Mrs. Dow Jones: Why Old Wealth Rules Fail Millennials When Cost of Living Is So High

If millennials follow the rulebook their parents used, they may be in trouble, says financial influencer Haley Sacks, known as Mrs. Dow Jones. She sees younger generations struggling as wages fail to keep pace with the real cost of living. College and housing have moved from difficult to genuinely unaffordable for many.

“I’m in my DMs and people are complaining because since 2000, the cost of living has gone up 67%, but wages have gone up 7%,” Sacks said on a recent episode of the Bloomberg Talks podcast. “There need to be new rules that meet us where we are at now.”

Her 67% figure may actually understate the problem. Between 2001 and 2024, the cost of maintaining a basic standard of living rose 106%, according to the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity’s True Living Cost (TLC) Index. That compares with a 77% rise in the Consumer Price Index over the same period. The gap exists because the CPI tracks a broad basket of more than 80,000 goods and services, including discretionary items, while the TLC focuses on the unavoidable costs that dominate working-family budgets: housing, healthcare, food, transportation, and childcare. In 2024 alone, housing costs within the TLC rose 10.6% and childcare jumped 7.7%. The latest LISEP data puts the annual cost of achieving a minimal quality of life at roughly $47,100 for a single adult and $121,100 for a family of four.

Sacks, who has spent nearly a decade building her brand, recently published a book, “Future Rich Person: The New Rules of Building Wealth.” In it, she pushes back on the finance industry’s canonical claim that all debt is harmful.

“One of the old rules of building wealth is that all debt is bad, that we need to all be out of debt,” she said. “But, I mean, you guys talk to really rich people all day. You know, they love leverage … If you have student debt and it’s below 7%, which is sort of the threshold of low interest rate … it’s actually OK. Let’s just pay the minimum on it and use whatever extra money that you have left over on these other financial goals.”

Consider a hypothetical millennial balance sheet. Say you carry $30,000 in federal student loans at 5% (a rate that applied to undergraduate borrowers in earlier years; the current undergraduate rate for 2025-26 is 6.39%), with $500 a month in discretionary cash. Option A: apply all $500 to the loan each month. Option B: pay the minimum, route the $500 into a workplace 401(k) with a standard 50% employer match on the first 6% of salary, then invest the remainder in a low-cost index fund.

In Option B, the employer match alone delivers an instant 50% return on every matched dollar before the market contributes anything. The loan costs 5% a year. Choosing the loan payoff over the match means trading a 50% return for a 5% return. Even setting the match aside, a diversified equity portfolio has historically returned roughly 7% to 10% annualized over long periods, which is comfortably above a 5% loan.

That logic is what Sacks means by leverage. Wealthy households rarely rush to extinguish a low-rate mortgage. They let cheap money sit while their capital compounds elsewhere.

The variable that flips the answer

The rate on the debt is everything. Sacks’s 7% threshold is a reasonable dividing line because it sits at the upper edge of long-run expected stock market returns after inflation. Above that line, paying down debt becomes the better use of every extra dollar.

Apply the same $500 a month to a different scenario: a $10,000 credit card balance at 24% APR. Current credit card rates average between roughly 21% and 25% depending on the borrower’s credit profile, so 24% is a realistic figure for many cardholders. Putting money into the market instead of paying down that card means earning perhaps 8% on investments while bleeding 24% on the balance. That is a net loss of roughly 16 percentage points a year on every dollar diverted from the payoff. No diversified portfolio reliably clears a 24% hurdle. The right move is to pay that balance down aggressively, with one exception: always capture any available employer match first, since that return is both guaranteed and immediate.

The core rule is simple: compare the rate on each debt to the after-tax, after-match return available elsewhere. The higher number wins.

Tips for millennials

1. List every debt you carry with its exact interest rate, then sort from highest to lowest.
2. Draw a line at 7%. Anything above that line gets aggressive extra payments; anything below gets only the minimum.
3. Before any extra debt payment, capture your full employer 401(k) match. That match is a guaranteed return that no debt rate beats.
4. Park three to six months of expenses in a high-yield savings account so a surprise expense does not push you back onto a 24% credit card.
5. Route anything left after those steps into a low-cost index fund inside a Roth IRA or a taxable brokerage account.

Editor’s note: This article was updated to add the LISEP Minimal Quality of Life cost figures for 2024 ($47,100 for a single adult; $121,100 for a family of four), the CPI-versus-TLC comparison (77% vs. 106% since 2001), and current federal undergraduate student loan rate context (6.39% for the 2025-26 academic year), and to note that current credit card APRs average roughly 21% to 25% depending on creditworthiness.

Contact [email protected] for any questions or corrections.