There’s been much ballyhoo lately about cost of living and affordability in media lately (deservedly so, imo) but I’m curious how hard it is for those of us who are a little more capable than normies (we like to think).
Feel free to be somewhat vague. Not asking anyone to doxx themselves. I’ll start.
In my mid-thirties. Married, two kids. Combined income is just under 100k. We live in a low cost of living area which has helped us a lot. We were able to buy a house in ‘21 with a 15 year mortgage and it feels like we got on the last lifeboat off the Titanic. We’ve been able to build about a 200k net worth, about half of which is home equity.
Day to day expenses are getting tougher, however. We’ve never had a car payment but our older kid has started school and that has put a strain on us since he goes to a private Christian school. I’ve worked in education and I consider sending a kid to public school to be akin to child abuse.
It feels harder and harder to save and invest. Just making ends meet with two kids in this red state feels like a Herculean task. Wondering if anyone else feels the same way.
Not even an hour ago, I told my mother that I needed to borrow her car later to take my new LED headlights to my mechanic to install on my car, which is over there for repairs to the headlight system anyway. She then proceeded to guilt trip me by complaining that she will have to give up swimming at the expensive gym that my parents go to in order for me to be able to do this.
I didn't utter one single complaint when my father asked me to pick him up from the auto glass repair shop that was farther away, in Trenton, a dangerous city, in the morning, during a time when I'm normally asleep since I work at night. I have done that twice in the last two weeks, and it screws up my sleep schedule every time I do it. Didn't bitch about it.
She goes swimming there all the fucking time. Sometimes she is there so late that we have dinner 10 minutes before I have to leave for work at night. God forbid a boomer has to sacrifice something other than their children's future.
Of course naturally she told me that I would have to do extra work around the house to make up for her lost time. This coming from a woman who hasn't lifted anything heavier than 20 pounds in decades, telling me, a guy who works in a fucking warehouse loading trucks for a living, that I don't do enough.
This is the same woman btw whom, when I had to leave my last home due to involuntary circumstances, used the leverage she had over me since I had nowhere to go, to force me to sign a contract in order to live in her house. That is the only reason why I'm not homeless. Granted, the terms of the contract aren't too strenuous, but I keep getting "asked" to do things that aren't in the contract, and it pisses me off because if I bring that up she just threatens to kick me out.
She also brings up how I'm over 30 now and I should be making at least six figures since that was what my father was making at my age. She conveniently leaves out the fact that he went to Princeton University and only had his job because his professor at the time was starting a tech company and offered a role to him because he was a promising student. I might have had a similar path if she didn't spend years telling me to follow my dreams and let me go to college for Film. What great advice that was.
To this day I still kick myself for naively trusting my Boomer, Ivy league graduate parents to give me good advice on what to do in life. After all, why wouldn't I trust them? They were enormously successful in life. They both drive a Mercedes, not base models either, and have a lot of property, in the state with the highest property taxes in the country. Why wouldn't I listen to them?
These same people who want me to go find a girl so they can have grandkids can't even be bothered to help me out with my cheap car, let alone finding a job. After all, my father only had one job for 41 years, and my mother never had a real 9-5 in her life because he was able to support a wife and 2 kids on one income, vacations to Europe included.
The worst part about this is that they aren't even that bad by boomer standards. I just wish my mother would stop psychologically undermining me at every opportunity just because she isn't satisfied with where I am in life.
It's probably an astronomical number of boomers that will die with zero grandchildren purely because they refuse to give enough help to their kids. I'm not talking about endless handouts to NEET bums, but little nudges here and there to their kids who are employed, trying, and obviously had it much worse than they did in terms of societal and economic situations.