How much money did you have growing up?

In My Humble Opinion
1

With all the thread about growing up rich or poor or middle class, I’ve decided to do a poll with it. How much money did you have growing up? I’m allowing more than one answer, since some (me included) went back and forth between classes.

I started out upper middle class, but when I was 4 my parents got divorced. Dad never paid a cent in child support, so my mom was forced to eek out a living while supporting 4 children. Those were the days of a tiny apartment, food stamps and watered down milk. Then she remarried a well paid, professional man and our money problems were behind us. We weren’t rich or anything, but we had enough for all our needs and many of our wants.

How about you?

I know these things can be hard to define, so just go by your own definition.

2

My brother and I were raised by a single parent who couldn’t get our father to pay child support even after taking him to court many times. He chose to push us right out of his life. My grandparents helped but they weren’t in much better shape.

Still, I ate good and never went without what I needed, even if it wasn’t the best. My mama charged and charged and charged to pay the bills though, and it eventually caught up with her when she became very ill with congestive heart failure. By then I was a teen so I went to work to help pay the bills.

I never knew how bad off I was until I was an adult. She was just that clever. I don’t know how she managed, really, even with charging so much.

I was luckier than my SO, who lived in a concrete shack and only ate when he shot something and went to work at the age of five instead of school.

3

My mom was, from the time I was six years old, a single mom. She had a good job working for IBM for decades, and because we were living in South Central Los Angeles, she felt it was really important to put me in private schools, so most of the money went towards my education. Beyond that, we ate and lived cheaply, but I wasn’t generally hurting for clean clothing or lacking a roof over my head.

I voted for lower middle class.

4

Oddly phrased question. “I” had very little when growing up. My father, however, was an officer in the Air Force, then a lecturer at Oxford University, then a professor. We were not poor by any means, but my parents did not believe in spoiling us. I attended state school, and had to work for almost everything I possessed - either through chores or, when I got older, through a job. I worked a year in a gas station to buy my first car. Never got any handouts at all, though they did pay my (tiny) sustenance at uni because my parents earned too much for us to get a grant. The moment I graduated, however, I was on my own. I’m glad they did it, too - I have struggled in the past, but I have a good understanding of money, a decent work ethic, and a good career. Despite that I’ve managed to fit a hell of a lot of living (and particularly world travel) into my life - but all of it self-funded.

5

I don’t know.

My mother was always frugal. In fact she was downright tightfisted. But she always had a nice car.

For most of my life, my mother was a widow. She did not work. She owned buildings and got money for some inventions she patented. She got into Amway.

For a few years we were members of the local country club–this was one of the expenses she complained about. When she quit playing golf she dropped the membership. Even though that meant I had to swim at the public pool. (But I should note that, while there was a public pool, there was no public golf course.)

We spent about every other summer traveling, sometimes in Europe, sometimes just getting in the car and driving east or driving west. My mother’s old college friends were spread across the country so it seemed we would spend a couple of nights in hotels and then a night or two with an old college friend. The hotels were cheap, but they had to be AAA-approved. (In those days, that meant something. It did not necessarily mean there would be a swimming pool.) For the European travel, my mother had this hilarious habit of thinking she was buying one kind of tour, and ending up with something quite different, for instance she thought we would be traveling through some part of France in a tour bus, but actually it was a bicycling tour. The idea of my mother on a bicycle was pretty funny, but it appealed to me. All her college friends who weren’t spread over America were in Europe because their husbands were in the military, so over there we went from base to base.

We had a regular cleaning woman who came in once a week. We also had people who did yard work. I had to mow the lawn.

I also got a certain amount of money, as a teenager, for things like cleaning up rental units people had moved out of (sometimes very, very icky), painting them, etc.

We took our stuff to a “poor” single mother to be ironed, but this I understood to be an act of charity (because otherwise, the ironer would have been me).

I always thought we were solidly middle-middle class. But when I was in college my mother bought a house. Then she decided she didn’t like it, so she bought another house. Then she decided that one didn’t suit her either, so she bought another one.

She paid cash for all three houses. No mortgage. Only deadbeats had mortages.

By this time she was selling Amway (had been for years) and was a Direct Distributor, but I don’t think that financed three houses.

6

Dad has his name on several patents for the pharmaceutical industry, one of which has to do with a thyroid medication.

7

I guess we were fairly poor. But I never thought about it. I had fun as a kid and never starved.

8

Growing up we were lower middle class, if only because my parents chose to have five children (which my mom stayed home to raise).

That being said we were never in need. My father was/is the hardest working person I’ve ever known.

