By Hailey Stone
Rebecca Henriques is graduating from college with the kind of checklist that should make the future feel steady.
She has a job lined up in Raleigh. She and her girlfriend have an apartment secured in Durham. She already has a Roth IRA through Vanguard, built from the kind of advice many young adults hear but do not always act on: start now, put money away when you can and let time do the rest.
From the outside, it looks like a clean beginning.
The reality has been less neat.
Even getting approved for the apartment required proving a version of adulthood that had not fully started yet. There was an offer letter, expected income and enough paperwork to show that the next chapter was real, even if the first paycheck had not arrived. The numbers existed, yet the life around them was still catching up.
That gap feels familiar to a lot of young adults right now.
Housing affordability is not only changing where people can live. It is reshaping how they think about saving, investing, retirement and long-term stability in the first place. The old sequence – graduate, get a job, buy a home, build a future – still lingers as the ideal, but it no longer feels automatic. For many, it feels delayed, stretched thin or increasingly out of reach.
At UNC-Chapel Hill, students in Professor Laura Ruel’s User Experience Design & Usability course have spent the semester working with Vanguard, an international investment management company, on a Year in Review project, thinking through how a financial platform can present information in a way that feels clearer, more useful and easier to trust.
The assignment is rooted in User Interface(UI)/User Experience(UX) design, but it brushes up against a wider set of questions about affordability, financial literacy and what people need from investing tools when everyday life already feels expensive.
The partnership began after Ruel met Steve Schang, a Vanguard senior user experience researcher who focuses on customer experience design, at a regional UX conference where she had presented work involving AI, web design and eye tracking. That conversation developed into a collaboration where the first Vanguard project focused on younger, novice investors and how the company could better reach them. The current project shifted to a
different audience, but the value of the work stayed much the same. Students were not designing for a fake company or turning in ideas that disappeared once the semester ended. They were working on a real problem for a real organization.
“You’re actually pitching your ideas to this company and they’re taking you seriously,” Ruel said. “This isn’t like, ‘Oh, well, this is nice that the kids are doing this.’”
That matters because the financial strain students are designing around is often the same one they are living through.
Henriques, a senior double majoring in computer science and economics, said she first got into investing after her brother explained the value of opening a Roth IRA. The logic made sense immediately. Start early. Contribute steadily. Give yourself time. Most of her investments are still in Vanguard, largely in a total market fund, with one share of Ferrari stock tucked in because she loves Formula One.
But investing still feels daunting for many people her age, especially when so much financial knowledge is expected and so little of it is formally taught.
“I think that our education system does a poor job of teaching people personal finance skills,” she said.
In 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law requiring public high school students to pass an Economics and Personal Finance course in order to be eligible for graduation. As the Class of 2024 was the first to meet that requirement, some young investors today do not have that course knowledge.
The gap between understanding and accessing financial resources becomes harder to ignore when housing starts crowding everything else. A person can understand that investing matters and still struggle to prioritize it. A person can know retirement is important and still keep moving it further down the list because rent is due, debt is real and homeownership feels less like the next step than a distant possibility.
Corey Hedges of North Main Financial Group LLC, in Charlotte wrote in an email that he sees housing shaping financial planning conversations from multiple directions. Younger clients are often balancing affordability with student loan debt, a combination that can make qualifying for a mortgage harder before they even get close to buying a home. Others are delaying long-term saving because so much of their income is already going toward rent, housing costs or trying to save enough for a down payment.
For many younger adults, he added, the traditional path of degree, house and family before 30 has become increasingly difficult to reach.
That changes what feels urgent and if homeownership remains the goal, long-term investing can slip into the background.
“Unfortunately, I think housing affordability can reduce the prioritization of retirement planning and other long-term goals for many young people,” Hedges said. “It makes it easy for those long-term goals to seem so far away that they can lose their real-time significance.”
That same shift is visible in Henriques’ life, even as someone who has already started investing.
She and her girlfriend are moving to Durham after graduation in part because Chapel Hill feels increasingly unrealistic. Too many people want to live close to campus, she said, and not enough housing exists to absorb that demand. The result is a market where prices keep climbing because people still must pay them if they want to stay nearby.
“It’s always been terrible in Chapel Hill,” she said, “but it’s especially bad right now.”
That pressure does more than determine a ZIP code. It changes how people imagine the future. A move becomes more than a move. Rent becomes more than rent. Every monthly payment starts competing with whatever long-term version of stability a person is trying to build.
When someone feels financially stretched, it becomes easy to sideline tomorrow to manage today.
“I believe the hardest part about balancing immediate needs and long-term goals is the emotional aspect,” Hedges wrote. “It is very easy to set aside long-term goals due to the pressure of meeting your near-term obligations.”
His answer is not a generic formula.
“You need to have a plan,” he stated. “And you need to have a plan that is unique to your situation.”
