3 Actions Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha Can Take to Beat Inflation

Inflation is eroding your purchasing power. Learn 3 proven actions millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha can take right now to fight back and build real wealth.

PERSONAL FINANCEECONOMICSMONEYINSPIRATIONAL

Garrett Duyck

4/11/202611 min read

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If you're a millennial, Gen Z, or even an older Gen Alpha starting to think about your financial future, you already feel it. The math isn't mathing.

Rent keeps climbing. Groceries cost more every trip. A starter home feels like a fever dream. And the advice from older generations, "just work hard and save," rings hollow at best when the economic ground beneath you is completely unstable.

As a millennial myself, I've spent far too much time studying economics than I care to admit. It was fun for me, but also a survival necessity. With that weight of understanding and experience behind me, I have two imperative messages for my fellow young adults:

You are not "crazy." You're not imagining this. It's not your fault.
A victim mentality won't solve the problem. The path is narrow and requires sacrifice, but you can break free.

Your frustrations are legitimate. The U.S. fertility rate dropped to 1.6 children per woman in 2024, well below the 2.1 replacement level, largely because young adults say they can't afford to raise kids. 75% of millennials and Gen Z have considered living in a tiny home. The rise of full-time van life and RV living isn't just a lifestyle trend; it's a survival mechanism. For many, it's a housing strategy born out of necessity. These are symptoms of a deeper problem.

I know this because I lived it. I'm a millennial who grew up in poverty, siphoned gas from a lawnmower just to get to school, bought my first car with student loan money, only to have the transmission die three months later (costing more than the value of the car), and started my career with nothing but a mattress on the floor and a computer desk. Over seven years, I systematically built financial stability by understanding how inflation actually works, and positioning myself on the right side of it.

That's what this article is about. I'm going to teach you three actions you can take to fight inflation. Not theoretical actions. Not things that require a trust fund or a six-figure salary. Actions that I've taken myself, that anyone can take, starting now.

The Inflation Machine: Why the System Is Working Against You

Before we get to solutions, you need to understand the mechanics. Not to make you angry (though it might), but because understanding the problem is step one of solving it.

Inflation erodes the purchasing power of your money. A dollar today buys less than a dollar five years ago, which bought less than a dollar ten years before that. The U.S. dollar has lost over 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve was created in 1913, with the decline accelerating sharply after 1971.

That year matters. In 1971, the U.S. effectively abandoned the gold standard, removing the constraint that limited how much money the government could create. Before 1971, every dollar was supposed to be backed by a fixed amount of gold. After 1971, the only thing backing your dollar was a promise. The game changed after they changed the rules in that fateful year. Unsurprisingly, the last Baby Boomer was born BEFORE 1971, setting up the entire generation to benefit from the coming inflation wave.

What followed was predictable. The money supply expanded dramatically. The M2 money supply, a broad measure of dollars in circulation, rose from $4.6 trillion in 2000 to $19.5 trillion by 2021, with roughly $3.4 trillion created in 2020 alone. More dollars chasing the same goods and assets means those goods and assets cost more dollars. That's inflation.

Here's the part that directly affects your life: inflation raises the price of assets faster than it raises wages.

Since 1985, the median household income in the U.S. has risen by about 255%. Sounds decent until you learn that median home prices surged over 415% during that same period. In the early 1970s, the median home cost about 2.5 to 3 times the median household income. Today, that ratio sits above 5, and in cities like Los Angeles, it exceeds 12.

In simple terms, this phenomenon is made possible because existing homeowners do not experience a rise in shelter expenses and instead experience a windfall of home equity. When the process compounds over decades, a divergence in net worth creates a great disparity between those who own assets and those who do not. Naturally, kids do not own assets. Therefore, this asset disparity becomes a generational one.

This is the cost-of-living squeeze. Wages rise, but not fast enough. Between January 2021 and July 2025, the Consumer Price Index rose 22.7% while average hourly earnings increased only 21.8%, resulting in a cumulative real wage decline. For 25 consecutive months between 2021 and 2023, inflation outpaced wage growth every single month.

This phenomenon didn't appear out of nowhere. It flared up following the Great Recession when the Federal Reserve discovered the full power of monetary expansion, pumping trillions into the financial system. It exploded again after the COVID-19 pandemic when unprecedented spending and money creation sent prices surging across housing, food, energy, and nearly everything else.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: voting or protesting, while important civic actions, will not produce material change in your financial life fast enough. Policy changes take years, sometimes decades, to filter down. The inflation that's already happened cannot be undone. The dollars that were already created are not being taken back.

So instead of waiting for someone else to fix this, you can focus on three actions that put you on the right side of inflation starting today. Here they are.

Action 1: Fix Your Living Expenses

Because inflation causes the price of goods and services to rise over time, one of the most powerful things you can do is lock in your largest expenses at today's prices.

