Do you have mixed socioeconomics in your family?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Two of my aunt/uncle pairs are extremely affluent (mansion-level affluent). One is extremely poor. My mom and I aren’t exceptionally skewed either way. I mean, I’m going to grad school so we’re not exceptionally poor, but we’re not really super rich either. My dead aunt wasn’t very rich.

It’s changed over time though. When I was little everyone was pretty much middle class. One uncle was in construction and became really important at the company, and thus rich, and my aunt (married to him) got lucky with a manager that liked her at the liquor store she worked at and now is second in command of a large chain of liquor stores.

My other aunt married into wealth with her second husband, also in construction.

The poor one has always struggled, but all my family except my mom and me live in Wisconsin. This aunt did education stuff (not a teacher, but in the field), and she’s married to a career fireman. They got hit really, really hard by the stuff with Walker. That caused more friction than anything else in the family, because the rich ones are extreme Republican, and very openly supported Walker’s reforms. “Of course, it’s not personal. We don’t want it to affect you, but it needs to be done and it’s definitely the right move” wasn’t what she wanted to hear (especially along with a staunch refusal to loan her money to help her through the rough patch, right or wrong it definitely was the last straw for her).

22

Not that it bothers us. It’s our personalities that drive conflicts, not money. It helps that all of our siblings and our surviving uncle largely have the same attitude towards wealth and savings, and none of us are poor by any definition of the word.

23

In my family it isn’t so much a matter of different incomes as of different priorities.

My paternal family includes several people who avoid getting signed up to book clubs simply by stating “sorry, got over 5K books already, no room for more”. And it’s true: Mom had c. 4800 when she thought she “might be approaching 3K”, several of our households have more. My maternal grandmother distrusts reading, but her husband left behind about 1K books, her mother was a voracious reader, her father insisted in getting all his children educated beyond what would have been normal for their time and location. An interest in art and history is not taken for granted in strangers, but it definitely is for us. Several of my relatives owned vacation homes, but they’d always go someplace else as well: our vacations were all over the place, and musts included “piles of rocks to visit”, whether they were mountains or museums (preferably both). Both sides of the family include many roamers, people about whom the first question is not “how’s he?” but “where is he nowadays?”

Middlebro’s wife is a doctor. He’s an engineer who keeps managing to get lower and lower jobs with time, rather than higher ones. One of the things she liked about our family was that “going to different places on vacation” (hers always went to the same place, and one where they’d be with her father’s coworkers), but in their case it’s to different beaches. They went to Peñíscola and didn’t visit the castle. Euh? It’s like, one of the coolest castles in Spain! Templars! The Pope Luna! And the stores walking up to it, c’mon, you like shopping, don’t you? Oh. No, no, not Mango, Mango is in another part of town… aaaa-I see… They’ve been out of Spain for their beach resort honeymoon (she refuses to fly again) and for one of those “if it’s Tuesday we’re in Napoli” cruises, both of which sound to most of my family like cases of terminal boredom.
Littlebro’s girlfriend studied Tourism and lived in New Zealand for a couple of years, she’s very much “our” crowd. But the other two… we just have completely different criteria when it comes to spending money.

24

We range from third-world very poor to quite well off.

Mrs Iggy is from a very poor Colombian family. They were living 13 in a three bedroom home when we met. The walls to abuelo’s room were made of straw and did not reach the floor. It constantly flooded when it rained. The family proudly point out that they are not on the lowest *nivel *as they do have electricity and running (cold only) water. They are in the bajo estrato economicamente (low economic strata), not the bajo-bajo (low-low).

I am much better off than mom, but she tries at every turn to give me money. Drives me a bit nuts since I know she cannot afford it. She is the one who needs help, but she won’t take it. All I can do is bank it for the day when I’ll have to care for her.

My sister’s family is lower middle class but she has now completed her master’s degree and started a good job. Prospects for them are rising.

And the one grandmother is still going strong and quite well off. Her second husband left her very well cared for and though he has passed there has been no financial arguing from his children.

25

I have 23 cousins. On my mother’s side, I’m the only one in my generation who’s not at least upper-middle-class or even wealthy. I have no problem with that. On my father’s side, they’re basically white trash, and I have nothing in common with them except some DNA.

26

In my immediate family (two siblings) we’re close enough to not matter. In my extended family (cousins) I have no idea. I have not seen nor communicated with any of my cousins since we were kids (many decades ago). I never saw any of them more than a few times, though, even when we were kids. I have somewhere between 20 and 30 cousins-- don’t even know how many.

27

Among my siblings it varies from dirt poor to doing really quite well.

My income is about the same as my parents when they were working, but I only work part-time due to my health. And they owned their own homes and I don’t, but that’s because house prices have changed a hell of a lot; a three-bedroom flat with a shared garden and not in great condition in my area (where my parents are also from, and the type of home they bought) would have cost maybe £5,000 40 years ago, and now it’s about £450,000.

28

My brother and his wife have much bigger paychecks than I, but they are up to their eyeballs in debt. I am a wage slave, but debt-free.

My cousins are all over the map, but mostly college-educated, and mostly middle class.

I have one uncle who we think is probably rich, but is probably going to give it all to charity. :frowning:

29

My wife and I are 5%-ers, earnings-wise. But also-rans compared to a lot of the family. A gathering can include: investment banker, owners of: medical practice(s), accounting firm, construction firm; law partner, high ranking military (the kind with stars), successful singer (30 singles on the charts, 10+ were top ten), airline pilots, Navy pilot, Air Force pilots, ship’s captain, owner of oil wells, etc.

