America's Cash-Strapped Millennials

It's well known that millennials in the U.S. have to live under a cloud of debt. A new study by LendingTree has shown just how bad the situation is for young Americans today with the median debt balance for millennials living in the country's 50 largest cities $23,064. The research analyzed anonymized credit report data on the LendingTree platform (which has over 9 million active accounts) from people born between 1981 and 1996.

Excluding mortgages, millennials in San Antonio, Texas, have the highest debt burden in the country with a median of $27,122. Pittsburgh comes second with $26,403 while Austin is third-worst with $26,164. Three cities in California had the lowest median debt burden - San Jose, Sacramento and Los Angeles. All of them have median debt levels below $20,000 among millennials.

Student loans account for the highest share of America's millennial debt, comprising 40 percent of their total credit and loan balances. The proportion varies condiserably between cities and its at its highest in Philadelphia at 49.1 percent and its lowest in san Jose at 24.1 percent. Auto loan debt is close behind and it accounts for 40 percent of those debt balances. Differing significantly by city (depending of course on public transport and the extent to which a car is necessary), it accounts for 43 percent of millennials' average total debt in Riverside, California and just 22 percent in New York City.