How wealthy was your upbringing? How has it affected you?

In My Humble Opinion
41

I grew up poor according to the economic definition of the term.
Single mother who worked as a waitress and got no child support (her own stupid, imo, choice), we often lived with my grandmother and/or she provided child care.

There was a time when she and I actually lived for a few weeks in a KOA campground until she could manage to get an apartment. (I had a blast at the time, being 8 or so, and couldn’t understand why she seemed so despondent about the situation :confused:)

There were times I was left alone at night while she worked and times she took me to work with her on weekends.

We were on foodstamps for a while (she had to have surgery on her feet and was confined to wheelchair and couldn’t work).

But I don’t recall ever going hungry (though some of what I ate was pretty junky; fast food, but also a lot of homecooked stuff) or not having clothes to wear (maybe not the coolest stuff, but ok and clean) or not having a safe, relatively decent place to live (even the tent in the campground was safe and kept the rain and wind off me). Or not getting at least a few gifts I wanted for Christmas, usually several.

I never thought of myself as “poor”, to be honest, even though I had cousins who were “rich” (actually middle class, which compared to us, WAS rich). But they also had parents who were unhappily married, were spoiled and neglected, and both ended up getting pregnant as teens and one at least now lives in trailer park in bum-fuck somewhere with 5 kids and a husband on house arrest. Go figure.

My mom grew up with a divorced mom and 4 siblings, and I know their life was even poorer…they ate beans and rice most nights and were lucky to get a slice of bread to go with it. They wore hand-me-downs and homemade clothes. She carries a lot of issues from that, including her tendency to hoard and her very inept handling of money. (oddly maybe, my grandmother seems to have been much better at handling money and thriving with less, perhaps because when she was a child, they didn’t even have SHOES)

As for how my upbringing has affected me, I think in a lot of ways, but mostly positive.

Yes, I recognize some of the same poor money habits in myself my mom had/has, but I am aware of them and discipline myself.

I appreciate beautiful, quality things and hate cheap-ass crap…the sort of low-budget, buy on time stuff so many poor people waste their funds on. I surround myself with nice things, even on a budget. I thrift. I go for quality items, new or used, and it’s important to me to have attractive, comfortable surroundings, so I put some effort into decorating and furnishing the home.

At the same time, I am not overly attached to things. I have lived quite happily with very little and realize that THINGS are not the be all and end all of life.

I find I am able to live rather well on very little. I find I enjoy a better quality of life than many I know who have more income than I do, mainly because I know how to budget (second nature), make efforts to create a nice home environment and experiences, and appreciate what I DO have in a way some don’t seem to.

I know how to make your own fun on the cheap…cards, board games, family jams with the instruments, taking the train downtown and walking around window shopping all day, etc…

Yes, I’m cheap as DIRT, lol, and proud of it. I am proud that the majority of items in my home were found or bought used for cheap. Got some NICE stuff, and hell NO I didn’t pay that much for any of it.

At the same time, I CAN spend big when I have it and want to…not mean cheap like that. I feel neither a compulsion to spend every cent that comes my way ASAP OR hold on to it as if I may never get another penny. Somehow, I managed to avoid either of those common side effects of growing up poor.

I’m still “poor”, but I don’t think of myself as such. I have a nice home, enough to eat, hell, I’ve even got cable! :eek: I am a returning college student, a widow with 2 kids, and yeah, the money ebbs and flows, sometimes flush and sometimes bust but usually somewhere in between.

I look forward to someday making more money, buying a house, being able to do things that cost more than we can usually afford more often, but it’s not something I feel is absolutely necessary for me to be happy.

42

As my mother is an off-again on-again Doper, I will just say that my early childhood was very very bad, in retrospect. Poor. Very Poor. Gov’t cheese bad. Spending a weekend living in a car bad (I think).

With other issues there that I won’t go into, but needless to say, when I was sent at 13 to live with my dad, it was probably a very very good thing. There was always love, but not always good choices, and certainly not good “examples”.

After moving in with my dad, I suppose it was a HUGE step up to lower middle class, but again, bad examples of how to live and REALLY how to take care of money have impacted me in some odd ways.

