Both my kids would have to try really hard to not do better, real effort lol.
My son’s father has mental illness and hasn’t worked since the day I took him to court for child support when our child was just short of one year old. He lives with his mother and does not leave her house at all, which was a gradual thing but by the time our son was a young teen he was house-bound.
My daughter’s father has a great federal position as an engineer but has significant debt and alcohol issues. Thank goodness we were never married.
Both kids were raised by me as a single parent and while they had everything they needed, they had little they wanted in the young years. It wasn’t until about ten years ago that I was able to make enough money to give them their “wants”. They saw me go back to school to get my degree while working 32 hours/week and caring for them both by myself. My son and I did our homework together at night, my daughter was just a toddler. On the other hand, we were never on assistance and they have a great work ethic. Son has been in the USAF for 8 years and D is in her freshman year at college. Smart, hard-working kids…I can’t imagine they won’t go places I could never dream of.
@MotherOfDragons My wife and I are moving to a one bedroom condo. And we aren’t leaving a forwarding address. We will find the kids when the grandkids arrive.
@MotherOfDragons I guess you could move to Texas. Very few basements here. I miss them. The soil is not right. The weather here screams for them, but it is very expensive to do so and is rarely done. (At least in North Texas…can’t really say if that is the case everywhere)
We are moving to the Piney Woods within a few years of the last one finishing HS. We will have some land, so they can visit, but they may be in tents in the backyard. Grandkids will likely get ‘indoor’ access. haha
My dad worked for a long time in the world’s largest/most valuable company, and the salary and benefits are near impossible to come by in other places (despite this, we have been through some rough patches due to some truly extenuating circumstances, and we have come out a lot more grateful for what we have).
All of my siblings went the professional route (Medicine, Engineering and Business). They have varying degrees of ambition. Some are more driven than others. Will they (and I) have higher economic standing than my parents? I honestly don’t know. I sometimes doubt it. My siblings are all over the world, and salaries for some professions in some countries are not what you would think they would be.
I just hope that I can apply myself enough to whatever it is I end up doing so that I’m not put in a position where I have to depend on anybody for anything. I agree with @conmama, having a disability can be really challenging
D1 is doing better than me at her age, and I thought I was doing pretty well. She is not a big spender relative to her colleagues, but she can and does travel around the world for pleasure. Her biggest concern now is how she will pay for her unborn children’s private education. She has no plan in going back to school because it would not help with her current career.
D2 is 5 years younger than D1. She grew up while we had more disposable income, so she’s had more luxury growing up than her older sister. Interesting enough she is the one who wants to go into public services in law. Both D1 and I are wondering how she is going to manage. D1 actually said once D2 figured out she could no longer shop at Saks then she’ll go into Big Law. We will see. At the same time, D2 is attractive enough, maybe she will marry someone wealthy so she could have her lifestyle and still do what she loves. Ok, just pile on.
I feel confident in millennials. I mean, it doesn’t help that baby boomers screwed up the economy for us with reckless investing, but I think we can bounce back, especially when it comes to STEM.
Not especially accurate, Cali. Some of the whiz-bang types that made the decisions regarding all the derivatives and other weird and risky financial instruments that crashed, as well as the MIT types that did the programming were in their 20’s and 30’s. Hardly boomers. Plenty of blame to go around.
Do u mean science innovation will solve world hunger? Or do you mean that a high paying STEM job will ensure a comfortable standard of living for that employee?
At just barely 19, I think our daughter is already doing better than we did even though she is not gainfully employed (unless you count her merit scholarship). She is by far a more serious and capable student than her father and I ever were, and she takes every opportunity that comes her way and runs with it. But the best part is that she loves to learn so much and is energized by opportunities and challenges.
I am far less worried about her potential to do well financially as I am about success in having healthy long term relationships and/or hopefully a marriage. Her father and I have managed to be happily married for almost 35 years now, something that NONE or our siblings (5 between us) can say. Serial marriages and divorces are so painful emotionally and financially, and the risk seems so much higher for that now. I know what my mother went through when my father left her when I was a young adult, and I have seen all of our siblings and a number of friends go through it. I pray that we have passed on some ability to succeed in marriage and family life if that is what she wants–truly means more to me than any income or degree.
I think about this a lot, and not just about my kids specifically, but their age group in general (mid 20’s). I’m in a rust belt state with a has-been economy, and I’m pretty confident it’s not coming back. I raised my kids to be very debt adverse and frugal, but I never factored in the wives they would acquire
Both sons have a career government job. When I graduated in '86 the government was an employer of last resort. Now I’m glad they have it–pension, insurance, steady employment. They both work hard and have side businesses. I think they’ll end up somewhat below us financially, but in the general range. Both girls have degrees in good/stable fields, but they are serial spenders.
