For millennials, financial hardships in their relatively short working lives have been many. Yet they are finding fortitude and progress, even if their recovery is uneven.

Ross Wakeman-Hines, a millennial electrical engineer from Viera, Florida, bought a house last year right before the onset of the pandemic.

The trouble was, he hadn’t sold his present home. And when the lockdowns hit, the old house sat on the market – and sat and sat for a full year before he finally unloaded it.

That meant double mortgage payments and double the expenses of home maintenance, which forced him to suspend his 401(k) contributions to conserve cash.

His wife, Honghong, had it worse. The pandemic, along with rising political tensions with China, killed her business of helping students from China apply and get accepted to U.S. colleges. She’s now selling life insurance.

If ever there was a generation that could complain about lousy timing, it’s millennials. Through no fault of their own, they started their careers in and around the Great Recession, then in midcareer got hit with a pandemic that locked down businesses and threw millions of workers out of jobs. 

Their story is one of perseverance and – for many – of progress against these head winds. But the setbacks exaggerated trends already underway in the rest of the American workforce: A widening of the already-yawning gap between the haves and have-nots played out along gender, educational, and racial and ethnic lines. 

The hardship – and the pluck and creativity with which they are meeting it – goes beyond the Great Recesson and the pandemic.

“What this generation uniquely has going against them is just the high cost of so many essential things in life,” says Lowell Ricketts, a data scientist at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The rising cost of homes, higher education, and child care makes it more difficult for millennials to get ahead. “On so many fronts, this generation is pinching its budget,” he says.