Falling behind (your parents)
In the discussion of Falling Behind, Jennifer commented that people compare themselves not just to what’s around them, but also to what their parents when they were little.
It made me wonder if part of the reason that young adults today — especially those from middle- to upper-class families — feel like they can’t keep up is that their parents waited until they were older, and more established, to have them. So, you’ve got 20-somethings comparing their lives to what their 50-something or 60-something parents can afford now, rather than to what their parents were able to afford when they were in their twenties. As Robert Frank suggests, maybe it’s a mistake to learn to tell the difference between good wine and Two Buck Chuck when you’re young, when you can’t afford the good stuff anyway.
April 7th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
Funny, I’ve been thinking about this a lot as we look at houses. I don’t think it’s the age thing; I think it is objectively harder for us now than it was for our parents.
My parents were born just before the baby boom, and it was a lot easier for a young couple to buy a house back then. At my age, my parents were comfortably settled in a nice three-bedroom home. We are looking at tiny two-bedroom fixers in dodgy neighborhoods. Of course they didn’t live in Southern California, but even here real estate was *much* more affordable back then.
April 8th, 2008 at 2:25 am
I do think certain things are harder to afford now, like houses — but. When my parents were my age, they had no microwave and no dishwasher; no garage door opener!; they had a TV with just standard cable, no movie channels and no DVD player…
You see what I’m getting at. It’s not so much that 20-year-olds have been raised on 2 Buck Chuck, but on the internet and TV and cell phones, which they will be surprised to learn costs at least $150/month (after a $2K outlay for equipment).
(BTW I had to google ‘2 buck chuck.’ Ah the underprivileged small-town life : )
April 8th, 2008 at 7:07 am
This is going to be my children’s problem, not mine. Not only is our standard of living ridiculously higher than that of my parents when I was growing up, it’s marginally higher than my parents’ standard of living now (more than marginally in the case of my long-term unemployed father).
April 8th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
I’m going from memory on the details, but I do know that real income for people in the States has been dropping since the early 70s, and life is indeed just objectively harder for us now. In our parents’ day, often *gas* for the car cost more than the car itself, over its lifetime. That is unbelievable to the current consumer.
Also, it can’t be understated that middle class people today must go to college — an expense that is borne solely by the individual. Combine that with much higher housing expense, and the things that are cheaper for us today (like TVs, jeans, and groceries) just don’t make up the difference.
April 8th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
well, since my parents are older, i would say that i’m an exception to this. their standard of living was not terribly high by any measure, other than owning 20 acres of land in an extremely undesirable part of the country.
but i definitely see this with my nieces & nephews, who are twenty-something children of their baby boomer aged parents (my older siblings). the sense of entitlement i see exhibited, quite frankly, astonishes me.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:45 pm
My mother, a boomer, always tells me that my generation had it easier than hers. I agree and disagree with her because our debate covers different areas, not just money. Alot of women in my family around my mother’s age tell me raising children today seems much more difficult than when they did it. So many more items due to new safetly laws and more expected of the mother’s due to education expectations. We may have more things that seem to make life easier, but there are more expectations and distractions.
I have to admit my standard of living is much higher than my parents, but they don’t have college degrees. I think that the boomers may have been born after WW2 and helped shape society through the sixties, but it is today’s young people that are truly benefiting from prosperity and acceptance of former social constraints.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:07 am
There’s been an absolutely staggering increase in wealth in this country since the Second World War. Just overwhelming. I look at pictures at the Shorpy blog often – here is the page about Shorpy himself: http://www.shorpy.com/shorpy. The folks running the blog put up photos daily from, mostly, US between the Civil War and Second World War. Runaway slaves, newsboys, millworker children. In my own family’s history, we have gone from outhouse and baths in the kitchen once a week, fresh fruit a rarity in my father’s boyhood to a pleasant house in the ‘burbs and HDTV, three vehicles, a lady comes to clean the house once a week in my son’s boyhood – now ongoing. My mother’s family pawned the wedding ring three times during the Depression, always managed to get together enough money to get it back. One of her cousins was horsing around in their house and climbed onto the sink, it pulled away from the wall – and they washed their hands in the bathtub for six years before they had enough money to get a plumber in to fix it.
