Context:
- I just found out that the student loans I’ve been saddled with for the past 19 years were completely avoidable because my parents are wealthier than they ever let on
- Something is wrong with my boomer parents—I don’t understand their relationship with money (or life in general). I think they may be seriously mentally ill
What happened
In 2014, my girlfriend and I moved into a rental home in a big city for about $1,500/month.
She later lost her job and it became unaffordable. The stress ended our relationship.
I struggled to stay in my home for the next seven years, until I finally declared bankruptcy and moved out in 2020.
I spent at least $120,000 on my rental home through those years. All down the drain. I liquidated all $30,000 of my retirement savings to try and stay afloat.
What could have been
2014 was a low point in the housing market. There were HUNDREDS of houses available in the ~$150k range, many of them nicer than the one I rented. All I needed was ~$10k for a down payment, and I could have been paying $800 for a mortgage instead of $1,500 on rent, and all of that money spent would be retained in the form of equity even if I still had to move out. It probably would have saved my relationship too (my parents complain about not having any grandkids, BTW).
What my parents say
When I mentioned this to my parents recently, they just said “we had no idea you wanted to buy a house”. NO, I JUST LOVED PAYING MONEY TO A LAND LEECH! I never even thought to ask for help with a down payment, because we were “broke”. My dad gave us grief over every dollar we spent. We never ONCE took a family vacation.
The truth
Today, my parents have $2 million in retirement savings, and no mortgage or car payments. They live in a rural area with a rock bottom cost-of-living. In 2003, they had HALF A MILLION dollars in cash, entirely separate from their retirement plans.
I would not wish my grandmother, after raising multiple families and working until she was 70 to have to live in a squat. If you think that’s out of touch, perhaps consider how many people in America live in squats.
Then consider that the OP and the family in question are not people who lived in squats their whole lives but rather a family who worked to establish a middle class lifestyle which means sacrificing all of their time to make profit for the owning class. When you have spent your life doing that, you do that for a specific reason - to be able to retire and enjoy a few years of your health without being ground into dust by the machine.
That is literally what people who have been working for the past 40 years and those who came before them in the liberal world-order were striving for. They are trying to avoid being homeless and living in squats. Your argument that people living in squats don’t need 80k/year is useless in this context because living in squats in the US and Europe is not considered, by the vast majority of people, to be a healthy and enjoyable life.
Poverty is not a virtue. It does not have moral standing except in that it should be eradicated through a revolutionary movement. Just because others suffer from poverty does not mean that the entirety of the Western world isn’t individually striving for a better life.
I really don’t know why you think this worthy of debate. I wish apartments cost less than 5% of my income like they did the USSR. I wish we have and 90+% home ownership rate like they do in China and Cuba. I wish there a social safety net for the elderly like there is/was in parts of Europe.
That’s not the economy we live in here in the US. In the US you need money. And living below the poverty line is in no way. shape, or form what people are striving for when they work for 50 years straight without any real time to develop themselves as people outside of as capitalist subjects.
Blah blah blah.
The question is whether these people are being selfish impoverishing their fucking child with debt while living so comfortably.
The answer is yes the fuck they are. Fuck off.
OK, so back to the topic at hand instead of trying to justify old people living in squats. You’re hard to keep track of.
The OP never asked for financial help. For me personally, I had never asked my parents for financial help and I had never received it. They also lived a life of credit cards and mortgages and saving for retirement. When I finally asked for financial help because my mental health made it difficult for me to keep working, it took months of emotional work on my end to get to the point of asking. And when I did, they gave me some money. But they didn’t volunteer it no matter how difficult my life was getting. I had to ask.
OP never asked.
My family did take some family vacations, but we also got grief about money. And my parents have less money than OP’s parents. Granted, my parents aren’t as old, and my parents are still working, so maybe in 10 years they will be as rich as OP’s.
But I would not say that my parents impoverished me, or my siblings, some of whom are worse off than I am. They didn’t ask for money either. In fact, as siblings we find ways to loan each other some money to avoid having to ask our parents for money. Which is honestly really silly, since the prior generation has more money the current one does.
