Hmm, interesting. I grew up middle class, with needs and some wants met, but nothing extravagant. But my father pinches pennies till they scream so I definitely view my parents’ stuff as theirs, because they paid for it and don’t buy anything they don’t need.
Maybe, but it that is the case then my family is an outlier. Money has never been an issue for anyone in my family and I wouldn’t dream of taking items from my parent’s house. FWIW, I used to go over and help my mom clean out her freezer and we would throw out hundreds of dollars worth of meat that had gone funky in there so it’s certainly not a matter of them not having extra, it’s a matter of their extra belonging to THEM, and not to me.
Interesting theory, but I’m not sure it pans out. Some of the most generous people I’ve known (within their family and with others) have little money to spare, and are barely scraping by, themselves. While I’ve known people with plenty of money that are very tight with it. A lot of it certainly depends on attitudes about money, though. My mother had real hang-ups about money. She was always somehow convinced that there wouldn’t be enough. So she was tight with it.
She handled all the money in the house, never balanced her checkbook, and was always worried that a check would bounce. When she died, my dad said “Let’s go see how much is in the checking account”. It was over $5,000.00
People are funny about money, for sure.
Maybe that’s the thing. I’m sure I learned my money attitudes from my parents - I’m freer with spending than they were, but I’m a lot tighter with money than a lot of people. I’m still not very comfortable with spending a lot of money frivolously.
Yep, sometimes I’m happy they live far away because I would be embarrassed for my father to see some of the “senseless waste” I perpetrate. He is penny-pinching (he got it from his mom the Depression child) but on the other hand I don’t think he’s ever paid interest on anything but their mortgage. He buys his cars with cash and paid for three of us to go to Ivy League schools. So I can’t really fault him!