Borrow Now, Buy Later: Gen Z investing Gets Messy

America's youngest adults are living a financial contradiction. Members of Gen Z are racking up credit card interest and leaning on buy-now-pay-later plans at the same time as they plan to put more money into stocks and retirement accounts, according to new research from Deloitte's Center for Financial Services. The Gen Z investing picture that emerges is not one of reckless spending — it is a generation trying to stay afloat today while still betting on tomorrow.

The findings come from Deloitte's ConsumerSignals survey, a monthly online panel of one thousand US-based respondents that tracks shifting financial priorities. According to the firm, Gen Z adults — roughly those aged eighteen to twenty-nine — are carrying credit card balances for more than a month at growing rates, even as they express stronger intentions to invest. The Gen Z investing trend is being reshaped by two forces arriving at once: a tougher entry-level job market and frictionless access to both credit and trading apps.

The debt side of the ledger

The numbers on borrowing are stark. From the third quarter of 2023 through the second quarter of 2026, the share of Gen Z respondents carrying a credit card balance for more than a month rose by nearly one-fifth, while that share declined among older generations. Buy-now-pay-later use tells a similar story: it surged to almost twenty-three percent of Gen Z in the first quarter of the year — the highest level among generations tracked across three years of data — before easing to under eighteen percent in the second quarter. For a cohort with rising Gen Z investing ambitions, that reliance on short-term credit looks less like comfort and more like pressure.

What has not changed is how Gen Z feels about the debt itself. Reported comfort with carrying balances has stayed largely flat over four years, even as older generations grew more comfortable with credit card debt. The resulting comfort gap nearly doubled, from just over six percentage points in 2022 to twelve points by the middle of this year, according to the survey. Deloitte's analysts read that as a sign of strain rather than preference: borrowing to get through a shaky job market, not borrowing because it feels fine.

The optimism side

Yet alongside the debt, the desire to build wealth is intensifying. Gen Z respondents told Deloitte they want to direct more of their savings toward stocks and retirement, a striking ambition for a cohort facing higher unemployment among recent graduates than the national average has seen in years. The Gen Z investing impulse, in other words, is not fading under financial stress — it is running in parallel with it, and the tension between the two defines the generation's money life.

Stephen Rogers, a managing director at Deloitte's consumer industry center, described the behavior as rational rather than contradictory: borrowing to survive an unstable short term while funding a long term that still looks investable. As he put it, the next twelve months feel uncertain, but the next twenty years still look worth betting on — "not a paradox," in his words, but what sensible planning looks like under pressure. Michelle Gauchat, Deloitte's US banking and capital markets leader, added that Gen Z is spending, saving and investing differently from the generations before it, a shift the industry can no longer treat as a phase.

Financial firms are paying attention. According to Deloitte, the combination of easy credit, trading apps and economic anxiety is prompting banks and brokerages to rethink how they court young customers — a cohort that wants both guardrails and growth. For Gen Z investors themselves, the survey is a reminder that the Gen Z investing story of this decade may be defined less by any single app or asset than by the balancing act itself: managing debt without abandoning the future, and borrowing for now without giving up on later. That split screen of Gen Z investing — stretched today, still saving for tomorrow — may be the defining money habit of a generation.

Sources: Deloitte Insights, PR Newswire