That emphasis on fit and clarity runs alongside what students are being asked to think through in Ruel’s class.
Over the years, she has built the course around collaborations with outside organizations, from media outlets to public health agencies to legal technology companies. The projects vary, but the standard stays the same. Students must think beyond what looks polished and ask what helps someone move through a system with less confusion. With Vanguard, that means understanding finance as more than data on a screen. It is also timing, trust, risk and the private strain people carry with them when they log in.
“You’re learning about UX, but you’re actually learning it in the context in which it’s used,” Ruel said.
That has made the class feel more tangible for Henriques too. It is one thing to learn interface design in theory. It is another to build something for a company whose tools already shape people’s real financial lives.
She also sees the limits of presentation when trust is involved.
Vanguard has repeatedly encouraged her to use its digital advisor, but she has not. Part of that is practical. She does not want to pay for something she feels she can do herself. But the hesitation is also about transparency. If a digital system is making decisions with her money, she wants to know what it is doing and why.
“If I’m giving AI my money, I want to know literally everything that it is doing,” she said.
That distinction matters. Younger users are not only asking for financial tools to look cleaner or feel more modern. They want them to make sense.
A platform can be sleek and still feel distant. It can simplify the layout without easing the uncertainty behind it. In finance, design is not only about aesthetics. It is about whether a person understands what they are seeing well enough to make decisions they can live with.
Ruel sees that need for clarity as part of why the original Vanguard project felt so important. It centered on younger investors who had barely entered the financial world, if at all. Students were listening to peers, asking what they wanted from an investment platform and trying to understand what might make them engage instead of back away.
“There needs to be some education about how these things work,” Ruel said.
That urgency is not just academic for her. She pointed to her own daughter, a full-time nurse at UNC Hospitals for nearly five years, who still could not reasonably buy a house in Chapel Hill. In that kind of environment, financial literacy stops feeling like an extra skill and starts feeling more like part of basic survival.
The broader industry is grappling with those tensions too.
Wallace Foutch III, an investment banking analyst at Bank of America in New York, described a financial world that is far more visible than it used to be. More people can access information, more people can participate in markets and more tools are available to people who once would have been shut out of them.
“There’s way more transparency now,” he wrote in a message thread to UNC Media Hub reporters. “People can access information and participate in markets that used to feel totally closed off to anyone without a Goldman email address.”
But he pushed back on the idea that finance is becoming more human-centered out of goodwill. This shift has not necessarily made the industry softer but in his view, has made mistakes harder to hide.
“I think the ‘human-centered’ piece is less about the industry having some kind of awakening and more about the fact that the consequences of getting it wrong are just more visible now,” he noted.
That applies to housing too.
Foutch described the housing crisis as “a real gut-check for the industry” because capital still tends to move toward the best returns, and affordable housing often is not where those returns are strongest.
He pointed to more creative financing structures, including tax credit programs and community development funds, where incentives can align more closely with projects that help people.
Still, the larger tension remains.
Housing exposes the difference between what markets reward and what many people need.
That is partly why a project like Year in Review carries more weight than it first appears to. A financial recap is not just a set of balances or graphs. It is a moment where a user is asked to look at the last year of their financial life and decide what it means. Progress may feel slower than they hoped for. Goals may still look distant. The account may show movement, while the person looking at it still feels stuck. In that kind of moment, wording matters. Hierarchy matters. What gets emphasized and what gets explained matters.
In 2019, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law requiring public high school students to pass an Economics and Personal Finance course in order to be eligible for graduation. As the Class of 2024 was the first to meet that requirement, some young investors today do not have that course knowledge.
Working with a real company, Henriques said, changed the experience entirely. That practicality gives the course a different kind of charge. It makes the work feel attached to the world students are about to enter, not sealed off from it and reveals how much financial confidence depends on more than money alone. It depends on what people understand,
what they can trust and whether the tools in front of them feel like they were built with real life in mind.
Housing affordability is not just making life more expensive. It is changing the emotional logic of planning. It affects what people delay, what they protect and what they convince themselves can wait. For some, retirement contributions move to the background. For others, homeownership no longer feels like a near-term goal. For many, planning ahead starts to feel like an exercise in negotiating with the present.
The UNC-Vanguard collaboration does not resolve any of that. It does not lower rent. It does not make mortgages easier to reach. It does not fix the mismatch between wages, prices and expectations.
What it does show is that financial tools no longer have the luxury of pretending users arrive untouched by real life. People come to these platforms carrying debt, rent, savings goals, anxiety and the persistent sense that adulthood keeps getting more expensive just as they are trying to begin it. If the market expects people to keep planning anyway, then the tools they use have to do more than function.
“Even if you make a lot of money, if you’re stupid with your money, you’re not gonna have a lot of money for very long, you know?” Henriques said. “And especially if you don’t make a lot of money… you need to be especially smart about how you use and invest that money.”
