Generation Z in Czechia Is Investing Heavily in Stocks — But Forgetting About a Financial Cushion

Young Czechs under 30 are increasingly putting their money into stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrency, unwilling to let inflation eat away at their savings. According to banks and investment firms, Generation Z is starting to invest much earlier than their parents did — sometimes with just a few hundred crowns a month — but experts warn that many of them confuse investing with saving, risking being left with nothing in case of an emergency.

Betting on Riskier Instruments

According to Lubomír Valík, an investment analyst at Partners, young people are choosing volatile assets quite deliberately: they have decades ahead of them, plenty of time for market dips to smooth out. Members of Generation Z surveyed for this article generally take price swings in stride — some even see downturns as a chance to buy more.

Data from Fio banka backs this up: in the portfolios of clients aged 18–30, 79% of all investments are in stocks, with ETFs coming in second. Still, only 5% of clients in this age group actually have an active investment account with the bank. Portu reports a similar pattern: younger clients tend to favor automated, higher-risk ETF portfolios managed through mobile apps, while interest shifts toward more conservative strategies as they get older.

Portu CEO Radim Krejčí also points to the downside of investing's growing popularity: young people often start speculating, lose money, and after a bad experience abandon long-term investing altogether — even though investing, by nature, should be "boring."

The Real Risk Isn't the Market — It's Having No Safety Net

Analyst Valík argues that market swings aren't the biggest danger facing Generation Z. Far riskier is putting everything on one card — a single stock, a single cryptocurrency, or a tip picked up on social media. His advice: diversify investments first and foremost, and invest small amounts regularly.

The trouble is that many young people simply don't have a financial cushion to fall back on. A May survey by Deloitte found that roughly 50% of millennials and Gen Z members live paycheck to paycheck. A study by XTB from last year showed that 30.5% of Gen Z respondents have savings that would last just one month, and a third wouldn't survive more than a quarter without income.

Petr Žabža, head of investments at Air Bank, doesn't think young people are irresponsible: bank data shows that 57% of those under 25 are able to regularly set aside at least a tenth of their income. He notes that young people want control over their money and aren't willing to "lock it away" for years — but he admits that a common mistake is investing an entire emergency fund at once.

This is exactly where Valík sees the biggest gap in young investors' behavior: "For a lot of young people, an investing app shows up before a three-month expense reserve does." According to a survey commissioned by the Financial Market Guarantee System, a third of young people save no more than a thousand crowns a month. "And anyone who immediately funnels that money into stocks ends up unable to pay for a car repair or cope with a sudden loss of income," the analyst says. Experts recommend building up a reserve covering three to six months of living expenses before starting to invest at all.

Investing With a Mortgage in Mind

Jakub Rychlý, co-founder of the financial literacy organization Nekrachni, believes young people don't actually confuse the concepts of "saving" and "investing" — the real problem is that many skip the step of building a reserve altogether and jump straight into investing, seeing little point in keeping a large sum sitting in a savings account.

Members of Generation Z interviewed for this piece say they invest with specific goals in mind: a mortgage down payment, buying an apartment, or retirement decades down the road. 24-year-old Michal, for instance, invests in stocks but also keeps a savings account and a pension fund on the side. 27-year-old Tadeáš puts around 10,000 crowns a month into ETFs, planning to take out a mortgage within five years and use his savings both as a down payment and a source of passive income.

Analyst Valík stresses the fundamental difference between saving and investing: a bank deposit is insured up to €100,000 and doesn't lose value, while investments are uninsured and can easily lose a third of their value at exactly the wrong moment. In his view, savings are suited to goals two to three years out and to building a reserve, while investing makes sense for goals five years or more into the future.

Read also: Savings accounts in Czechia: bank rates for 2026

Source: seznamzpravy.cz