But no, OP’s parents did not impoverish OP with debt. OP didn’t ask for money and chose to tough it out. I did the same thing. I also blew shit tons of money on rent. I could have avoided that if I had asked for a down payment. But also, in 2014, my parents were still working through their lifetime of debt, so it probably wouldn’t have worked out for me if I had asked.
The reality is that his parents clearly have emotional trauma around money and OP will get an inheritance if the medical system doesn’t bleed his parents dry. His parents are totally out of touch with how the next generation is living financially, but that’s a mostly universal trait for people their age - they’re out of touch about how young people live along ANY dimension.
As for being selfish for living so comfortably, again, I’ll use my personal example. One of my siblings lives hand to mouth, massive debt, no strong employment prospects except bar tending, struggles with alcoholism and depression. Another of my siblings has saved 10s of thousands of dollars, but also has no strong employment prospects except front-of-house catering service. The first sibling lives in a rundown apartment, in a poor neighborhood, no vehicle, no family around, and very little comfort. The other sibling literally lives in our parents home, with their own vehicle.
They made their choices, they are content with their choices. My parents don’t get to decide how their kids choose to engage them. They would give the poorer sibling money if the sibling asked, but no ask is made. The second sibling chose differently and lives much more comfortably.
I feel for OP, having struggled with spending my retirement money as well, and currently staring down the potential for bankruptcy myself. But my parents are not to blame and they are not selfish for living a more comfortable life than me. I have agency in this whole thing. So does OP.
At no point did I say old people should live in squats.
I don’t know why you think someone would read a wall of text when they’re pissed at you, especially not one that starts with making up a scarecrow to attack. I have never taken that position, I have not even come close to that position.
I will read no further. “Fuck off” should have clued you into this conversation have degraded beyond the point of usefulness. I have no common ground to find with a person this far out of touch. You are pursuing the approval of the kind of person that has lived their entire life in a comfortable upper middle income suburban lifestyle. I am pursuing the approval and support of the impoverished. We are on quite different teams here, the people I support would as I said earlier be moved to violent thoughts by the kinds of things you have said here.
https://lemmy.world/post/40238517
You are not making any point other than reinforcing the fact these people are selfish bourgeois out of touch assholes and coddling them is similarly out of touch. The post isn’t even fucking true, only for white people, statements like it un-person anyone that isn’t white.
Think we should coddle the white beneficiaries of apartheid south africa too huh? They lived well! It’s only correct that they should want comfort! What about Israelis? They live well! It’s only right they should have comfort, their perception is warped compared to the impoverished arabs in open air prisons!
Come the fuck on man. Your entire way of thinking completely lacks and consciousness of the real conditions the oppressed are suffering. You’re absolutely desperate to coddle the privileged while simultaneously desperate to tut tut the poor for being mad at the privileged, which comes at their expense and they know it. Which is precisely why they think violent fucking thoughts whenever you say the shit you’ve said here.
The people in this story are not bourgeoisie. At best they are petit bourgeois but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. They are labor aristocracy, first-world white working class. And they came of age during the height of global wealth extraction by the US.
It sounds like you’re angry with this group of people, but the thing you should be angry about is that they lack class consciousness, not that they didn’t give their kid a down payment on a house. Whether or not they gave their kid a leg up has no bearing on the development of a socialist society. Whether or not they scrimped and saved so that they could live in some comfort has no bearing on the development of a socialist society.
I hear what you’re saying. I’m not ignoring it. I am saying it is the incorrect position for a revolutionary consciousness. Anger at the parents that made it to retirement with sufficient savings to leave their kids with maybe a house but probably less than that is misplaced anger. The anger should be with the bourgeoisie.
These people are not bourgeoisie. The anger your describing is far more about intraclass resentment than it is revolutionary fervor. The members of the working class, regardless of savings, are not our enemy. They are capitalist subjects just like you and me. Resentment between members of the working class is destructive.
