Indebted youth: no health insurance. No plan for retirement. No paid vacation. If you're moving back in with mom and turning 30 with no significant assets, you are a member of "Generation Debt".

When Anya Kamenetz graduated from Yale in 2002 and couldn't find a good job, she began to wonder if the American dream was falling out of reach for her and her friends, some of whom had massive student-loan and credit card debt and a precarious job with a salary too low to cover it. Young adults in their 20s and early 30s are in bad shape financially, a reality that Kamenetz, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, confronts and analyzes in her new book, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young (Riverhead). While the money woes cut across the generation regardless of social differences, there are some unique pitfalls for young LGBT adults.

How would you describe the current financial mess that many young adults are in?

There's three areas I talk about in the book. One is the change in the importance placed on higher education as the path to success. Along with that is the cost of higher education shifting on to individuals. The government is just not paying as much. Area 2 is this much bigger economic transition we're going through, from a manufacturing to a service economy, where the average quality of job is just not as good. Health care is a huge issue for young people, because we're the largest and fastest-growing group of people without it. The third area is the issue of baby boomers retiring and taking more of our national resources.

So it's not just credit card debt?

Credit card debt is a huge problem for us--it's caused us to be the second-largest group filing for bankruptcy--but really I see it as a symptom of the other kinds of changes.

How do these issues affect young gays?

Gay people are more likely to gravitate to big cities, where the cost of living is higher. They have more reason to do that because they need a broader community. Obviously, marriage is a huge issue. If you're not getting married, maybe you don't get the same support from your parents, you're not saving as much, you don't have the same tax structure, and you can't share benefits.

Also, some young gay people are cut off by disapproving parents.

Absolutely--knowing you can't necessarily rely to the same degree on your parents.

So what can young people do to help themselves?

The most basic thing is just a reality check. Look at your credit report--it's free at www.annualcreditreport.com. And there are calculators all over the Internet for what you need to retire on. Financial experts say the number 1 determining factor on whether you've started to save for retirement is whether you know your number.