“On student loans: I have a good friend whose husband’s lifestyle is, as I call it, “employment-optional.” He also has more than $200,000 in student loan debt. Do I think she should give his loan debt the same priority from her income as other family expenses? Hell no.”
Lots of women take it on themselves to be employment-optional but somehow that’s not a slam on them and indeed they get a “you go girl .” Why is that?
^ Re: the above, is this husband carrying more weight with the household and kids? Is he taking burden off his wife in other ways to allow her to focus on maximizing her career and earning potential? If so, I don’t have problems with it if it works for them. I agree with @Pizzagirl. There is a double standard in our society.
It will be interesting to see, but I don’t know right now. DS got an account in his own name, taking me off the high school joint account so I don’t see what he spends! DD still left hers and I peek every now and then, but duct tape my mouth shut before i do. It is her money. He talks about it though, was almost not having grocery money at the end of the month because he would rather have a private studio than eat. He made a budget! DD is frugal as is her SO . She doesn’t budget, but she doesn’t spend a lot. I see me in our boy and my H in our girl … same approach to money. I am the one with analysis in Quicken of where the money goes. (DS uses MINT). DH knows in general how much money we have and how much to spend. He is the one who fights with the cell phone company to get the rate down sort of thing.
BIG difference between DH and I and the kids is that WE have money. Neither of our parents did. Both of us put ourselves through college pretty much (My grandparents helped me more than his family helped him). Both of us were completely self sufficient when we graduated college, as are our kids … except that they have stock accounts that DH set up . But we fully funded kids’ college (they are on their own for grad school, and managing on their grad stipends).
What we needed to do and didn’t realize until just recently, is TALK about larger money management . Neither DH or I had more money than our own salaries. Now we have what I think of as REAL Money (“I am RICH, RICH I tell you!”) YMMV with what makes me RICH. But we needed to sit down and tell kids about stocks and investing . Don’t buy the tax dodge oil wells we did in the 70’s to shelter our (to us) big salaries. Don’t bother with stocks, watch out for fees as well as returns since there is no difference between a 3% return with a 2%fee and a plain 1% return in a bank, and the bank is safer and lots less trouble for taxes (generally).
My friend’s husband almost got a Ph.D. and then dropped out. He then went to law school. My friend has borne the majority of all responsibilities throughout the marriage. No double standard here; if a woman were doing this, I’d also be offended.
Thanks for sharing your experience, either the experience in our (50s or 60s yo) generation, or the next generation (20s or 30s yo.)
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I could be called cheap in my spending habits. This actually give us some hardship in the first few years (maybe even a decade) of our marriage. Because of this, I occasionally have some concern that we may have raised a child who could be called cheap comparing to his peers, due to behavior inheritance.
It is often very difficult for us to convince DS to spend money. An example is that unless we bought a smartphone for him, it is very likely he would not go buy it himself even if he has the money (from his student loans.) When he got his first smartphone when he had been graduated from college, he mentioned that he finally got something that Mr. X (his suitemate in college, who flied first class for his vacation) had got in his high school.
Wonder a reason why he did not have a GF all 4 years in college was that he was too cheap! In his gap year, he had a colleague who had a girlfriend. They often ate lunch and chatted with each other together. He came from a very moderate background and is as careful about spending money as DS is. His friend said he had always hated the Valentine Day because it means he needed to part with his money. DS agreed with him and sort of congratulated himself that he had not had this “trouble” yet. I remember DS once said (likely still in high school) that having a GF means that you need to spend a lot of money and time.
Don’t get me started on this: At one time, he mentioned casually that his girlfriend did not return him the money for the ticket of a short train ride for one of their day trip. Hopefully, he did not ask for it later.
I don’t know about how the new generation handles this. In our generation, when you invited a girl out to have a day trip to a not distant destination, you were not supposed to ask her to pay for her share of bus or train ride cost. Doing so is likely considered as being too cheap by most in my generation.
Not using student loan money to buy a smartphone seems practical and smart, not cheap, to me.
Mr R didn’t get a smartphone until a year or so ago (2 years maybe?) and had the same flip phone since high school all the way until after undergrad.
IMO and IME, whoever asks for the trip/date/whatever pays- male, female, or otherwise. “Expecting” people to part with their money on Valentine’s Day does not reflect well on that person IMO. (But I am biased because I don’t like V-Day and do not celebrate.)
No, having a girlfriend doesn’t mean spending a lot of money. I think that’s a pretty sexist attitude to be honest.
Here is the difference between me and DS: When I finished the school, I did not have any student loans. (But I believed we only had a couple of thousands dollars after we had bought a clunker for my first job.) When DS finishes the school, he will have tons of student loans which he needs to pay back in the next 10+ years. A big difference.