If you fundamentally believe that you are justified in harboring violent thoughts against working class capitalist subjects who have managed to become somewhat comfortable by spending 50 years of their lives working sacrificing community, connection, and respessing their own nature and desires, then I guess bye? My quarrel is with the owning class and the system they maintain.
Do you know what the rich call the people with $10M? The “comfortably poor”.
The comfortably poor and below are all in various positions of generational precarity. Yes, it feels absurd to say that $10M is poor when there are people living in squats. The reality is that the bourgeoisie are orders of magnitude richer than you imagine.
Don’t wish violence on people just because they are trying to escape generational poverty and have succeeded in managing a modicum of success at it.
You’re not fucking listening. You’re just doing liberal civility tut tuting. This is precisely why the poor fucking hate you and you find yourself completely alienated from them.
You are not in touch with the impoverished. You’ve spent this entire conversation trying your damndest not to listen and to keep yourself out of touch. You literally only want to be in favour with the fucking millionaires in this conversation. Any attempt to point out why this fucking disgusts the impoverished is met by you with tut tut and talking down like you’re standing on some moral fucking high ground while these people are being ground to a pulp by the system.
You need to shut the fuck up and listen. Come out of the wine cave.
I am listening. I’ve been through this debate with myself many times over the years and with others. What matters is revolutionary solidarity, not virtue signaling. The reality is that a 78-year old man who managed to save 2 million over 50 years is still a member of the working class and not a member of the bourgeoisie. They wouldn’t technically qualify as a member of the petit bourgeois either except under some very specific circumstances, but those don’t seem to hold in this case.
There is always going to be a comfort spectrum under capitalism. We cannot adopt a position to be driven by resentment for anyone higher up on that comfort spectrum because there will always be someone lower down on the spectrum. The dividing line needs to be around the class war, not some arbitrary amount of savings.
Should millionaires be dispossesed of their wealth? Absolutely. As part of a revolutionary program. Not as an individual moral requirement. Again, this is the system we all live in. These are the incentives we all have. We are all working class capitalist subjects in this story. Resentment doesn’t serve us, solidarity does.
Let me try a different angle with you on this. Who exactly will be fighting in the revolution and what rough age and income range can we expect the fighters to be?
When you’ve grasped this question, the next question to ask yourself is what alienates you from agitating those people.
Ok. Good luck telling that frank the stoner with two criminal convictions who currently works in the local car factory and lives in a 1 room bedsit.
The revolution will not be fought by educated communists. The revolution will be fought by the working class agitated and led into performing it by a vanguard of communists. You will never, ever be able to create a working class of educated communists that understands this position. The more you shout it, the more you piss them off and alienate yourself from them. They only see the simplified version. They only see the simple economic unfairnesses. It is necessary to be simple in calling economic unfairness out for what it is, and not to hedge or caveat or play down any of it just to coddle the boomers for having been brought up under different conditions. The boomers are never ever going to be your fighters, you do not need to coddle them, and the fact that you do only serves to alienate from those that will be fighters.
What matters here is not being technically correct in the communist form of petty technicalities. What matters is what serves to push the needle towards revolution and what does not.
These people ARE selfish and it is OKAY to be angry at them for how far out of touch they are with today’s conditions. It is OKAY to be angry at them for further perpetuating economic misery when they could have prevented it. Tut tutting people for being angry at them will alienate you from the working class that will be your fighters. It also just generally stinks of liberal high horse shit, which makes it worse and even more alienating because they already hate that.
It sounds like you’re rationalizing resentment at the wrong target by calling the working class too stupid to tell the difference between working class with savings and oil barons. That hasn’t historically been true. Lenin was from a middle class family that had annual summer vacations and could afford university degrees.
Lenin did not build his campaign saying that people who managed to acquire some means of comfort for their retirement were deserving of our anger and resentment for being out of touch.
It is not a hard concept to understand that there are classes, there is a class war, and there are unconscious reactionaries working against their own interests. Not a difficult thing to communicate either.