D is a college freshman and struggling with her LD. Just hoping she can find a major and job that she can get through.
Basement jokes aside, I moved (on my own) to Italy when I was 19 and began supporting myself (and never went home again), and H moved out and was independent very early, as well. Our siblings both seemed to get mired in the apron strings, and while I don’t place judgement on it (my brother knocked up a girl, H’s siblings had a VERY cushy home that was always open to them), it’s not what I want for my kids. H and I have had a lot of adventures living in different places and chasing the dream.
What we’re shooting for is for the girls to love us enough to want to visit us all the time, but spartan enough to not want to stay. While our door is always open to them, the door is probably going to be a little house on stilts somewhere close to the beach in FL-they’ll be sharing a bathroom, and that’s practically a guarantee that they’ll be motivated to strike out on their own once they graduate college (yes, bathrooms again. It’s like the secret answer to everything).
My parents have summer homes , hefty estates to disburse (to grandkids, as we’ve all given blessing to skipping us to favor the flotilla of children) and comfortable retirements. We are never going to have a second property or the time to spend there, and our retirement packages are decidely less comfortable and less available before 65 or 68. So, already, we’re downhill.
My kids have no student loans (yay!) but also don’t have high earning potential at this point in their 20-something lives. If you aren’t in STEM or finance, it’s a cold world. But I never believed that whole “do better than your folks” trope, anyway, so we aren’t losing sleep over it either. We did start them Roth IRA’s, at least!
My H and I have done well and had a comfortable life with a couple of bumps in the road. All three of our kids will do better than we did. Two are out in the working world, one at Google, one at Spotify, both already making great salaries. All three went to Ivy League schools which led to great opportunities for them.
It seems that the same type of professional job these days would not allow our kids to buy the same type of house in the same type of community due to the crazy escalation in home prices. I was able to move out immediately after graduation and even earning a low wage, lived in a desirable city with roommates and saved money. Kids these days get great jobs and are living home because the rents are so high. Of course expenses differ too. We did not have cable, internet, and cell phone bills. It seems like kids these days have to earn more to attain the same level of comfort.
Also, my dh has a small pension from an old company and my kids most likely won’t. Health insurance was much cheaper and co-pays much smaller.
I think my kids will be OK, but where they choose to live will be impacted by income more than we were. I think it will be even harder to buy a house, save for retirement, have kids and put them through college than it is today.
So am I. I don’t think you understand derivatives and the similar financial instruments these people used. They took risky mortgage loans and rebundled them into huge packages that couldn’t be disentangled, and with the same bad mortgages often being in multiple packages. It is way too detailed to get into here, but this was a major aspect of the crash, more so than the original bad loans themselves because of the way it accentuated, multiplied actually, the risk. And the people that came up with the ideas to do these and had the mathematical chops to make it happen were mostly millennials, not boomers. Like I said, plenty of blame to go around.
@fallenchemist I know that. I took a class on the crash. But no one held a gun to anyone’s head and told them to take out a mortgage. A lot of adults knowingly took out mortgages they could not afford. And yet they pick on the millennials who struggle to find work today because of a trap they walked into. Of course there is blame to go around. The bankers, the brokers, the people.
^^ We saw that in our neighborhood-there was a certain type of personality that took on a jumbo loan with little to no equity, then proceeded not to pay taxes or the neighborhood HOA fees, all while posting on facebook about their latest Jimmy Choo shoe purchase. Most of those people got flushed down the recession toilet 2008-2010, and the neighborhood took on a decidedly more reserved flavor with the next round of owners, who tend to be older.
I’ve never bought into the mantra that home ownership is a path to wealth-we’ve owned 8 homes (rented several in addition), and if I go back and look at all our prior homes on Zillow, only 1 has increased in value substantially. Some have gone down even decades later as the promised gentrification of the area never happened.
We don’t counsel our kids to buy property as part of being a grownup, that’s for sure.
If we’re talking one of the factors of the 2008 crash, only the very oldest portions of the millennial generation would have been old enough to have finished their educations and worked long enough to the level needed to be hired and trusted to “make it happen”.
A critical mass of colleagues at the same level are likely to be younger Gen Xers and their supervisors/senior level executives who were consulted and approved the mortgage loans and risky derivative bundling were mostly boomers with a limited number of older Gen Xers*.
Most of the millennial generation would not only not have been in a position to land such jobs, most were still in the midst of getting their educations when the 2008 crash happened. As such, while it’s true a minority of the older portion of millennials may have participated, to make even an implicit implication their generation were also responsible as a whole is IMO highly misleading and injudicious to them.
Gen X were the baby bust generation who do not have the demographic numbers to have had an impact in comparison to boomers or millennials before 2008 and after.