Bad choices as a teenager such like : I was forbidden to get a job (bad grades) but was also no allowed to have money, and thus had no concept of what having money was like. The example was, if you have it, spend it, and if you don’t, spend that too (big envelopes of bounced checks were a common occurance).

Also, cleaning isn’t important. Which re-inforced some earlier stuff.

To this day, I am bad with money (I think. I really don’t know. My spouses have handled money, always). And cleanliness and learning to clean up after myself is a constant struggle.

My teen years

43

Poor.

My mother raised the 3 of us on low-end secretary pay, with no financial help from my father. We had housing assistance and were on welfare until I was about 8 or 9.

We got our clothes from a thrift store which sold clothes for $2 per pound.

One sister was a bitch who liked to beat the crap out of me.

My other sister was a psychopath who locked me out of the house during a blizzard, while I was wearing just shorts and a t-shirt.

My mother loved us all and cared very much but was so busy with work and going to family court for reasons relating to my sisters that she didn’t have much time for me.

I went into foster care when I was 12 and other than the summer between 8th and 9th grades, I stayed there until I graduated high school.

I think my years in foster care molded me more than anything else. I am fairly minimalistic. I have a lovely house (thanks to my boyfriend) but my blanket and teddy bear are the most important possessions I have. I’d be more distraught to lose those than all the electronics in my house.

I have no money but again, thanks to my boyfriend, I have a nice place to live and food in my stomach.

In general, I don’t much care about money. If the bills are paid then all is good. The extra stuff - cable, internet, going to Disney - none of that is necessary but it is nice.
Oh and the sister who abused me - I forgave her. She is one of the most special people in the world to me and I love her very much.

My other sister is no longer medicated and she’s the most wonderful mother I’ve ever met.

My mother has a loving husband who takes care of her and I see her at least once a week and we text every day.

I have my family and I have a home. Money is unimportant.

44

Wish I were kidding, but there are places I’ve lived where that credo is ‘Drop out of high school, get pregnant, and STAY pregnant’. Uncle Sam seems to take care of the rest. :frowning: (Wouldn’t say this if I hadn’t seen it, and I am so sorry that it is that way for some folks)

45

I would add - don’t have more kids than you can afford. My mother says after she had her third kid in the late 50’s, my two grandmothers sat her down and TOLD her to shut down the baby factory, bringing up the concept of birth control. Mom said back then she was so naive, just bumbling through life like a puppy dog, she never thought about things like that, being a happy airheaded 50’s housewife! So she didn’t have several more kids as she may well have done, and so there was more for the kids (including me) that she already had. I digress, sorry, but wanted to fit this in here somewhere.

And I am really enjoying reading these stories, each of them would make an engrossing novel, IMO.

46

Socially upper middle class “outsiders,” financially solid middle class. I always had less money than my classmates; growing up, my father didn’t make anywhere near as much as most people thought.

The “outsiders” part is because we moved towns when I was 4; people get real pissed when you tell them you grew there but they can’t “place you” (i.e., they don’t know your ancestors to the Nth generation).

People thought Dad was the owner of the factory where he worked; they thought this when he was the Personnel Manager, when he was the Production Manager and when he was the Factory Manager. After more than ten years of “he’s not the owner, he’s one of the managers,” he got fired and people would tell me “but he was the owner! How does the owner get fired?” He. Was. Not. The. Owner. Damnit!

The two years when his income was greater, moving us into the town’s Créme de la Créme and making Mom welcome in the poshest circles, were horrible in many ways, for me. There was a cleaning lady (which I never got to see), but I did most of the housework that she didn’t do; Dad almost wasn’t home, and when he was he’d be chainsmoking (4-5 packs a day) and angry; Mom almost wasn’t home, and when she was and he wasn’t she’d be giving orders.

The next year, Dad was unemployed; Mom, bedridden; both, depressed. I was in 11th grade, the bros in 1st and 3rd. Dad got a job the following summer; Mom underwent back surgery at the end of September but didn’t leave the house again until early April. Mom’s best friend and my BFF’s mom came and helped once a week; sometimes they’d bring food that they knew I wasn’t good at cooking (veggies, mostly).

