Nauseating demographic acronyms were commonplace in the baby boomer and generation X eras. Remember Yuppies (Young Upwardly Mobile Professionals) and Dinks (Dual Income No Kids)? Now there’s finally an acronym for affluent millennials, apparently. It is “HENRYs,” which stands for “High Earning, Not Rich Yet”.
The term been around for a while, it seems, but we came across it for the first time today in a research note published by those notorious millennial experts Goldman Sachs. It sounds hilarious (and there’s arguably some gender bias inherent to the male name) but HENRYs could be a very important market for the finance industry and everyone else in coming years.
Millennials will overtake baby boomers as the biggest age cohort in the US at some point in 2015. And even though millennials have struggled through two recessions, are underemployed, drowning in student loans, and don’t own homes at the same levels as previous generations, they already have sizeable financial clout.
In the note, Goldman Sachs estimates that millennial households already control financial assets worth more than $1 trillion. You can see its calculations in the table below.
As the high-earners among millennials, HENRYs would control a significant proportion of that. Yet they remain an underserved market from a financial industry perspective.
That said, some companies such as Wealthfront and Betterment, which favor passive and automated investment strategies with transparent fees, have done a good job of targeting them, Goldman says.