agree on.

We've always assumed that younger people had a volatile risk appetite.

We assume that young people are digitally native and completely unengaged.

But in actual fact, that particular generation, having lived through multiple crises, environmental, economical crises, and they've seen how health scares and things like that have put a pressure on people around them financially.

This particular generation is actually experiencing severe accumulation pressure.

So they're struggling to create that those buffers to create that wealth, to build that accumulation that they need at this young age.

And even if you think about it, if I think about it, when we were growing up, there were generations before us that seemed to have figured it out very quickly.