Are You Financially Better Off than Your Parents?

Agreed. It's very hard to tell from this distance.

Sky-high interest (and mortgage) rates then, but pre-1970 or so you could (mostly) raise a family on a single income.

Interesting thing I suppose, is that you can look across the 20th- and 21st-century economic/political landscape of America and find that people aren't a helluva lot happier as individuals now than they were then - regardless of their financial wellness.

 

Maybe it's my imagination, but it seems like for a lot of people, even when doing well, a bad economic hit can always be just around the corner. Depending on the car, a new part can be a couple thousand (counting labor). My property taxes went up $1,000 over 2021. So did my homeowners' insurance. My dad never had bill for either that exceeded $850.

Then again, my parents did have to buy braces for me, which had to really suck back then.

 

Lectures about what?

And who was the better Battleshipper, you or Joe?

 

Lectures about I wasn’t supposed to let anybody in, even a kid across the hall that we already knew. This was the early 80s before you heard about latch key kids regularly, so I think my parents might have been nervous about attracting attention from DHR.

I don’t remember either of us dominating Battleship (or Connect 4) so we must have been pretty evenly matched.

 

For starters, to which parents do I compare? The 25-year-old mom who tended house and cooked three meals a day and the 30-year-old dad who worked a regular job at one of the plants in town and worked a weekend swing shift at a plant 30 miles away? Or the 40-year-0ld CPA mom with her own small practice and the 45-year-old dad with a small tool-and-die shop? Or any other set of circumstances, attractive or no, at other points in their lives?

Like the time when I was about 5 and they discovered that after the week's groceries had been bought and the week's bills paid, they had a quarter left over ... which they argued over for a week (mom wanted to buy a couple spools of thread, dad wanted to be able to get coffee during breaks at work). Or the time in the late '70s when my dad knew of a potential customer in Fort Worth (irony of ironies) and they: 1) flew first class into DFW; and 2) got shitfaced on the plane while waiting out some delay or another on their return flight. This being not five years after they'd hauled a pop-up camper (sans air conditioning) for a week at Myrtle Beach, during which they'd splurged on ... a six-pack of beer.

 

We had three vacation destinations when I was a kid.

---Aunt's/uncle's place in Henderson, N.C.
---Aunt's/uncle's place in Winchester, Ky.
---Atlanta, once.

All the other kids regularly went to Myrtle Beach, it seemed.

 

Your family is a great story, brother.

 

One of the areas where the current emerging workforce has kicked themselves in the ass is growing up in an environment that seems to demonize unionized labor. They have fallen for the trap that they're only one idea away from being rich and getting involved with unionized labor would take that away from them. That any one of them could be the next Zuckerberg.

 

Sounds familiar. Sometimes my grandparents would spring for one night, maybe two, at Myrtle Beach with my mother, sister and me (my father would stay behind so he could work and, probably, luxuriate in a quiet house), but until I was in my early teens vacations were almost always a pitched tent (or pop-up camper) in a nearby state park campground.

The big change for my parents' finances came in the late 1970s, when my mother finished college and started practicing in public accounting AND thanks to some quirk in the tax code one of my father's customers got him to build multiple dozens of this machine for a plant they were planning on setting up in Mexico. Because he already had several things worked out re: the building of it, he made really good money on that. As I recall that plant never opened and those machines never were put into use.

It was around then that a regular the-four-of-us-only trip to Myrtle Beach started happening. I'll never forget standing at the Holiday Inn check-in desk with my father and seeing him pulling out a wad of cash to pay for the room (I suppose some people used credit cards back then, but we weren't that kind of people) ... I was astonished to see that much money. It was close to $200!

 

What truly turned things around for my parents was my dad getting his VA disability rating bumped up from 20 percent to 80 percent around 2000 (for a case that began in 1977 - gotta love government red tape!) That put him in the sweet spot where he was drawing more money each month and getting his health care covered, but just under the cutoff where he could still work full time and not lose his benefits. Combine that with my mom having finished trade school a decade earlier and getting well established at the city-owned hospital (read: state pension plan) and suddenly they were on a completely different trajectory from the couple that got married at 18 and declared Chapter 13 when I was in elementary school because of my brother’s medical emergency when they were working jobs with no health insurance.

 

My grandmother inherited about a quarter-million from her rich brother in the early 1970s.

The bad news: My mother was one of 11(!) kids, so not much of that money made its way down to our family. (Although come to think of it, maybe that's how we paid for the $10,000 house expansion).
Grandmother did hand all of her grandkids a $100 bill, though. And from that my Estes rocket hobby was born.