The US has such a wealth disparity that we could disposses everyone with a net worth of $2M and make not even a dent in the class war. In fact, the bourgeoisie would love nothing more than for the working class to direct itself at the “1%” because the bourgeoisie are easily capable of hiding when the working class can’t tell the difference between a grandmother who has just enough money to live on her own for 20 years before dying with dignity and the actual oppressors of society. This is why liberals are totally fine with the 1% rhetoric, because it obscures the class war and creates the conditions for sheepdogging revolutionary energy.
Anyway. I disagree that people who have retirement savings are selfish in ways that you and I are not selfish. I disagree with the idea that people being selfish is sufficient for violent thoughts about them. The bourgeoisie are not bad because they are selfish, they are bad because they maintain a national and global system of violence and oppression. The solution is not and never has been a vow of poverty, nor is it cultivating resentment within the class for those people who got some comfort.
I accept my mistakes and agency. I’m mostly upset by the lack of communication in our family. Until very recently, my parents have been relentlessly secretive about money due to my dad’s deep-seated insecurities and shame (he didn’t share what his income was with his own wife for decades), which I view as a problem separate and discrete from his poverty trauma about spending money.
It seems like you’ve at least had an accurate perception of your parents’ wealth. After my parents rescued me from homelessness, I spent two years unable to get out of bed due to depression, because I thought I had brought financial ruin on my entire family and that we were a week away from living on the streets.
The only thing I knew was that we had $50k in credit card debt. I knew nothing about their $300k in stocks and $2M in retirement savings. I assumed they had maybe $200k in retirement savings, at most, one or two mortgages, and were living paycheck to paycheck (because that is the only sane reason to have credit card debt IMO). It was only after hearing my lamentations for years that my mom finally shared their true status. The removal of that weight from my shoulders is the only thing that has allowed me to get my life back together.
I have a friend whose parents bought an investment home and rented it out to their son after he graduated college and started working. He never asked. His parents just did it, because were smart enough to know that that would save him money while also making money for themselves. If my parents had been as open about their financial situation as I was to them, we could have planned intelligently and done something similar and saved at least $200k together. But they are social basket cases in addition to being financially illiterate. I still love them though.
Yeah, I wish my parents were better with money too. I don’t think it makes them bad people or that they made me poor or that they were being selfish.
The fact that you thought you made your family poor and you were to blame says a lot about the manifestations of trauma in your life. I didn’t feel that way with my parents, but I never knew their income or savings or retirement until they went through their divorce.
I’m sorry you went through what you went through OP. It sucks. And if it helps to blame your parents right now, I can’t stop you. I would say that the problem is the society and not your parents or you. Society impoverished you. Your parents are likely still true believers in liberal capitalism. They don’t understand the mechanisms. They are operating mostly ritualistically, and so are most of us, just kind of hoping a better life comes from the behaviors and emotions and beliefs that are drilled into us by our society and replicated by our extended family and social network.
The family that bought an investment property for their child have completely different relationships with money, completely different beliefs and emotions. My family was much closer to your family than your friend’s family.
That doesn’t make my parents shitty people or selfish or the root cause of my poverty. My parents were fucked by the same system that fucked me. They managed to get a step up on the ladder, it sounds like your parents did too. My dad’s only communicated financial thought during the divorce was “but how am I going to leave anything behind for my kids”. That’s his prime emotional directive and it informs everything.
If your parents cut you out of the will, then I would say they’re shitty. But I have a lot of empathy for the people in your story. Including you. You didn’t deserve whatever fucked you up so bad that you went through 2 years of depression feeling like you were to blame for financial troubles of your family. I am sure your parents had no emotional ability to understand what you were going through. I know it’s easy to think that they ought to have, but eventually we have give up the idea that our parents know what we’re going through and are aware of the causes and the solutions and realize that no one has that objective perspective and least of all our parents who are as much responsible for passing on the shit as they are deep in it themselves.