Poor to fairly wealthy to poor then middle class. My parents were immigrants who owned a series of small businesses. My siblings and I all graduated college and grad school with mountains of debt.
I would almost have preferred being poor the whole time, the dramatic fluctuation in lifestyle made everything seem impermanent and unstable.
Pretty solidly middle class, with my parents’ income increasing as they got older, as makes sense.
All 5 children went to Catholic schools. We lived in a large Victorian home, and had a cottage we owned (although in Michigan, everybody has a cottage on the lake). We certainly never gave a thought to whether there would be as much food on the table as we wanted.
On the other hand, my parents almost never bought new cars. Our clothes weren’t from the expensive stores in town, and as the youngest, I wore plenty of hand-me-downs.Occasionally my mother would hire a cleaning lady, but mostly that’s why she had 5 kids, and we all had chores.
I’d sum it up as saying that as a kid, I never gave money much of a thought. I had what I needed and although I wasn’t given everything I wanted (I was an adult before I bought my first horse), I never thought that the stuff I didn’t have was because we couldn’t afford it. It was a blissfully simple childhood.
StG
Solidly middle class. Possibly upper-middle. It’s difficult for me to tell and taken me years to work out that much, largely because my parents are bonkers. My mother does the money and rules with an iron fist. Unfortunately, she’s terrible with it; I got to college before I realized you were really really not supposed to float checks, because she did it about fortnightly at the supermarket. There was never-ending tooth-gnashing, wailing, and rending of garments over not having any money – but we had a 1600sq ft house in the suburbs with a backyard and a pool, we never had our power, water, phone or internet shut off, and we kids never lacked for decent clothes, electronic gizmos, or things like summer theater and dance lessons. The first pair of cars I can remember were both used family sedans, but the first one that died was replaced with a brand-new Hyundai, and when the second one went to meet its maker, they went out and bought an SUV. My father is an engineer and was an early telecommuter, and making sure he had a computer powerful enough to handle his CAD work was never an issue.
On the other hand, neither I nor my sister had anything even remotely resembling a college fund. I can count the number of vacations we took on one hand, although I don’t know if that was due to a lack of funds or just to my parents being so exquisitely neurotic about traveling that all of their plans ended up strangled before getting to the point where they’d bother telling us kids about it. The only time that there was not continual carping about how much everything cost was Christmas, when my parents would routinely spend several hundred dollars on each child, and the kitchen would be jammed with enough groceries to feed twice as many people as actually lived in the house, in order to stave off complaints of ‘there’s nothing good to eat’ while both children plus Dad were home for a week with nothing to do but snack and play video games.
I would ask my father, but he’s oblivious. I was old enough to remember when something went afoul with his direct deposit and he actually had to pick up and carry home physical paychecks for a couple of weeks. Mom thought it was hilarious, because that’s how Dad finally found out exactly how much money he made. I think I’ve seen more of their tax info than Dad has, since I used to have to gather it up yearly and fork it over to the university for my financial aid. She’s been signing stuff for him for so long I think if he actually scrawled his name on anything financial the bank would flag it as a potential forgery.
Middle, with ups and downs.
Dad was socially-upper: my family name is instantly recognizable as “posh” to anybody from his home town, but that doesn’t mean my foreparents ever had big money. Mom has a social climber’s mentality; she still defines the two years Dad made more money as “the best years of his life” despite being the years that he was on a 4-5 packs/day regime and we barely saw him, but you have to realize they were the two years she got with the “in” crowd. Dad was white collar/management; Mom has a teaching degree but had her last paying job years before I was born.
We did get vacations although most of them were through an organization which set up boarding schools as hotels for the summer so it was cheaper than regular hotels (Christmas and Easter visiting Mom’s family; in the summer we’d usually go to one place the last week of July and to another the first two of August, until I was old enough to want to stay in town for fiestas and then it was only August), my classmates consistently thought Dad made more money than he did or had a better job than he did. In Spain it’s usually the parents who put children through college: my childless uncle and an aunt whose children didn’t want to go to college loaned my parents some money (no interest, no payment terms) when we were all three in college, by which time we’d gone down to lower-middle. We still had the big flat Mom lives in, but it had been bought just at the start of those two years: Dad’s final job didn’t pay enough for that mortgage and three kids in college out of town.