3 Ways To Maximize Millennial Purchasing Power
Millennial home buyers hold the keys to sustainable growth for the real estate market. Unfortunately, many of them deal with credit challenges that limit their purchasing power. We’ve put together three ways to help your clients maximize their millennial purchasing power.
Find a process that works. Most millennial consumers have an unhealthy relationship with credit cards. There seems to be a divide in spending statistics. There are the Dave Ramsay lovers who rely solely on their debit cards, and the easy spenders, who carry more credit card debt than they have income. Fortunately, there are options to build a process that enables a healthy relationship with credit cards that can help improve credit scores and maximize purchasing power. Products like YNAB.com and author’s like Ramit Sethi are helping young consumers simplify their spending and use credit cards as a tool rather than a crutch.
Encourage a credit monitoring service. At one point, half of all millennial consumers were credit invisible. This is starting to change, but there are still thousands of young consumers who aren’t managing their credit profile properly. The best step is to start monitoring your credit. If you have a serious client, they may want to ditch Credit Karma, and go with a paid option like SmartCredit that provides budgeting tools and better platforms for building healthy credit.
Set the record straight on student loans. First, student loans don’t help you build healthy credit, and can only hurt if you don’t manage them properly. Second, they can drastically alter your debt to income ratio. Millennial consumers carry more than $1 trillion dollars in debt (the most of any previous generation), and withhold major purchases due to the strain for student loans. By helping your clients understand the reality of their student loans, they may be able to explore refinancing or consolidation options to maximize their purchase power.
We hope this helps your clients maximize their purchasing power. If you have clients struggling with credit challenges, please don’t hesitate to contact us directly. We’re happy to be a resource for you and your clients as they work towards healthy credit.