What’s the point of locking your money away for the future when you could be spending it now? So goes the logic for many millennials, fewer of whom are saving for their retirement. That’s the case for Jenny Woolf* who has £7,000 in the bank and just £250 in a pension pot from a brief teaching stint. She sees herself as being “very much in the ‘doom spending’ category” – those who consider their savings so far from being able to fund something meaningful that they simply don’t bother putting money aside at all. Instead, they just buy more stuff. Signs of doom spending can be seen across social media, in posts celebrating vintage Chanel handbags, for instance, or exotic holidays – things regarded as “little luxuries” procured in spite of, or perhaps to distract themselves from, the state of their finances. Half of what Woolf, 33, has in her bank account will go on her upcoming wedding, and locking money away in a pension “doesn’t feel worth it,” she says. “I feel almost quite freed by it. I’m so far away from buying a house that I just go ‘yeah, let’s spend’,” she explains of her mentality. “That doesn’t...