Bankrate released its 2024 survey of financial regrets. The survey asks people about their financial errors and which of them they regret the most. Not surprisingly, survey respondents identify insufficient savings for retirement and emergencies as their biggest financial failures this year.
Bankrate also provides a generational look at the events that respondents see as their downfalls. Generation X and Baby Boomers identify shortfalls in their retirement savings as their biggest mistakes. This regret took its usual place at the top of the list, as it has done in six of the last seven years. Only in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, did shortfalls in emergency savings snag the top spot. Young respondents (Gen Z and Millennials) identify low emergency savings as their biggest monetary regret.
Prime age workers (Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z) tend to worry more about having too much credit card debt. Despite all the coverage about student loan debts, only 5% of survey respondents thought their student loan debt was too high. Interestingly, according to the Bankrate data, overwhelming student loan debt was hardly on the radar for people who had completed a four-year degree. Just 5% of all respondents raised the issue of student loan debt. 40% of respondents said they’d made no progress on resolving their financial errors in the previous 12 months.
The survey is notable because many of what the respondents identify as regrets are actually caused by circumstances outside their control. (These include inflation, wage stagnation or insufficient earnings and other problems related to their jobs.) Not making enough money to address all financial priorities may not be a variable that the worker can easily modify.
Increased earnings can resolve financial regrets
Higher salaries enable people to save more for retirement both independently and as part of an employer benefit program. They also allow people to set aside more money for emergency purposes and reduce the need to raid savings for unplanned expenses. Higher earnings may also reduce a household’s dependence on credit card use, thereby lowering credit card debt. Further, higher monthly income can reduce the impact that student loan debt may have on monthly expenses.
The earning potential of every college degree is limited; however, in the absence of pathological spending habits, higher earnings neatly dispel the most frequently mentioned financial regrets that people carry around. It also makes it possible for people to move forward with either correcting past financial mistakes or addressing their present financial concerns.
There is no question about the need to increase the earning potential of a two-year degree. If two-year degrees are going to survive, community college executives must make this their highest priority.