9

This is pretty much me to a T. My father had a good job and we lived in a reasonably nice house in a pleasant middle-class neighbourhood. I was never hungry or cold and my parents made sure I had good medical and dental care (including two rounds of dental surgery and years of braces - that must have been pricey!).

But, my brother and I went to public school and then onto public universities (in Canada, but equivalent to state school I think). My brother worked and lived with my parents throughout school, I lived away because I was offered a scholarship, but I still worked summers. My parents did help slightly with living expenses, but I had some mighty tight years and lived pretty poorly (starving student type thing). I also have travelled pretty extensively entirely on my own dime.

I am always a bit shocked by people whose parents gave them lavish gifts, fancy cars, and unlimited funds. I do wonder how those people turn out.

10

The thread title and the poll do not work for me. Being British degrees of social class and wealth just aren’t congruent although they may coincide.

11

Not all Americans would say that they coincide as much over here as the thread suggests, although it’s definitely a more unusual viewpoint.

12

I grew up in a poor home - single parent making minimum wage. We eventually worked our way out of it.

13

$25000 a year for four people. It was enough for quite a while, until medical expenses came in.

14

My parents had sufficient money to meet my needs and to send me to a private college. I can honestly say I never wanted for anything (except a pony :() and only borrowed money from my parents once in my life.

However our town was pretty classless and a measure of a good human was not so much how much money they had and more so how much they contributed to communal well-being.

When I was ten I received a single dime every Friday. Sounds almost like a fairy tale doesn’t it? With that I could buy a comic book.

One very warm July I saved my allowance for the full month and treated myself to a banana split for forty cents.

It was one of the best lessons I ever learned. Today I have no credit card debt and a single bill - for my cell phone!

I’ve got lotsa toys, too. :wink:

15

I had a paper route and made $30-45 a month. I also got money from my relatives on my birthday. My parents had considerably more money than I did though.

16

we were about as poor as you could be and still be considered middle class. Without grandparents help we would not have been able to afford the tract home we lived in. My father was a minister and a lot of people helped out unoffically. For example, we always got a “great” deal from the Ford dealer on his cars. Guy never went to church as far as I know, but there was some sort of connection and I don’t know if there cars were truely at cost or if the guys subsidized us.

Without working and scholarships, I would not have been able to complete university. And I went to a really cheap public university. Go University of California!

17

My mom is a pediatrician, but I was born before she even got out of medical school. We didn’t have much at all when I was young; my mom was a struggling new doctor and my dad worked hard to pay the bills. As I grew, my mom moved into private practice and started making better money. But then my Dad was diagnosed with MS and eventually stopped working. There were also four kids and my mom took pay cuts to work for clinics that would allow her to see sick kids whether or not they had amazing insurance. I never went hungry, but I also never got a free ride. My parents were of the belief that if you can’t afford to give it to all the kids, you can’t give it to any… so we all had to pay our own way. Buy our own cars, pay for our own college, weddings, legal issues, whatever.

18

We had money but I never knew how much we had. We lived WAY below our means. My parents grew up in the 30s in Yugoslavia and came here after WWII.

My father was making a lot of money but you’d never know. I didn’t realize and I didn’t have any less than anyone around me so I never knew. I had clothes, and I earned my own money for a bike and a TV and back in the 70s there was nothing more to buy.

We didn’t really have designer clothes or such, there were no real electronics back then. But we lived well below what we could’ve, as witnessed by my mother was worth nearly $500,000 when she died, in 1980. Not that I got any of it, even then :slight_smile:

19

My father started up the retail division of a manufacturing company. We were doing pretty well, and then he was replaced. It was three years before he was able to find a decent job again. We didn’t have to move or anything, but we were living off our savings. I remember suddenly developed a great interest in baking, canning and making clothes, even as she went back to work. The family photos from that time showed my sisters and I were pretty much always wearing clothes that we had already outgrown.

I was just a little kid, but my sisters were teenagers and it hurt them more than me.

20

My parents got married very young (I was a prom night baby, conceived in the backseat of a Chevy, amidst a sea of taffeta), and were fairly poor when I was very little, but I don’t remember much of that. My dad is self-employed, a seriously smart and hard-working guy, so from the time I remember, we were what I consider to be solidly, if parochially, middle class. Never wanted for anything, had whatever “nice” things were locally mandated, lived in a big house in a decent town with a good school system, vacationed on the Cape or in New Hampshire with the occasional trip to Disney World. No private schools or summers in Europe, not much with the horizon-broadening beyond the willingness to feed my constant desire for more books, but no complaints.