Since I posed the question of do you think your kids will be better off than you I guess I should answer it.
I’m not sure really. We have been really fortunate with several strokes of luck. My parents and grandparents were able to leave us a nice nest egg with investments. I ignored the wee little investment nest egg from my grandparents — bank stock in their county bank, but it split and split again and split again as the tiny little county bank got taken over by bigger and bigger banks. When we wanted to buy a house 25 yrs ago I had that stock we could sell some of for a down payment, which proved to be great timing because then it tanked afterwards. So I was lucky I didn’t do anything with the stock before then, lucky that my grandparents could leave it to me at all (it was only like 100 shares in a little county bank), lucky that it split so many times, and lucky that I sold It when I did.
We were also lucky to be able to buy our house before housing prices got crazy in our area (bought for $139K and houses in our neighborhood now go for mostly in the $350k-450k range). We were just kids and thought that was the next thing we should do a few years after we got married. We could have upgraded from our “starter home” but we were conservative about that and didn’t.
My husband luckily has a job where he will get an actual pension in 2-3 years if he wants to take retirement at 20 years and do something else.
My parents — my dad was in sales and my mom worked for the schools — had also investments that they were able to leave to us three kids. I was lucky there too. They were solidly middle class with a three bedroom brick ranch. But they saved well.
We are somewhat frugal (don’t buy a lot of extras except nice food) and don’t have any debt except the last $20k left on the mortgage. Cars all paid for, don’t carry credit card debt.
We will be able to send D22 to college without loans if we want to.
Our kids (oldest is 21) are not ambitious for money. Oldest is working in food service and taking a break from Community College right now, but plans to go back in the summer. Not sure if a 4 year degree is in that one’s future or not, but maybe. Our 18 year old definitely wants to go to college, but wants to major in Creative Writing, so not a clear path to a lucrative career.
As far as the geopolitical stuff, we graduated college in the mid/late 80s and married in the early 90s. I do feel like things are worse in the greater world now than they were then. I think politics all over the world is more polarized. The Ukraine situation seems much worse than Iraq or Iran since they didn’t actually have nuclear weapons. COVID is more contagious than HIV. Global Warming is more intense now. We had Glastnost and Perestroika and the Berlin Wall coming down and Solidarity.
So I think if the world keeps turning (some days I have my doubts) my kids will be okay. They’ll be fine. We will be able to help them and they do know how to work (my 18 yr old has a part time job too), but I don’t know that they will ever be in careers where they will be raking in the big bucks and I do fear for what this world will be like in the future.