The Year I Stopped Apologizing for My Savings Rate
Somewhere around March, I realized I’d been defending my money choices to people who weren’t even asking. A finance bro acquaintance had posted something about “delayed gratification” on LinkedIn, and I found myself composing a mental response about how I wasn’t choosing experiences over security, I was choosing not to disappear into the future. Then I deleted it because who was I trying to convince? Myself, probably.
This is the thing about 2024 and 2025 that nobody really talks about: we’ve all become extremely online about our financial philosophies whether we meant to or not. There’s this narrative that’s been building, one where Gen Z is simultaneously broke and frivolous, desperate and irresponsible. We’re soft saving, apparently. Which means we’re choosing lattes and concerts and actual weekends over the mathematical precision of retirement planning. And yes, someone is always there to tell us this is wrong.
But here’s what I’ve noticed after sitting with this for a while: the people calling it lazy aren’t usually the ones carrying $37,000 in student debt while trying to exist in a city that costs more than their parents’ first house did. They’re not doing the math that reveals retirement benchmarks from 1987 don’t actually work when your entry-level job doesn’t pay what theirs did at the same career stage.
What the Numbers Actually Say If You Read Past the Judgment
Let me be specific about this because specificity matters. Bankrate’s analysis of the soft saving generation found that 73 percent of Gen Z respondents said they prioritize living in the moment over saving aggressively. That’s a number that gets cited a lot, usually with an implied eye roll. But when you actually talk to people about why they made that choice, it’s rarely because they think retirement is a myth or because they’re financially naive.
Something more complicated is going on. According to Bank of America’s 2025 data, young adults between 18 and 27 are putting 31 percent of their discretionary income toward experiences, compared to just 18 percent for Millennials at the same age. That’s a meaningful difference. But here’s the part that interests me more: the same report shows that younger workers are actually saving at a 14 percent rate overall. That’s not nothing. That’s not even particularly negligible, especially when you consider what they’re working with.
Fidelity still recommends saving 15 percent of your gross income for retirement, which is fine advice if you’re operating from their baseline assumptions. The problem is that only 28 percent of Americans under 35 are hitting that target right now. That statistic gets used to argue that young people aren’t taking their futures seriously. But financial planner Chloe Moore, who actually studies this stuff without the doomscroll energy, pointed out something important in a 2025 Bloomberg interview: nobody’s retirement plan from twenty years ago accounts for what it looks like to carry nearly $38,000 in student debt before you even start your career. The math doesn’t work the same way anymore, and pretending it does is dishonesty dressed up as tough love.
The Narrative That Won’t Fit the Data
Here’s what keeps me awake sometimes: the story we’ve built around this doesn’t actually match what’s happening. The narrative says Gen Z is financially irresponsible and heading toward a retirement crisis. And then the Federal Reserve 2025 Survey of Consumer Finances drops and quietly mentions that Gen Z’s median net worth at 25 is actually 25 percent higher than Millennials had at the same age. That detail never makes it into the think pieces. It doesn’t fit the story that sells advertising and generates comments.
I’m not saying everything is fine or that nobody should think about the future. I’m saying that the people younger than me might actually know something about building stability that doesn’t require erasing themselves from their own lives right now. They might be working with information about mortality and opportunity cost that previous generations didn’t have access to quite so viscerally.
The soft saving thing isn’t about not caring about money. It’s about a calculation that looks different when you’ve grown up watching very prepared people still get devastated by circumstances beyond their control. It’s about asking whether a life spent mostly in future tense is actually security or just a very sophisticated form of poverty.
What I’m Actually Doing With My Money
I spend money on things that matter to me. I also save. Not aggressively. Not according to anyone’s formula. But consistently, in a way that feels like it’s mine and not something I’m doing to pass some invisible test. I go to concerts and I fund my retirement account. I take trips and I have an emergency fund. It’s not some perfected balance where everything is optimized. It’s messier than that.
What I’m not doing is apologizing for the fact that I went to dinner with a friend instead of working an extra shift to put more into my 401k. What I’m not doing is pretending that advice from people who were twenty-five in a completely different economy applies universally just because it’s been repeated often enough. And I’m definitely not believing that my worth as a person, or my competence with money, gets measured by someone else’s timeline.
The finance bros are going to keep posting about discipline and delayed gratification. That’s their thing. But I’ve noticed something about some of them: they seem genuinely angry that other people aren’t making the same choices they did. And usually, when someone’s that angry about what other people do with their own money, it’s worth asking yourself if maybe they’re trying to convince themselves more than they’re trying to convince you.
Where This Leaves Us
I think about this a lot because I think about money the way I think about everything: as a tool for living, not the entire point of it. I want to be secure. I also want to actually exist while I’m here. Soft saving isn’t the answer to everything. But neither is the rigid formula that requires you to live like you’re already dead.
Maybe the real thing worth questioning isn’t whether Gen Z is saving enough, but whether the people criticizing them are asking the right questions. Maybe it’s worth asking what it means that young people would rather spend money on experiences than save aggressively for a future that keeps getting more uncertain. Maybe that’s not irresponsibility. Maybe it’s wisdom we’re just not taught to recognize.
I’m curious what you’re doing with this question in your own life. Are you saving aggressively and feeling good about it? Are you prioritizing now and living with the tension? Are you somewhere in between, like most of us actually are? Drop a thought in the comments or send me an email. I’m genuinely interested in how people are thinking about this.
