How to Declare Your Financial Independence

NEW YORK (MainStreet) -- The current job market doesn't make it easy for young adults to start out on sound financial footing, and their failure to assert their financial independence goes beyond the nation's high unemployment rate.

"Millenials are more dependent on their parents than any generation before them," says Joseph Templin, author of The Financial Mistakes of New College Grads and The Psychology of the Millennial Client. He explains that young adults have come to rely on parents not just for a place to live, but also as the source of funding for their phone bills, car insurance, health care, student loan debt and a slew of other miscellaneous expenses that prevent them from developing any real sense of how much it costs to live these days.

The current job market doesn't make it easy for young adults to start out on sound financial footing.

The severe (and at times, subconscious) financial attachment may have a lot to do with the relationship parents have with their own mom and dad.

According to Laura Scharr-Bykowsky, a certified financial planner with Ascend Financial Planning, the parents of Generation Y were largely raised by people who grew up during the Great Depression. Well aware of financial struggles, these grandparents were more likely to require their children to work for what they wanted. But the pendulum has swung the other way.

"Baby boomers had an adversarial relationship with their parents," Templin agrees. "To compensate, they've become much friendlier with their children and also more protective."

This altered mindset, coupled with advancements in technology that have turned luxuries such as TVs and cellphones into household staples, has made young adults used to an ever-present monetary safety net that has prevented them from learning some valuable life lessons.

"Many parents bubble-wrapped their children," Templin says, adding that when it comes to their finances, "they haven't learned to fall down and get scrapes."

But while it's certainly easy to rely on a parent to pay the bills, it's also a recipe for long-term financial failure. Study after study has indicated that most Americans are woefully underfunded for retirement, including this one that found 20-year-olds were experiencing serious trepidation about their own long-term financial investments (or lack thereof). At the same time, another study has suggested that young people are not nearly as worried as they should be about their debt.