'Millennial investors are a lot more independent;' Rajo-Miller

Sara Rajo-Miller, financial advisor at Miracle Mile Advisors, joined Yahoo Finance Live to break down the latest trends with Millennial investors.

Video Transcript

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ADAM SHAPIRO: It's time for our retirement segment, brought to you by Fidelity Investments. We invite into the stream Sara Rajo-Miller, who is a financial advisor at Miracle Mile Advisors. And we want to talk about younger folk and what they should be looking at toward investing in retirement. I'm talking about people age 40 and under. Millennials, even, I'm Gen X, so I guess we're talking about is it Gen Z who are before millennials? What are the mistakes or the good things that they're doing at that age?

SARA RAJO-MILLER: Hi, yeah, so let's see. When we're talking about next gen investors, we're typically talking about millennials who right now are between the ages of 25 to 40 years old. I think it's really important, though, to note that we love to lump them all together. And there's a big difference between let's say a 25-year-old who's just a couple of years out of college and a 40-year-old who may have 10 plus years of saving and investing under their belt.

Right now is an example I'm working with, I'll give you three 30-year-olds. One is going through an IPO event at their company. One is just in their first job out of college and working on 401(k) savings, and the other is focused on a real estate investment that they have. So they can be very different situations.

SEANA SMITH: Well, and Sara, going off the different situations, I mean, I think a lot of times millennials maybe get a bad rap. People compare them to previous generations and say, we aren't up to speed. I'm a millennial. I'm curious just how it stacks up, how millennials stack up compared to previous generations and where they were in terms of retirement savings when they were around this age.

SARA RAJO-MILLER: Millennials do get a bad rap. I've heard it all. And I think from personal experience, what I've seen is millennials actually do care about retirement savings. And they are working really hard to build up a nest egg. I'll give you a couple of big examples. Millennials, a lot of millennials came into the workforce in 2008. Obviously, a terrible time to enter the workforce. Not only was it challenging for them, but a lot of them saw their parents go through retirement savings that dwindled down because of the '08 crisis.

Another big difference I have seen is that millennial investors are a lot more independent. So that can mean either they're not expecting to rely as much on social security or pensions as the previous generation. Therefore, they are focusing more on retirement savings. But also, a lot of them are just making decisions on their own in ways that the previous generation wasn't. They are often delaying the decision to get married and have kids, buy a first house. So they are making decisions for themselves for a longer period of time.

I think the last big difference is awareness and access to information. There is a lot more access to information I think now than there was for the previous generation. So whether that's podcasts, online courses you can take through a university or something like Kaplan, or even Instagram. I had a client last week who told me that they watched a real estate investing seminar on TikTok. Now granted, that's probably not the best platform, or may not be the best platform for that specific subject, but I think it's great that there's so much interest and so much awareness out there.

ADAM SHAPIRO: I lost the computer for a second, but want to say thank you to Sarah Rajo-Miller who is an advisor at Miracle Mile Advisors. And remind everybody that our retirement planning investment trend segment is brought to you by Fidelity Investments. We'll be right back.