I think it’s normal to want to leave your parents house when you’re 18; in my case, I would have gone to college in Anctartica if there had been one there.

In college, my yearly budget including books, cookies, entertainment and transportation was about 1/10 the amount most of my classmates had. I won a school lottery for 10K pesetas in the 4th year and didn’t break the second bill until three years later.

I can pinch pennies until they scream; I’m also able to dump any amount in electronics, so long as I have it. I hate borrowing (yes, even the mortgage; yes, I know it makes sense; “hate” isn’t rational). And I know perfectly well that while poverty can make you miserable, having money beyond what’s required to cover physical needs doesn’t make you happy.

47

Not when it’s voluntary, as it would have been in the case you reference.

48

When I was a child, we vacillated between poor and the lowest of the lower rungs of middle class. My parents divorced when I was 1, my father never paid child support or alimony, my mother was cut off from her family because she married outside her race, and she really despised my sister and me. We were frequently on welfare and food stamps, and when working my mother typically worked two jobs. My sister and I were the ultimate latchkey kids.

I grew up with a strong sense of deprivation. Of course, our neighbors were all struggling as well; otherwise they’d be living in better neighborhoods. But it seemed that most of my friends had stereotypical families wherein they were poor but their homes were filled with love (or, at least, some basic human decency). We learned to always say my mother was out when the bill collectors called, and not a few times we moved out in the middle of the night, owing one or two months’ back rent.

In that time, I knew that I needed to get into college, or I’d have to go to Vietnam, so around the age of nine or ten, I decided that (a) I needed to get into college and (b) the only way I could do that was with lots of scholarships. I didn’t have a very clear idea of what would be involved; I just needed to have a place to go to, because my mother spent all of my childhood telling my sister and me that she’d love nothing more than to drop us off at an orphanage and be done with us. We were expected to leave when we turned 18, because our stuff would be out on the street the day after that birthday. So really, I needed a plan.

I buried myself in schoolwork, generally tried to stay out of my mother’s way, and when I was 16, I ended up going to a college that had a wealthy enough alumni association that they could backfill whatever money I needed (though I had to first max out any Pell grants and miscellaneous scholarships, max out student loans and work part-time jobs the whole time I was in college). But hell, they cut me a check for several thousand dollars pretty much every quarter I was enrolled, so I was quite fortunate.

Since then, I’ve grown to have an upper-middle class income, but I still think like a poor person. However, my version of a former poor person involves getting big paychecks and sometimes buying big, stupid things or going the other way and saving like a miser. I fixed my spending problem years ago, but still haven’t settled on what I would consider a consistent lifestyle for someone with my income.

I’m very, very risk-averse, and have worked at the same company for over 25 years; it’s hard for me to conceive of the idea that people leave jobs willingly. My sister and I are in therapy (separately). She manifests a rage problem, whereas I express it as depression. Both of us are “hyper-vigilant,” meaning that I have a tendency to try to anticipate absolutely every possible way things can go wrong, and to prepare myself for The Bad Times. Though I occasionally pull the odd all-nighter for work related reasons, I pull even more of them either worrying or writing out my thoughts, attempting to calm myself down enough to sleep.

49

Upper middle class. My dad was a Dr., though a GP in a small town doesn’t make anything like those city-slicker specialists. My college was paid for, and I had a car, clothes, etc., but we didn’t live lavishly.

I’m one of those people who, barring some ship coming in, won’t make as much as my dad did. I do fine, though, and it doesn’t bother me.

50

I grew up poor, or that’s how I felt already at an early age. This despite having two working parents. But my dad had extremely low income, not least due to his constant mental health problems, there were three of us kids and I guess most of the money was simply eaten by living expenses.

We didn’t have a car. Or VCR. Or a computer. We never went abroad. I had a cheap-ass bike. My weekly allowance was pitiful. Compared to my school friends, who took all of the above for granted, I felt shamefully poor, even though I always had food, clean clothes and even my own room.

My mom did the best she could. Dad could’ve probably contributed lots more had he cared (I later learned that the poor bastard spent thousands on things like useless magazine subscriptions, lottery, various high-end gadgets he didn’t know how to use but still wouldn’t let his kids touch etc.). At any rate, I dreamt of the day I’d be a well-off adult, living in a house instead of an apartment, having a nice Volvo in the garage and all the entertainment tech my kids knew to ask for.

