Which I mean, I'm not really sure why considering I still haven't grown up. But I sort of see it, that at that time we were still, broke isn't the right word, but we were college being paid off and two promotions away from having much disposable income left. So there wasn't room in the budget for, for instance, a $100 Maleficent Barbie like there is now. And also we are always pretty clear that I am not the model for typical.
But because of that she's spent a lot of her real adult life getting her things back. Like she played card games competitively for awhile. (Gave that up because it's not a super safe place for a trans woman to be, which is a fucking shame) Today they are going to go to the new big Lego store in Bend and look around. When she was growing up she was on a Lego Robotics team and also had a lot of different sets. So now she's looking at rebuilding with new things.
We talked about how it's sort of difficult for Millenials with younger parents. Like the Boomers gave up a lot of childhood things and put on the suit and went to work, but kept the music and forced entertainment to cater to them. Gen X said, yeah, no, thanks. I'll keep the video games and skateboards and my clothes. I'm just not interested in the whole "adult" thing. So what do Millenials rebel against? Do they put on the suit and throw out the toys or do they cling to the toys even more hard core? How do you make your own generational grown up or refuse to grow up line?
And she said that it was especially difficult because they don't really have the owning your own house marker. Because they can't afford it. Housing is still out of reach for the majority of them, or at least out of reach until much later.
And I had just been thinking about her specifically earlier in the week. Her dad and I made sure she was set up to succeed. We paid her college tuition. We encouraged her to get a degree toward what she wanted to do for a living instead of just wing it. We didn't want her starting out behind. So when she graduated and got a job she was debt free. And her first few apartments were head and shoulders above the rat holes that Brent and I started in. And her savings account is, well she has savings so let's just start with that. She's much better off than we were at her age. She has every opportunity to be ahead of us all the way through, though her job field is a lot more volatile and she is for all intents and purposes the main breadwinner for a family of 3 right now where we had two incomes (but I think together at her age it was still less than hers solo), but she's better off than we were.
Which is not usual for her age group. Millenials are the first that are behind their parents. Now a lot of them had Boomer parents not X, but still. They faced a whole different set of economic factors including massive college debt. By lifting that from her, while still getting her a degree she was able to use to get a good starting job, she was able to start fresh.
Which is so important. It's why we did it. We did not start that way. We were young, not a ton of earning power. I didn't even take a college class until we were stationed in California and it was before they dismantled their excellent public college system so I only paid a few hundred dollars (plus about double that in books) for my entire Associates degree. But we were in debt fairly quickly, not massive, but enough that we didn't have extra to put away to save. If something happened it had to go on a credit card. Or split among a few depending on how wrong it went. We were digging out for a long, long time. And it's hard.
There is this great myth of progress we all hold on to, but it doesn't always work that way. Until maybe 15 years ago we were one step away from catastrophe at any point in time. And even now we aren't kidding ourselves that one huge medical disaster couldn't bankrupt us. Welcome to America where that is true for almost everyone except the 1%. When Katie was still in elementary school and we were living up here the first time there were so many months where the last two days (we both got paid on the 1st) were hold your breath and cross your fingers days. And because things were so close to the bone for so long even when we did start to see the edge of the hole we didn't live that way, we kept the low mortgage house, we stayed with one car, we were careful with clothing and vacations.
We know what it's like to be in the hole and not seeing the way out. And we were lucky as well as working hard to get out.
We didn't want that for Katie. So we dinged our own retirement savings and safety cushion to make sure she didn't start out under the dirt pile.
A lot of her peer group didn't have that luck.
So we can see that on a personal level our child is better off than we were. We can see on a generational level that her generation is not.
We cashed in stocks that we had been saving since Brent got out of the military and Intel gave him pieces of ownership paper instead of money as bonuses. We struggled and scrimped where we could have gotten ahead ourselves if we had just told her to get her own loans. We would have reached the comfort zone years ahead of time if we hadn't done that. Brent might even be looking at an earlier retirement.
And now Biden is forgiving student loans for people who did not do what we did. People who didn't cash in retirement. People who didn't find cheaper ways to live to afford those payments. People who didn't give up vacations or new clothes or another car.
And I say....
Good.
Katie is doing better than her peers because of choices we made. But we were able to make those choices. And they were choices WE made. Freely.
To say that because we paid and struggled everyone else should too is a dick move.
What I really would like is for people to have the equivalent cost structure that I had. Five dollars a credit hour with a maximum of $25 a semester puts higher education in reach for everyone. Even if it's just at the junior college level. We need to tackle the cost of college. We need to fix the problem at the root. But until we do that, we need to give people some breathing room and if that means their debt load is lifted, then good for them.
I struggled so you don't have to is a much nicer way to look at the world than I struggled so you MUST AS WELL.
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