When my father died he and my mother were worth a million dollars. He was astonished – had bought some real estate at the right time, and been thrifty (when he spent a dollar, you could hear George Washington squeal…) Now, this real estate based prosperity came at the expense of those coming after – they bought their first house with a GI loan and a couple of hundred dollars down, the price was around two and a half or three times a cop’s yearly income, and values went nowhere but up. By the time they sold the fourth house they had rolled over into, houses were around five times a cop’s income, and now in the coastal expensive cities like the one I live in moderate houses are going for ten times a cop’s income. So it is far tougher to start out, and that’s a result of the escalator my parents (and my wife and I, to a somewhat lesser extent) have ridden. The twenty-somethings in my work place see 2-bedroom condominiums for 6 times a starting cop’s/ teacher’s/ govt worker’s income.
April 9th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
What I meant to say, which I’m not sure I did say, is that when a 20-something stikes out on her own today, she finds herself shockingly, and perhaps (depending on how she was raised) insultingly poorer than she was while living with her parents. Suddenly she’s in a tiny, dark apt in a dangerous part of town, she’s eating only Ramen noodles & she has to go to the library to check her email. Her car is falling apart and she can’t afford to fix it, she doesn’t have insurance so she can’t get antibiotics when she needs them — and so on.
And there’s no knowing how long she’ll be in that state, esp. if she has college loans — and esp. if she makes a few poor decisions, like buying a big screen TV with her raise instead of saving for a house.
I don’t mean that we should feel sorry for these kids or prop them up. But I do think it’s understandable that they’d be arrogant for awhile, given how they’ve been shielded from economic realities.
April 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Jennifer, you make a great point and it has me thinking.I don’t want to blame parents here because I think all of culture and society are somewhat influential in attitudes and expectations. However, even if a person is raised with a great standard of living, young people are not being taught the lessons of economic responsibility and sacrifice. There is a distorted expectation that after four years of college a young person expects to have the same standard of living and lifestyle as his/her parents who have worked for 30 plus years. Unless the graduate has a job that is much higher salaried than the parents due to industry or education, then I can see the reverse happening.
April 10th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
“There is a distorted expectation that after four years of college a young person expects to have the same standard of living and lifestyle as his/her parents who have worked for 30 plus years.”
Agreed. Even without coming from that sort of home, it is easy to get sucked into an unaffordable level of consumption by the irrational exuberance of early adulthood. I did that, and only after two kids and 9.5 years of marriage did I wake up and start having a real monthly budget. We have a good income, but it’s going to take us until Christmas to pay off our car, which is our last debt (the credit card and my student loan were paid off over the past two months and we haven’t bought a house yet). As I said, it’s a very good income, but if you walked through our house, looked in the garage, or poked in our fridge, you’d wonder where the money went. We live exactly the lifestyle our income allows, and it is comfy, but it’s not photogenic.
With regard to entitlement and preventing kids from growing up to be broke, envious 20-somethings, I do have a few suggestions. Sometime last fall, I noticed that my five-year-old was being very wasteful with art supplies. Coincidentally, her room was a mess. I’ve since created a system where she can collect a dollar for every night her room or the living room is picked up. She also occasionally does her 3-year-old brother’s room. She can also earn about 20 cents a page for doing a Kumon workbook. She now buys almost all her art supplies, coloring books, and activity books, and she recently bought an $8 stuffed elephant. Last month I budgeted about $20 for her earnings, and that was about right. I’m not saying that her room is always tidy, but I believe it has cut down on consumerist whining quite a bit. She knows that if she wants something, she can earn it. She’s even talking about spending $3 of her money on instant oatmeal, since I’m buying the non-instant kind as an economy measure.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:10 am
I’ve been having a hard time with this lately. Even though I graduated from college and do earn more than my parents due to differences in housing prices across the country I can come no where near to affording the same type of house my parents own. They live in the mid-west and I’m in the northeast. I wouldn’t move out of the area I’m in b/c there are so many more job oppurtunities here, but I am often resentfull that I make more money than my parents but I’m going to have a way crappier house than them when I do decide to buy.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Mykal, although your comments ‘crappier house’ makes me cringe, your voice speaks volumes. I am a bit baffled as to why many young people get angry at the fact that they can not afford a large home or a home at all. What happened to starting out in an apartment? Unfortunately, here in the northeast real estate is ridiculous in terms of cost and taxes. But a part of me feels the house size issue is so related to the invention of the McMansion or Plywood Palace. People were not so supersized years ago in terms of housing. In the suburbs around NYC so many homes as young as 50 years are completely demolished to build a new oversized home on an undersized lot.