Oh…we do not know whether DS’s GF has or has not student loans. Not our business to be nosy about their finances.
Ok…? I’m sorry, I don’t understand your point. Many of us have very different situations than our parents.
When my dad was my age, he had a kid and was going through a divorce.
Your S will be fine. If the loans are a dealbreaker for his girlfriend, THEY will figure that out. It is nothing YOU need to worry about.
We raised our son to pay for the girl, though his girlfriend will reciprocate by treating them to ice cream after dinner, funding the occasional movie, etc. They are flying down to Florida over spring break and he bought her airline ticket. (They are staying with grandparents so lodging is free.) I know it’s old fashioned but oh well.
Mr R was raised that way (guy pays) and it’s how it worked with his first two girlfriends.
I was not and I was having none of it. It worked for us and that’s how it worked for many of my undergrad friends. Then again, the circles I ran around in had little time or patience for what we considered to be outdated gender roles. Hence “IMO and IME.” I don’t pretend to be a representative sample 
Each couple will figure out what works best for them. And, truly, that is the only important thing.
@romani, In my generation and in the culture where I was raised, there is no denying that it was a sexiest society. My parent’s generation was even worse. (My own parents were worse than most people in their generation. When the parents had a fight, or more correctly speaking, when the father was angry at our mother, for any reason, we children were expected to kneel down before him as if our mother’s fault were also these little children’s fault — Do not blame me that I hate that aspect of culture so much today.) My grandparent’s generation was “horrible”.
I once worked in that kind of working environment between my college and graduate school. (Granted, that company was an old-school company dated from Japanese colony days, not the new breed of more westernized companies.) My female colleague (with the similar college degree I had) was required to wash my towel and put the clean towel on my desk everyday before I arrived at my office. How sexiest is that?!
yup, our generation was/is pretty sexy 
For sure! I really value my parents’ input when it comes to finances, but they had a much easier time than I believe I will. When they bought their house on Long Island, it was about 200k. Now houses on my street go for 800-900k. My mom stopped working when she had kids; I can’t envision a scenario in which I don’t need two incomes. My boyfriend and I both make decent starting salaries but we are very careful about what we buy. My parents tell me to go out and enjoy the city, see Broadway shows and try new restaurants, but bf and I would rather save as much as we can. We also split dates 50/50; I’d never expect him to pay for me, unless maybe it was my birthday. I think I’m financially responsible (just opened up an IRA!) and despite having no student loans, I still can’t imagine buying a house AND paying for college AND possibly private day school.
“see Broadway shows” Who can afford broadway shows these days?? It’s a definite splurge.
@rebeccar Kudos on the IRA! Keep funding it every year.
Haha, that is true! I’m hoping maybe by 2020 I can see Hamilton!
Don’t they still have the tkts booth at Broadway and 42nd to get discount tix (we used to go to the one at the world trade center, but…) And dont some theaters do a drawing at their box office for cheap/free tix the day of? ANd what about the RUSH and lottery ticket? http://www.nytix.com/Links/Broadway/lotteryschedule.html Any way to attend a rehearsal?? Just thinking outside the box when $$ is tight.
Ok, but your son is neither in your generation nor in your birth society so I’m not sure why you constantly compare him and his situation(s) back to this foreign place/time.
Ha…If DS told us the truth, thus was exactly what happened for their first official date (with his current GF.) He paid for the dinner and later in that evening she paid for the ice cream.
At one time, it seems she was trying to find out whether we would likely be as “difficult” as her mother’s inlaw (her grandmother, toward her mother.) A smart girl!
Well, I’m definitely from an older generation than the current 20-somethings.
But every time our generation complained too much about “how our generation didn’t have it easy”, my father only had to speak sotto voce for 30 seconds about how it was no picnic being born in the Great Depression, then having to fight in World War II - and all that before reaching age 24 or having the chance to go to college. That usually shut half of us up … the other half were too self-absorbed to understand.
I worry about a lot of things for my children’s generation. However, I also understand economics well enough to know that (absent a true disaster) it isn’t even a question that the vast majority of healthy, college educated couples will be able to afford a house and send their kids off to college.
People are falling victim to a variant of the “Yogi Berra” fallacy - "Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded."
If I had the chance to be 20 years old again, I wouldn’t even hesitate to do it. We are amassing more and more knowledge; the world is filled with more and more marvels. I am just sad that I’ll never get to see all of them. But that’s what kids and grandkids are for.
Yes, but post WWII, there were many, MANY social welfare programs that were designed to build and strengthen a (mostly white) middle class.
Those are gone now and we like to pretend they never existed. But they did and it’s why the 50s were a great time for a certain segment of the population.