The biggest expense in most people's lives is shelter. And when it comes to shelter, there are two paths: renting and owning.

Renting means full exposure to inflation. Your landlord isn't absorbing rising costs. They're passing them to you. Since 2020, rents across major U.S. cities have surged an average of 36%, with cities like Miami (+53%) and Tampa (+50%) seeing even steeper increases. If you're renting, your shelter cost rises every year with virtually no ceiling.

Buying a home with a fixed-rate mortgage does the opposite. It fixes the largest portion of your shelter cost at today's rate. In addition, it positions you to ride the wave of inflation, instead of swimming against it.

Consider this: a $ 3,000-per-month principal and interest payment today will still be $3,000 per month in 20 years. But the dollars you're paying it with will be worth far less due to inflation. You're effectively paying back your mortgage with cheaper money over time. Meanwhile, the value of the home itself tends to rise with inflation. U.S. homes have historically appreciated an average of 4–5% per year over the long term, with periods of much stronger gains.

A mortgage is leverage. It's borrowed money used to purchase an asset that tends to rise with inflation. Sometimes the appreciation outpaces the financing costs, generating cost-free returns. That's an extraordinarily powerful position to be in.

Let me illustrate with a real story:

In 2017, my wife and I decided to buy our first home. Admittedly, I wanted to keep renting because I thought houses were overpriced and due to "crash." That was emphatically wrong. My wife insisted that we needed the control and stability of homeownership to start our family. So we bought one of the cheapest homes we could find.

There were several issues with buying a cheap home. It required a lot of fixing up, which consumed my weekends. The neighborhood was also subpar. Looking back, we could have comfortably afforded a bigger house and would have had more peace of mind.

In contrast, my friend, who is also a millennial, had saved up a substantial down payment and was ready to buy his first house. He shopped for a long time and was never satisfied with any of them. Like me, he was looking for a cheap, cheap house. Ultimately, he decided to keep waiting.

But then the unthinkable happened. The COVID pandemic hit in 2020. In all the chaos, the Federal Reserve artificially pushed interest rates to the zero bound (0%) and flooded financial markets with liquidity, which is a fancy way of saying they printed and spent a lot of money. This resulted in one of the hottest housing buying frenzies in modern U.S. history. Home prices nearly doubled in less than 2 years.

My wife and I were able to sell our home at a huge "gain" and used the proceeds to afford our next home, which had also appreciated violently. But my friend who waited was now shockingly behind. His down payment had lost a huge chunk of purchasing power. That one decision cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars in net worth.

Yes, homeownership comes with rising costs too. Property taxes, insurance, utilities, and maintenance all increase over time. But with a fixed-rate 30-year mortgage, a large portion of your shelter expense becomes locked in. Compared to renting, where 100% of your housing costs are subject to inflation, owning a home dramatically reduces that exposure and rises with inflation.

My biggest financial mistake was waiting to buy a house. I waited because it was unknown to me. I didn't understand home buying. I didn't have people in my life to look to as examples of homeowners. I learned that owning assets is not optional to build wealth, and that financial ignorance is never an excuse.

If homeownership feels overwhelming or unfamiliar, you're not alone. I created a resource specifically for this.

👉 Download a free copy of The First-Time Homebuyer Survival Kit — a bundle designed to walk you through the homebuying process step by step, so you can fix your largest living expense and stop renting your future away.

It's critically important that, when buying a home, the homebuyer can comfortably afford the monthly payment, including rising variable costs and home maintenance. There are a few strategies that can help you get into your first home at a more reasonable cost. These include house hacking, roommate sharing, and simply buying a home you can't afford. This requires sacrifice: you will live in a home that you hate for longer than you want. I did it. It changed my life.

Action 2: Buy Inflation-Protected Assets

Fixing your living expenses is defense. Buying assets that rise with inflation is offense.

Here's the core principle: if inflation raises asset prices, then owning assets means your wealth grows with inflation rather than being eroded by it.

This is what separates those who fall behind from those who get ahead. When the Federal Reserve expands the money supply, the new money flows into the financial system, inflating asset prices. Stocks rise. Real estate rises. Certain commodities rise. If you own those assets, you benefit. If you don't, you're watching from the sidelines as everything gets more expensive.

The data backs this up. The S&P 500 has returned roughly 10% per year over the long term, including dividends. Even adjusted for inflation, that's approximately 7% real annual growth. Real estate has historically appreciated 4–5% per year on average, with significantly higher returns during inflationary periods.

These aren't returns reserved for the wealthy. They're available to anyone who participates.

My first income-producing asset was a dividend stock. It wasn't exciting. Dividend stocks are boring because they are simple. That's why I like them. They pay you just for owning them. Over time, I expanded into additional asset classes: equities, real estate, risk assets, and digital assets. Many of these generate supplemental income that helps offset rising inflation-related costs.

You don't need a large amount of capital to start. You don't need to understand complex financial instruments. You need to begin.

