Young Blacks and Latinos aspire to pass on intergenerational wealth at a higher rate than their White peers — despite the fact that they themselves are much less likely to have received an inheritance. Yet, despite these aspirations, 44% of Gen Z’s aspiring homeowners say that they are not on track or will never own their own home.
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For Asian aspiring homeowners, a unique barrier gains prominence: process complexity. Specifically, 35% of Gen Z and Millennial off-track Asian aspirants found that the homebuying process is simply too complicated to navigate. This rate is the highest of any group and significantly higher than the 21% of young White aspiring homeowners who indicated a similar concern. This research suggests that aspiring Asian homeowners may be disproportionately blocked by navigability of the system itself.
Our survey confirms that Black Millennials are more optimistic about their households’ financial future than their White contemporaries (46% vs. 31%), despite earning less, having less savings, and receiving far less family financial support. This finding is consistent with a well-documented pattern in research on the financial psychology of the Black community: one that finds a propensity toward optimism in the face of structural adversity and an upward-mobility framework that measures progress against one’s own starting point rather than the progress of peers from other races.
Though JBI’s 2050 Survey finds that young Blacks and Hispanics aspire to homeownership, entrepreneurship, and intergenerational wealth at high rates — in many cases surpassing their White peers — there is a clear gap between their aspirations and their realities. These same communities lack access: access to family financial resources, access to affordable credit, access to adequate income, and access to the knowledge needed to navigate a system not fully designed with them in mind.
77% of Black Gen Z and 70% of Latino Gen Z aspire to build an inheritance to pass on to loved ones — higher than 64% of White Gen Z — even though Black and Hispanic Gen Z are far less likely to receive one (18–20% expect an inheritance, versus 33–38% of White and Asian Gen Z).
Over 50% of Black Gen Z used a payday loan app or buy-now-pay-later product in the past year - vs. 11% and 28% of White Gen Z. This exposure did not start in adulthood. Black and Latino respondents are far more likely to have grown up in households where high-cost products were used by their parents.
While homeownership is a near universal aspiration, the same does not hold true for business creation. Instead, our research found that the desire for entrepreneurship evidences its own striking racial pattern. Overall, 36% of respondents aspired to own a business when they first became financially independent. Among Blacks, however, that figure reaches 56%. Interestingly, we find that the greatest appetite for entrepreneurship is among Black Gen Z (67%) and Black Millennials (66%) — roughly doubling the rates of White Gen Z (34%) and White Millennials (31%) that share the same ambition.