Yep, Being A Young, American Adult Is A Financial Nightmare

Here are the graphs to prove it.

Poverty is an astonishingly common experience here in the world's richest country. As I wrote this morning, almost 40 percent of American adults experience it for at least a year by age 60. 

But you know who poverty is especially common among? Young adults. 

Based on the data I shared earlier, which were given to me by Washington University in St. Louis professor Mark Rank, I've pulled together a few more graphs that I think illustrate the difficulty of making ends meet in your twenties and early thirties (particularly if you're not lucky enough to, say, have a college degree). Exhibit a) between the ages of 25 and 34, 41.3% percent of Americans will spend at least a year earning less than 150 percent of the poverty line, which is a technical way of saying "being pretty broke." By age 35, a little more than a quarter will have lived under the actual poverty line, which is the technical way of saying, "really truly broke."