Funny as hell, now at age 33 and with two small kids, I’m poorer than my old folks ever were. I’m a full-time student and my wife’s at home with the kids. We rent (and can barely pay that). We don’t have a car. We never go abroad. Now I have a VCR but no DVD player. I don’t own even a crappy bike. I’m used to living with less than $500 per month, and get a kick of some sort out of it, but dread the day my kids are old enough to realize the situation and feel the peer pressure. Working on that, though, with my Masters degree in sight. Wife doesn’t seem to want to work ever again, so we’ll remain poor, only less so.

51

Accusation? Hardly. Just a different experience of people with a bunch of money, that’s all. And tax policy really doesn’t enter into this (but it’s worth noting that tax treatment of money earned in a family-owned retail business, for example, depending on what it sells and how it’s structured, can be very different from Wall Street income taxed at a capital gains rate).

52

First part of my childhood was extremely poor. I was the youngest of six in rural Appalachia. We lived miles from the nearest town on a dirt road with very little traffic, and my next oldest brother and I pretty much ran wild.

Somewhere around when I was 9 or 10, things changed rapidly. There was suddenly money, a lot of it. Everything changed, though I was still pretty much that same tomboy kid.

As an adult, I was making very little money and then married a disabled man whose medical expenses were more than I made in a year. He died in January, so now I’m back to having money. I guess I should accept that my life is very cyclical.

53

Lower middle class. Father was a bartender and quit working in his 50s. Mother worked for the State as a mid-level supervisor. Interestingly, my brother and sister, being ten years older than I, grew up relatively poor. I always had what I needed, and we always had meat on the table and a car (eventually two of them). When my siblings were growing up, they had very little, ate a lot of rutabega soup and a car was a dream. I don’t know as any of us were particularly affected, although my brother holds onto possessions like grim death.

54

Upper middle class. My parents were materialistic in some ways but not in others. My dad never cared about cars - he drove a tan Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera like the one in “Fargo” for a long time - but good food, wine and clothes were essential. I got used to eating at restaurants several days a week. As soon as my parents moved to town, when I was 1 year old, they bought a giant, old, hellishly expensive house (which was unbelievably beautiful) in probably the nicest street in the entire town, which they proceeded to pump money into for the next 10 years fruitlessly trying to restore the place to 20th-century standards, a battle which they ultimately lost, and we moved to another nice, though newer and less interesting, house in a suburban development.

My parents were always generous to my sister and I and they still are. I always got the best, coolest clothes in middle school and high school; my parents would take me shopping and I’d buy hundreds of dollars worth of Tommy Hilfiger, Abercrombie, Hollister clothes. (Knowing that I’d quickly outgrow them.) In college I shopped at thrift stores, but for hipster cred and not out of necessity. I always had tons of video and computer games and all the latest kool gadgets. I always got the best musical instruments - guitars and several saxophones, etc - even though I was only a dabbler in music, at most. My parents definitely lavished material stuff on me (and, truthfully, they still do.) Whether this is a good or bad thing, I really cannot say.

There were some things that I was always jealous of other kids for, though. I always envied the kids who lived out in the rural areas who got to ride dirt bikes, ATVs, etc. I knew a lot of farm kids - well-to-do farm kids, but still farm kids who had vast expanses of land to ride go-karts and dirt bikes on. My family had a nice house and a lot of stuff, but the one thing we didn’t have was land and I always resented that as a kid. When I was younger my parents would sometimes talk about moving out to the country and I would always be like “pleasepleasepleaseplease!” but it never happened.

As I got older, my dad got more and more successful and eventually when he and my mom divorced (when I was 18) the true man that he really was came out, which was the “playboy” who travels around the world and has lots of young girlfriends and drinks a lot of wine and buys clothes more often than any woman. So that’s what my dad does now, and he seems pretty happy with that lifestyle. I guess it’s what he always wanted to do, and his marriage with my mom prevented him from doing it. It’s been an interesting thing to watch, this metamorphosis of a man. My mom is a lot more conservative (in terms of lifestyle, not politically) but she still splurges on some things. She has a fairly successful career of her own but still gets some money from my dad.

