The 10 Cities With The Most Responsible Millennial Spenders

Image:

There’s a prevailing cliche that exists about Millennials: they’re prone to living beyond their means, credit-illiterate and slightly irresponsible, enjoying the spend-now, consequences-later era of their early youth.

Only that may not always be the case, as Credit Karma research has found. Average credit card debt for Millennials, viewed as a proportion of their disposable income, has shown that this figure differs massively across America. There are many, many cities across the country where Millennials appear to be spending more responsibly. In some cases this revolving credit card debt-to-disposable income ratio was as low as 11.79 percent, in others, it was high as 36 percent.

To calculate this, we looked at our database of over 45 million members for the average credit card balance of the millions of Millennial Credit Karma members – what we define as between the ages of 18-34 – who both live in the 100 largest cities in America and have credit card debt. To determine their disposable income, we looked at the US Census for the average income of Millennials in these same cities, adjusted it by citywide unemployment rate, and using data from Zillow subtracted how much a typical person living there might expect to pay in rent. We then divided the first figure by the second.

The results show that the average Millennial in Detroit, MI (which came out first by our calculation) has a credit card debt-to-disposable income ratio of just 11.79 percent, which is far lower than the average Millennial from Scottsdale, AZ, which placed last on our list, who has an average debt-to-income ratio of 36.01 percent.

The ratios in the top ten cities on our list ranged from that 11.79 percent to 14.63 percent; for the bottom ten cities (Scottsdale, AZ, Irvine, CA, and Miami, FL filled up the bottom three spots) these figures ranged from 27.7 percent to 36.01 percent, more than a third of an average Millennial’s disposable income. A lower percentage may indicate that Millennials in the top ten cities are more responsible with debt than their counterparts.

Here’s the list of the top 10 cities with the lowest ratio of credit card debt to disposable income:

Disp. Income Avg. CC Debt Debt to Income
Detroit, MI $25,511 $3,007 11.79%
Jersey City, NJ $32,571 $4,333 13.30%
Saint Paul, MN $29,944 $4,043 13.50%
Washington, DC $38,058 $5,263 13.83%
San Bernardino, CA $22,157 $3,082 13.91%
Newark, NJ $25,005 $3,536 14.14%
Milwaukee, WI $25,729 $3,677 14.29%
Philadelphia, PA $27,851 $4,023 14.44%
Baltimore, MD $28,843 $4,188 14.52%
Cleveland, OH $24,750 $3,621 14.63%

This list is an approximation of spending habits created using publicly available US Census information, data from Zillow and our own information sourced from the millions of Credit Karma members between the ages of 18-34 who live in America’s 100 largest cities and have credit card debt. It should be used as a guide only, and is not to be seen as a definitive judgment of the spending habits of Millennials who live in these cities.

The data assesses the average, revolving credit card debt of 18-34 year olds in these cities as a proportion of disposable income in America’s 100 largest cities. The calculation uses the average credit card debt of Credit Karma members between the ages of 18-34 among those who have open credit cards. For disposable income, it takes into account the median income by city for 18-34 year-olds, according to the US Census, adjusts for citywide unemployment rate, and subtracts the average rental costs, according to Zillow. Our calculation assumes that residents of each city were sharing their house with one other person.