Are you a millennial or generation Z and do you feel guilty about the situation of your personal finances? Social networks like Instagram or TikTok are part of the problem. According to a recent study, the ads, impulse purchases and harmful comparisons caused by these platforms are ruining the finances of young people.
64% of social media users who made an impulse purchase after seeing an ad regretted at least one purchase, according to a survey conducted by Bankrate, a New York-based consumer financial services company.
Those purchases “can often hurt our finances more than benefit our lives in the way we think they would on social media,” said Sarah Foster, an analyst at Bankrate in the
But social networks not only cause worse purchase decision making. They also seem to be to blame for younger people feeling more guilty and sad about their financial situation.
The explanation, according to the Bankrate study, would be that Instagram and Tik-Tok provoke unrealistic comparisons between the wealth that influencers appear to have and that which young people themselves have.
“Influencers play a significant role in the pressure to make impulse purchases on social media platforms. A lot of people feel that they, too, could be just as glamorous if they just had that coveted swimsuit or pair of shoes,” says Foster, one of the study’s authors.
Forty-four percent of millennials surveyed indicated that social media made them feel bad about their appearance, but also about how successful they are in their careers, home, and relationship situations.
“Social networks distort reality in the sense that they give their best and sometimes portray unrealistic versions of themselves (…) You don’t know if someone went into a lot of debt to finance that incredible vacation (…) This can lead to some kind of competition,” says Ted Rossman, senior credit card industry analyst at Bankrate.
Younger people felt worse about themselves and their personal finances than baby boomers when using social media. Well, while only 20% of baby boomers felt bad about their appearance and 22% about their finances, this proportion rose to 44% and 46%, respectively, in the case of millennials.
These data correspond to the results of a survey that involved more than 2,400 people in the United States.
In the case of Mexico, according to the National Survey of Self-Reported Well-being 2021, young people between the ages of 18 and 29 who use Instagram very frequently have an average level of satisfaction with life of 8.7, on a scale of 0 to 10.
In contrast, older people, between 45 and 59 years old or 60 years and older, have a level of satisfaction related to the use of Instagram of 9.1, on the same scale.
