Are You Financially Better Off than Your Parents?

My father died at 67, and he lived the longest of any of the men on his side of the family.

My mom’s side isn’t much better, though her father made it to 92. But he’s the exception.

I’ve been fighting an uphill battle against genetics for a long time. And it scares the shit out of me. Especially since I’m already closing in on 50 and my kids are still in elementary school.

But, unlike my dad, I quit smoking in my 30s and quit drinking in my early 40s. And I started running marathons. Figured in terms of prolonging my life, that’s a pretty potent 1-2-3 punch.

 

And you're obviously doing all you can to make it be the norm. Continue!

 

My ex is talking about retiring in the next 4-5 years, basically as soon as she gets her 25 in with the state education pension plan. She’s been fixated on that from the moment she started teaching out of college (and used to chew me out for the years spent in Georgia she couldn’t “buy back” even though moving was a mutual decision.) But that would mean being done in her very early 50s, and man that just sounds boring to me. If she doesn’t double dip at the seg academy up the road, my poor daughter will have her at home full time for the last year or two of high school.

 

I started this thread wondering if the typical newspaperman today was better off than my grandfather who worked at the Minneapolis Tribune from 1945 until 1953.

My grandfather was destitute in 1941. He had been fired for alcoholism from a small paper in Wyoming. He was living with my grandmother and their three kids with his parents. He was running a trapline for income.

WWII broke out. Since he had three kids he missed the draft. Due to labor shortages he was able to find a job in Billings for three years before moving to Minneapolis. During this period the family expanded to six children and my grandmother never worked outside the home. A substantial part of the check went to my grandfathers drinking (my grandmother would go to the paper to meet my grandfather coming off work on payday to grab the check). But after renting for a couple years he bought a home in what my Mom described as a nice neighborhood (It was near Lake Calhoun on the Southwest side). I am sure the house was not particularly big. During this period the family expanded to six children and my grandmother never worked outside the home.

What newspaper in this country is paying enough money to a journeyman reporter that he could buy a 1,000 square foot home on his income after three years at the paper? I can not conceive a way that someone could get married and start having children right out of college like my grandparents and parents did with only one income.

 

Check back in 15 or 20 years. Depends on whether I get hit by a bus or drop dead of a stroke vs. pissing away my life savings on 6 years of memory care.

 

When I started full time as a sportswriter in 1997, I had a conversation with a first year coach, and we came to the conclusion that I was making what a first year teacher made at the time. Fast forward to 2012 when I bailed as assistant sports editor, and I was making less than a first year teacher ... in 1997. I actually made less my last full year in the business than I did earlier in my career because of pay cuts. I make more than double what I ever did or would have in the newspaper business.

 

It isn’t as sexy as hedging your parlays at Uncle Ex’s Sportsbook but it is the same idea.

Making Sense of Your Long-Term Insurance Options

 

My dad died with $500 in the bank. No property. No savings.

My mom is still alive. I think she is better off.

In 12 years, my wife and my home will be paid off. Right now it sits at about $450,000. I have a vested retirement with the state and my wife and I at one point we were on track to have $1,000,000 for retirement, before stocks took a shit. That does not include the house. But we still own stock, and that’s important.

We would like to leave our daughter $250,000 to $300,000 in wealth, and our money manager has already started an account for her. Our kid is a freshman making $13 an hour and already has $1600 in the bank.

We are much better off. My mom and dad never went to college, so their earning potential was far more limited. He wasn’t smart enough, but she could have and done much better for herself.

Left writing in the late 90s.

 

Sadly, not even close. This has been long a sore subject for me and I delayed responding. I am now at 46, exactly twice the age my dad was when he married my mom back in the late 1960s. They bought a duplex in 1972, 6.5 years before my dad got his bachelor's.

When my dad was my age, he was on his second owned home, been married for more than 23 years, and had two (awesome) children. I've never been married, am childless and never owned a home. I want to change all those things.

I quit newspaper journalism in the early 2000s for graduate school in order to change careers. By the time I wrapped up my new degree, we were in the midst of the Great Recession. It took me a painfully long time for me to find full-time work in my new field. That necessitated a lot of moves around the country which made life hectic and socially unproductive.

 

Divorced guys read this differently than married guys.

 

Not getting into your relationships or social life, this highlights a real difference in our generations, compared to our parents': The difficulty in buying a home. It almost cannot be done now without a very good job. Just the downpayments, in a lot of places nowadays, are what the previous generation would've paid for the houses, and they would've been considered mansions. It was all relative to people's generally lesser paychecks, of course, but the difference was so glaring as to be almost unbelievable.

An example: It wasn't the first house my parents bought -- that one was a 2-bed, 1-bath little place with a yard and garage that they purchased for $8,000. My dad made about $65 a week at the time. The next home in which our family spent a significant amount of time cost $18,000, in the Long Island, N.Y. suburbs. And the one in California in which we also spent some of our growing-up years cost $38,000. It was a 4-bed, 2-and-a-half bath ranch house, on a corner, with a pool and large front and back yards. We looked it up a few months ago, and it had recently sold for $1.1 million. We could not believe it because, while it was a nice house that my parents were proud to have owned, it certainly wasn't anything great that would seem to command that amount of money. It had the amenities of the pool and was on a corner lot, but it was just...a nice, average house in a middle-class neighborhood.

The price of housing is ridiculous, and puts it out of reach for a lot of average people nowadays. You can't just work to make a living anymore. You have to make a good living to be in any kind of a good position going forward.

 

I alluded to this earlier, but it took me five years as a working journalist and a promotion to “management” to make more money than I did delivering pizza when I was 19.

At my last newspaper stop, I was in charge of hiring copy editors and page designers. I was told I could offer “up to” $21,000/year as a starting salary — in the mid-2000s, a stone’s throw from the nation’s capital. The part that not a lot of people saw was how many talented people came in to interview and left laughing after hearing that offer.

I made decent money in my last three years in the business, and still couldn’t even come close to making a decent, normal adult life for myself and assorted partners until I left.