That's why I built the Portfolio Builder. It's a tool designed to help people, especially those who are new to investing, get started buying income-producing assets.

👉 Try the Portfolio Builder and take your first step toward owning assets that rise with inflation instead of watching from the sidelines.

Action 3: Monetize You

This one isn't a necessity, but it can make a significant difference.

The first two actions, fixing your expenses and buying assets, work within the traditional framework of earning a wage, managing it wisely, and investing the surplus. Action 3 goes further. It's about creating a new income stream that is uniquely yours and has the potential to grow with inflation.

I'm not talking about side hustle culture. I'm not talking about picking up a side gig that trades more of your time for a few extra dollars. I'm talking about leveraging what's unique about you: your skills, your perspective, your experience, to produce income that can scale.

The key words there are "can scale." If you cannot scale the endeavor, you'll continue to trade your time for pay, which does not keep up with inflation, as we have discussed. Building something that can scale can be done in a number of ways, but the most straightforward is to use the internet to scale digitally.

There are many methods to do this. Social media content creation. Blogging. Selling digital products online. The common thread is that you're packaging something you already know or enjoy into value for other people.

One of the most flexible and universal methods is affiliate marketing. The affiliate marketing industry is projected to reach $37 billion globally in 2025, growing at roughly 15% year over year. It's not a fad. It's a mature, expanding industry that rewards people who create genuine value.

Here's what makes it powerful: you don't need to create a product. You don't need inventory. You don't even need to charge anyone for your content. You create content around something you genuinely know and enjoy, and you earn commissions when your audience purchases products you recommend. When you share that content online, the scale is virtually limitless as it can reach the whole world.

Everyone has something in their life that can be used to create value for others. For example, say you love hiking (I love hiking). You can share your adventures, your trail recommendations, your gear reviews, and instead of charging for that content, you use it to promote affiliate products like hiking boots, backpacks, or trail guides. Somebody is going to buy that gear anyway. You're simply being the trusted voice that helps them choose.

I did this with CheatCode Wealth. It was easier than I expected, largely because I used Hostinger's AI-powered website tools to build and grow my platform. You don't need to be a web developer. You don't need a marketing degree. You need a topic you care about and a willingness to start.

The beauty of this approach is that unlike a side gig where your income is capped by your hours, a monetized platform can grow. As your audience grows, so does your income. Unlike a fixed hourly wage, that income can rise with inflation because affiliate commissions rise as product prices rise.

The Bottom Line

Inflation isn't going away. The dollars that have been created are not being recalled. The policies that caused this are deeply entrenched. And while systemic change may come eventually, waiting for it is a losing strategy.

But you are not powerless. Here's what you can do, starting today:

Fix your living expenses. Buy a home with a fixed-rate mortgage to shield your largest cost from inflation. (Grab the free First-Time Homebuyer Survival Kit if you're not sure where to start.)
Buy inflation-protected assets. Own stocks, real estate, and other assets that rise with inflation so your wealth grows instead of shrinks. (The Portfolio Builder can help you get started.)
Monetize yourself. Leverage your unique skills, knowledge, and experience to build an income stream that can scale and rise with inflation. Read this article about how I used Hostinger to build it fast with no experience.

I grew up in poverty. I started with nothing. I didn't have wealthy parents, a trust fund, or a lucky break. What I had was a decision: I would learn how the system works and position myself on the right side of it. Seven years later, I was financially stable. Today, I'm extending my hand to help you do the same.

You can do this. The system is rigged. But I'm sharing the ways to level the playing field. That's why I named my business "CheatCode Wealth," because the cheat codes are right here.

Build your wealth. Keep your life.

Disclaimer: This article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Consult with a qualified financial professional before making any investment or purchasing decisions.

Garrett Duyck is the founder of CheatCode Wealth and the writer behind the Portfolios & Bedtime Stories newsletter. He writes for employed people who want to build wealth without quitting their job, burning out, or missing out on life. Garrett is a former contributor to Seeking Alpha, where he built an audience of more than 4,000 readers, and he has published more than 140 articles about investing, passive income, and personal finance. He was among the top 20% of analysts according to TipRanks.

He has built a portfolio of income-producing assets that generates more than $50,000 per year in passive income, and he and his wife have paid off more than $180,000 in non-mortgage loans while raising four children. Garrett grew up in poverty, became a first-generation college graduate, and believes the best money strategies are the ones real families can actually stick with over time.

Educational Disclosure: CheatCode Wealth content is for educational and informational purposes only. It is based on personal experience, research, and firsthand investing practice. It is not personalized financial, legal, tax, or investment advice. Always perform your own due diligence and consult with a licensed professional before making significant financial decisions.

Affiliate Disclosure: To support the site, some links in our articles may be affiliate links. If you click on these and make a purchase, CheatCode Wealth may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. We only recommend tools and services that Garrett has personally used or thoroughly vetted for the CheatCode community.