AARP Helping Young Adults With Personal Finances

We received a clarion call a few years ago when we discovered that 69% of our members were still providing some level of financial support to their adult children. We realized that we had both an obligation and an opportunity to get more involved and help young adults (aged 18-34 years) understand the role that money plays throughout every stage of their lives. With that said, we have two very important developments on this front:

• This morning, we issued a report that illustrates how pervasive financial challenges are in almost every aspect of young adults' lives, including their relationships and how they use the Internet. From our prior research and what we'd heard from our members, we knew this was a serious situation, but this report shows how deeply these worries are affecting this generation.
• To help young adults confront these challenges, we are announcing a new AARP-sponsored project called LifeTuner.org, a free, online personal finance community for young adults. LifeTuner fills a major need in the financial landscape: an unbiased, inclusive resource where young adults can get free expert advice and share stories with their peers completely free of any commercial jargon.

Our research has shown that while young adults freely admit that they are worried about their financial future and that money often causes friction with their families, partners and friends, they are still reluctant to ask for help because money remains a taboo subject for the most part. Our hope is that LifeTuner will help eradicate those social boundaries and inspire a healthy, helpful dialogue about money management. Additionally, LifeTuner also provides a series of tools and calculators designed to help balance budgets, itemize spending and pay down debt.
We need your help in order to make this mission and this project a success. One of the features of LifeTuner is the "Been There" forum, a place where AARP members can share their life lessons, experiences and finance tips with LifeTuner users. Not only does this offer members a great platform for giving back, but it will also help encourage an intergenerational dialogue around finances, career and other money-related life concerns; something that is sorely lacking in this country.
Young adults play a massive role in the financial future of the United States and the more we can do to make them realize the gravity of their situation, the better we'll all be because of it. The tagline for LifeTuner is 'Your life is your greatest currency' and our goal is to use LifeTuner to help young adults realize this fact.
Click here to see key findings or to download a full copy of the report or visit LifeTuner.org for more information.