And a couple of homeless ones too. And one who committed a crime that all of you heard about, trust me.

We seem to be an all-or-nothing bunch.

30

I have a brother who’s extremely well-off - he’s very good at what he does and he’s frequently headhunted. I think he’s now president of the company he’s working for.

I have a brother-in-law who can’t keep a job, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of his attitude. When the boss tells you to do something and you decide that you don’t need to because it’s useless to your way of thinking, you shouldn’t be surprised when you’re handed your walking papers…

A couple of my sisters are getting by, tho I know they sometimes struggle.

My husband and I are doing OK - we were able to retire before 60, altho I do take temp or part time jobs occasionally for something to do. I’m sure some of our sibs think we’re rolling in it, but we made choices to simplify and I think we’ve got a pretty good plan for the next 30 years or so.

31

Penis-cola? Snicker :stuck_out_tongue:

32

Mixed economics, yes. Very wide range of income, and a few in the “now my income comes from my previous income” range. The socio- part isn’t so mixed – even the most economically successful are still excited about eating fried bologna sandwiches on Wonder bread, or casserole with potato chips on it, because that’s what we all grew up with … even those who are also comfortable with more sophisticated food.

I would guess that by the time this generation’s small kids are adults, they will feel more of a true socio-economic difference.

33

Not so much anymore; when I was growing up, the grandparents were middle class, with my Dad’s parents being better off, but not really “wealthy”. The interesting thing is that when my paternal grandfather passed away, my grandmother was much more aggressive in her investing and ended up making a bundle in the internet boom of the late 1990s/early 2000s, and somehow managed not to take a bath in the ensuing crash. So she’s pretty wealthy now at 90 years old.

My aunt & uncle have always been toward the upper end of “upper middle”, with my uncle being a rather successful small business owner (construction) who rakes in probably in the low-mid six-figures.

My parents are well educated, but ended up as a teacher (mom) and a civil servant (dad), so they were never loaded with 2 boys in the house. Once we got through with college, they sort of moved in to upper middle class, and have stayed there due to generous pensions and judicious investment of their retirement savings.

34

Fighting rock, little rock or rocky peninsula, actually, from what I hear. The first root is peña, rock; there’s several versions on which is the second one.

35

My immediate family ranges from “upper middle class with a doctorate” to “disabled and depending on upper middle class sibilings to survive”. I’m toward the lower end.

Haven’t had contact with any cousins for nearly 30 years and, AFAIK, all aunts & uncles have died.

36

Um, Nava, it’s spelled Pensicola. You reversed the bolded letters, making a completely different, much more male, word. :o

37

It sure sounds like the rich ones are gleefully sticking it to the poor ones.

38

My immediate family is all middle class, with our mother the wealthiest and me the least wealthiest. We’ve actually been lower class at times (between jobs, though when I worked at Target it was a lot like being unemployed, economically speaking) but never out of sight poor.

My extended family includes a few one percenters, a lot of middle class folks and some rural poor folks. Mostly it seems to be generational … the rural millenials are having a really tough time, the Greatest Generation types are dying off but have lots of money, the Baby Boomers are middle class though the spectrum varies. I can’t think of ANY in my generation who are wealthy, and the millenials are lucky to be middle class. My father’s side of the family was a huge farm family (seven siblings) who begat large numbers of offspring so there are hordes of nephews and nieces and such.

There might be some class conflict here, but I don’t know much of it because I am a damn city liberal and atheist and don’t have much money besides, so get left out of a lot of family stuff, which … does not bother me.

39

My immediate family was never working poor, at least not after my birth. We were middle-class-with-debt for a while, but my parents, now empty-nesters, are pretty comfortably upper middle class. They’ve ossified into yuppiedom in their old age, glad to be able to afford froofy coffee and call the plumber when they discover the leak, rather than a week later when they can actually pay the bill. Dad has multiple professional degrees; Mom went to college but never finished, and has some on-the-job training in nursing/healthcare.

Mom grew up fairly well off. Her father was a certified professional, and both her mother and her mother’s sister had undergraduate degrees, which was pretty swank for women of their generation. Both of her sisters finished college, in completely different areas, and both worked for quite a while in their areas of study, although I’m not sure either one does anymore. AFAIK, their parents paid.

Dad grew up middle class, son of a shop owner and a housewife. He and his sister both went to pretty prestigious schools, partly with work and partly with scholarships. That aunt has an MD and a PhD and makes a comfortable living using both.

My sister dropped out of high school. We suspect some kind of learning disability, but she and my mother were adamantly against talking to anyone for a diagnosis, so who knows. Last I checked she had a white-collar office job that she got by lying and claiming to have gotten her GED, without ever bothering to do so. She married a man in one of the building trades, and so far as I know, they’re financially doing fine.

I’m a freelancer in a creative field(s), which is kind of like being working poor, only I’m never compelled to drag myself into a job that kills my soul. I think the occasional financial stress is easier on me than the chronic strain of having to force myself to do something I hate nearly every day, but that’s a personal choice. I have an undergraduate degree and a half, having quit the second when I ran out of both money and patience, and am self-educated in a lot of the kind of subjects where a ten-minute interview would be adequate to assess whether I’m bullshitting or not.

My parents used to try to buy my cooperation on a regular basis, but they’re bonkers in a lot of ways. Overall, the family is weird enough to understand that there’s not necessarily a good correspondence between SES as measured by background and education and SES as measured strictly by current assets and purchasing power.

40

Na-ah http://www.tripadvisor.com.sg/Tourism-g609036-Peniscola_Castellon_Province_Valencian_Country-Vacations.html . Smirk-worthy but true.