Although not as many millennial households own mutual funds as those of other generations, millennials are buying funds earlier than their elders did.
That's according to a survey by the Investment Company Institute that found that, while less than a third of adult millennial households actually own mutual funds, the median age at which they bought them was 23.
GenXers didn't start buying mutual funds till the ripe old age of 26, while baby boomers didn't touch the stuff till they were in their thirties.
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But boomers make up 40 percent of all mutual fund-owning households as of the middle of 2015, holding 53 percent of all household mutual fund assets, while GenXers held second place at 32 percent, owning 27 percent of household mutual fund assets, and adult millennials came in third at 16 percent, owning just 5 percent of all household mutual fund assets.
While the so-called Silent and GI generations own considerably more of the mutual fund assets owned by households than adult millennials, at 15 percent, they make up a smaller percentage of those who own mutual fund assets, at just 12 percent.
Millennials' entrée into the field of mutual fund investments at such a young age likely came via their retirement plan, since 67 percent of mutual fund-owning households that purchased their first mutual fund in 2010 or later purchased that fund through an employer-sponsored retirement plan, compared with 57 percent of those that made their first purchase before 1990.
Nearly all investors in mutual funds, according to the study, were focused on saving for retirement, with 91 percent of households owning that type of investment saying that saving for retirement was a financial goal; nearly three quarters said it was their household's primary financial goal.
And that goal probably drives not just their interest in the performance of those investments but also their view of the mutual fund industry itself: 59 percent of those who own mutual funds said that fund performance was a "very" important factor influencing their views of the industry, and nearly four in 10 cited fund performance as the most important factor.
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