Here is another story I wanted to share because it is a rampant feeling from alot of recent college grads I know. I don’t mean to lump all college grads in this attitude category; many of my own college students have a very different outlook.
My friend’s daughter went through pharm. m.d. program (6 years) and makes a six-figure salary. All we hear from her is how she can’t tolerate her long days working and annoying coworkers. Although she has massive amounts in student loans to pay off she spends her money on expensive furniture and Prada accessories because she feels it is evidence on how hard she worked through college and six months as a pharmacist. Her parents moved from a communist country, were on welfare for a short time and now are medical professionals. I witnessed them raise her with financial responsibility. My husband and I basically told her that this is real life and some people work just as many long days as she and get paid less than half of her salary.
April 15th, 2008 at 10:03 am
another reminder of the staggering increase in wealth in this country: http://www.shorpy.com/node/3200?size=_original
how you are doing compared to your parents depends some on whether your parents were in grinding poverty.
May 3rd, 2008 at 8:03 am
“Carin Dillingham handed over her watch to the pawnbrokers at Society Hill Loan as if she were giving up one of her bones.
The 30-year-old bookkeeper stood pregnant, broke and sad under rows of pawned guitars hanging like curing hams from the ceiling of the ragged South Street shop. She got a $20 loan for her $200 Bulova, a gift from the Harley-Davidson Co., where she used to work.
“It feels so weird,” said Dillingham, accompanied by her fiance, Pat Lapetina, 35, an unemployed ironworker doing painting jobs on the side. The couple recently moved to South Philadelphia from Florida to build a life.
“I worked hard for this watch. I’m middle-class, not poor. I can’t believe I have to do this to buy gas.”
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_left_story/18479604.html
It’s an interesting article – a substantial number of the sad stories it tells are about people who bought a lot of frivolous stuff in the expectation that the good times would continue to roll. A number of the folks thinking about this (I’m looking at YOU, AmyP) have noted that their own lives have gone pretty well because of personal thrift.
May 5th, 2008 at 10:40 am
dave s.,
I’m a pretty recent convert to financial responsibility. We’ve only had well-worked out budgets since October (and let’s not talk about how long it took before my husband’s 401(k) got set up). The first several months of life on a real budget I felt really stressed out and deprived. However, we’ve now paid off both my small student loan and the tail end of our old credit card and are paying double car payments and our current budget looks really lavish to me. We’re putting aside some every month for Christmas expenses, $100 each as a fun budget for both my husband and me (he’s saving some of his to buy a telescope), we’ll go as a family to see Prince Caspian, we’ll all four go out to a real dinner for our anniversary, and I’m on track with savings to take my daughter for a trip to DC this summer before one of her old friends moves overseas. I think spending the money we actually have (rather than the money we don’t have yet) helps me to appreciate the stuff that I do get a lot more. On the horizon is the fact that our rental house will be bulldozed in two years, so as soon as the car is finally paid off and we are debt-free, we’ll need to save like crazy for the move and for our first house. That’s intimidating and we’ll probably have to cut back on a lot of stuff, but I think the deadline will help me focus, and if we can save the equivalent of the double car payment and my travel savings every month for a year, we will basically be where we need to be.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
“…forever poorer than their parents…”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/11/spain.france