55

Poor. Trailer park. Welfare. Food stamps. Military instead of university. I hated it and the stigma. On the plus side, we had lots of support from the extended family. I do well now, and have an excellent life. The consequences of my background are surely there, but I tend not to dwell on them. Perhaps I have a penchant for not getting into debt, and being tight with my money.

56

Wow, what happened?

57

Not if you marry the right person.:wink:
So clearly I grew up upper-middle class. Both my parents are highly educated (MBA for my dad and Ivy League doctorate for my mom). Both worked professional jobs. My brother and I weren’t lavished with gifts or BMWs or anything like that. But money was never an issue, it was expected we would go to college and there wasn’t a question about how it would get paid. In fact, I just sort of assumed that most people grew up in 1400 sq ft homes on 1/2 - 1/2 acre wooded lots because that’s what every single home in Connecticut seems to be.

Probably the biggest difference I’ve noticed in terms of class culture and values is between me and my mom. Her side of the family grew up very working class. So my mom tends to exhibit what I associate with a middle class or working class attitude. Do as you are told, listen to authority, don’t make waves, basically don’t do anything that could possibly endanger your job and cause you to dip further down the status later into “poor”.

I, as you may have noticed, do not think like that. I have the the sense of entitlement that often comes from not really ever having to truly worry about money and knowing that the system pretty much works for you. And I don’t even mean it in a negative way. It seems to me that people, like many of my peers, who have grown up in a similar way truly do believe that their success or failure is more about their own personal drive and ability.

There is a Facebook group called “You Know You Grew Up in Fairfield County, CT When…” Here are a few items from the list I felt were relevant and not that obscure to people outside of New England:

*You have hiked up a golf course at least once to get to a keg party.

*You never went to a bar in high school.

*You party on the beach of Long Island Sound.

*You have deer in your backyard.

*Your family owns more than one house.

*At least one parent works in New York City. They take the train.

*You know the crucial difference between SoNo and SoHo.

*In high school you drank outside, regularly.

*You still don’t understand why people say that Connecticut is the richest state.

*You have at least 10 friends who drive Jeeps.

*You’ve never looked at a public bus schedule. You would also never get on one.

*You know girls and guys that have the same names.

*You think Bridgeport is the worst ghetto you’ve ever seen.

*You spend the summer on Cape Cod, in Nantucket or Marthas Vineyard.

*When you go to a real city, you sincerely feel bad for the poor/homeless people.

*The cars in your high school’s parking lot were worth more than your high school.

*You were pissed that your sixteenth birthday car was a new sedan instead of an SUV. (I drove **Argent Towers’s **dad’s Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera in burgundy for like 8 years)

*You know what Okemo is (and you or a friend owns a house there).

*You grew up wondering where the old cars in the parking lot at the grocery store came from.

*You found it easy to drink college seniors under the table within the first week of college.

*You don’t have an accent. (it’s true. We are the only people in New England and the NJ/NY/CT tri state area without an identifyable accent)

*You know how to play Beruit, and how it differs from Beer Pong.

*You have more than one country club in your town.

*Your high school sent more than 10 kids to Boston College.

*You consider Fairfield County and the rest of Connecticut two different states.

58

Oil. My dad started a business and made some really good investments in oil.

59

I have 1/2 an acre and a 1600 foot^2 home, but it seems small to me in the “keeping up with the Joneses” sense, given my income and job and so on. Granted, there was no “creative financing” involved, but I consider it very modest for southeast Michigan. Certainly there are lots of humbler lots and homes, and they belong to people that make less than me, but I certainly don’t consider myself on the upper end of the middle class. (There’s another thread asking what is middle class.)

On the other hand, most of the people I know with houses worth twice as much as mine have, e.g., 1900 ft^2 ground floors on 2100 ft^2 lots, so I’m still the winner. Might as well go live in an apartment if that’s how you want to live.

60

1400-1600 sq ft is a modest sized home. The difference is that in southeast Michigan (according to Zillow.com) that house probably goes for around $150,000. In Fairfield County, CT the same exact house can run you half a million to a million dollars, depending on the town.