Are You Financially Better Off than Your Parents?

Junior college is one of our society's great equalizers. Night classes at community college were my gateway into higher education. CC saved me a ton. It's why my student loans were manageable.

 

These stories are great.

My parents were both Depression-era kids. My dad's family had more than my mom's but not by much. Somehow they both went to college, thanks (for my dad) to the GI Bill, but we never were what I would call comfortably middle class until my dad became an administrator instead of a teacher when I was 12 or 13.

The best gift they ever gave me was teaching me to be frugal, but not cheap, with your money. Buy good things, but only what you need. Tip appropriately. And save. Somehow my mom became a cagy investor and the estate they left me and my two brothers was not life-changing money, but retirement-securing money, and a nice chuck of change for two kids from two podunk New York State towns a stones throw from the Pennsylvania border who probably never had taxable income above $50K.

One quick edit: Looking back, I can't underestimate the impact the GI Bill ultimately had on my family. My dad went to college on it, BA and MA. It still paid his way for classes to get certified as an administrator more than 20 years after he left Army in 1946.

He got a GI loan so he could buy our house in the town I grew up in, even though he was making only about $3500 a year as a full-time teacher.

Other than Social Security, the GI Bill might have been the greatest law passed in the 20th century.

 

Sounds like you and your brother both ended up doing well.

USPS for 30 years is a good landing spot, I think. And the prior military career? Special, useful and excellent in its own right.

And you with close to 50 years in newspapers? Awesome, because it's what you wanted and must have worked out well.

 

I'm a boomer, so of course I'm financially better off than my parents. They grew up in some hardscrabble parts of the Midwest during the Depression. Mom quit school at 16 and went to work as a domestic in Chicago because there were too many mouths to feed at home. Dad and some of Mom's brothers put in stints in the CC camps, which were open to the sons of families on relief. Dad worked at the post office; after sis and I were old enough Mom went to work as a nurse's aide.
They made some serious sacrifices to give my sister and me a good start in life, but the federal government made it easy to get a higher education as well with lots of financial aid and cheap tuition. I consider one of the great failings of the baby boom generation to be our refusal to direct the government to give a similar hand up to our children.

 

The differences in the generations is becoming clear through these posts, particularly a few from the last page or so.

My parents, too, grew up in the Depression. My mom's family was genuinely poor, and my dad's not much better off. The stories of how my mom slept in a drawer as a baby and toddler and how they had no food other than beans in their little apartment for Thanksgiving one year are now family canon. Both issues were tackled by one of my mom's uncles, who was...not rich, but better off than her parents.

A well-loved, and loving and generous member of the family, he was the husband of one of my grandmother's seven sisters, and Uncle George bought my mom a used crib when he came over once and saw her, healthy and growing fast, but crammed into the drawer on the floor. Then, with hardly anything to eat on the holiday, he went out and bought some ground beef and vegetables, along with some coffee and some milk for my mom for them all to enjoy for Thanksgiving.

A couple years later, my mom and her parents got kicked out of the apartment they'd been living in when they fell too far behind on the rent. My grandmother fainted dead away upon being told this was going on, and my mom, about 5 at the time, started crying and screaming. "I thought she was dead," my mom said. "What did I know? I didn't know what was happening." The landlady throwing a pot of cold water on my grandmother's face to rouse her hardly helped matters any.

Another little bit better-off family member again rescued them so that they weren't left out on the streets. They stayed in a duplex, the top unit of which just happened to have been recently vacated, and which my mom's family was told it could live in, for a cut rate, if my grandmother would also agree to work as the janitor for the building. She did, and they did, with my grandmother rising early each day to shovel coal into a furnace/stove in the mornings to warm the place up, and then also cleaning/maintaining all units as needed.

Anyway, the point is, average Depression- era people didn't have money at all. Now, people have way more money, and, theoretically, at least, we would all seem to be better off than our parents. But we're not, because the money -- more of it though it is -- can't be stretched nearly far enough nowadays.

Different definitions of and perspectives on being poor (and rich, too). But the results can be much the same, relatively speaking.

 

I think I am. Mom is a mid-level supervisory nurse and my stepfather is a retired industrial mechanic/machinist.

Not sure I’m better off than Mrs. tbf’s parents though. Her dad worked a union job with AT&T for 50 years and has a nest egg approaching 750K.

Although given a job in which I generally love every two years, I neither own nor have any equity in a home like they do. But the ones they own aren’t going to make them rich.

The pension, disability, and health benefits I earn when I retire in a couple years will be worth a good deal more than that. Plus, with all the tax-free income made on deployments over the years, we’ve been able to save a pretty decent 401K.

 

I asked my buddy this question and he said “we might be better off monetary wise but not quality of life wise.” I had not thought of that but I agree.

 

Yes money was tight, but family was a lot closer, as your post illustrates. Even when I was growing up, we saw aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents pretty regularly. I miss those family ties, and I still reach out to cousins I knew well when we were kids -- with varying levels of success. I just learned that a cousin's wife died, and reading her obit I was surprised to discover that my cousin died a couple years earlier. I never heard a word about it. He was six or seven years older than me, so I always got his hand-me-downs from my aunt (a sweet, sweet woman).

It's also worth noting that that Depression-era generation and the one before them did a lot to create a robust middle class in this country. There's also the postwar dominance the US enjoyed, but the economic progressivism of the mid-20th century was their doing. (Actually, the postwar dominance was their doing too.) We boomers were lucky to be born in an unusually prosperous time.

One of my favorite history books is "Lies My Teacher Told Me." Its theme is that public education tends to treat history like an unerring path of progress. A more realistic view is that America can, and has, regressed fairly often on economic, social and/or political bases. While I progressed as an individual over the last 40 years, I don't think our country has.

 

Here’s part of the history we aren’t allowed to teach in red states now.

https://www.history.com/news/gi-bill-black-wwii-veterans-benefits

 

A pension: a very valuable thing because it is generally less volatile and thus more secure than the currently prevailing 401k's, I think, is almost extinct nowadays. My mom would have been in real trouble upon my dad's death if not for his pension.

 

My mom has a pension. She gets like $3,500 a month off of it. More than enough for her to live off of since basically she has everything paid off (I mentioned it with my contribution to this thread, she doesn't realize how well off she is).

One stop I was at still had a pension while I was there. I was there for just about two years even and I got a payout when I left. I can't remember what it was, but it wasn't terrible. The sports editor retired while I was there. He was in his 50s. He is pretty comfortable. I'm actually amazed a newspaper kept a pension as long as it did. It is like all the others now and barely has a staff.