Making more money than your siblings

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I have two older siblings. My brother, who had a talent for tinkering with electronics, went to community college to get an AA in electronics, but dropped out. My sister, who was an A student in high school, announced repeatedly that she’d never go to college or “become a 9 to 5 stooge”. Both never had more than menial jobs, with my sister in particular quitting job after job and depending heavily on money gifts from my mom.

I went to community college and got a two-year degree in business admin, and it has served me well. I got a job as a legal secretary straight out of school, and worked my butt off in this capacity from 1979 until a few months ago, when I retired.

When my mom was still alive, she cautioned me not to talk about anything I did or bought that cost a bit of money because it pissed off my siblings to hear about it. I hadn’t been aware I was doing anything like boasting, and this surprised and saddened me. From then on, I was cautious to never mention anything my husband and I did that might be construed as costing money, and this led to constrained conversations. I had to keep the talk to things like gardening or cooking or TV shows, and these subjects were quickly exhausted.

Sad to say, it eroded my relationships with my brother and sister severely. It was tiring to worry about anything I might say that would offend them, and their griping about financial problems made every phone call stressful. I couldn’t support them after our mom died, as my husband was struggling with layoffs and temp jobs himself.

So that’s my story. Anyone else have poorer, resentful sibling stories?

2

Not mine , but one of my husband’s. Although we are financially doing the best of the four, there is one sibling who is financially much worse off. But in large part, that’s because of her own poor choices. She took months off from working when she was young to travel. During the time she was traveling, she paid rent to keep the apartment she wasn’t living in. She withdrew money from her retirement savings to finance a move to San Diego - where instead of working as a hairstylist , she ended up working as a supermarket cashier and dog walker. The dog walking was because she wanted to be the next Cesar Millan - although she had never had a dog only cats. So now that she is in her 50s all we hear, all the time is how she will never be able to retire. Her mother left her 50% of a co-op apartment which has now been on the market for over a year ( mom is gone almost two ) because she doesn’t want to drop the price because “that’s all I have” . Once that apartment is sold, I doubt the other three will ever speak to her again.

3

Not overtly resentful, but still different in my case.

One of my brothers got a BA degree in a commercially useless field while working in construction to finance his living expenses; Dad covered the tuition as he did for all his kids. Bro still works construction as a one man outfit. He’s not good at working with others; they’re all lazy incompetents, and by comparison to his work & work ethic, he’s right. He’s darn good at working and is in great demand. Almost 50 years of that has made him a very self-reliant, rustic, frankly rough-hewn and rough-edged guy. He’s smart, can turn on the charm for the ladies, but really thinks modern urban society is for wussies and the frontier or sea-going 1700-1800s was the last time men were worthwhile men. Having said that, he’s got no use for ignorant MAGAtism.

Conversely, I’m comfy. I have utterly screwed the pooch on investments a time or two, so not nearly as fat of a cat as I might have been but I am a tad overweight, do have a thick coat, and a contented purr. And a somewhat smug urbane manner in person. That I usually try to hide on the Dope to varying success.

We’ve always been good friends and can talk on the phone for hours. But usually about the Big Topics of the World, not day-to-day life. He’s happy with his free life in charge of himself and his companion dog on a day to day basis, but hints that the larger long term picture both past and future has him feeling down, and always has.

It’s tough. He never expresses resentment, but I try to minimize talking about “I did this, spent that, have this, bought that, etc.” A lot of his work is done for the spoiled idle seriously rich who’re 10 to 10,000x as rich as I am. I see those folks where I live too, and although they look sleek and have very nice toys, up close and personal they’re not easy people to work with or for, and are generally not much people to admire.

I get the impression I have slid at least partly, if not fully, into that category from his POV. Which means I’m becoming persona non grata in his world. Which hurts. From his POV, it’s not personal, it’s just that the proletariat has nothing good for the bourgeoisie.


Semi-related to the above, The Dope demographic skews towards skint. It's a low-cost recreation. Yes, there are bunches of high earners and middle earners here (whether still working or retired), but lots more who are scraping by in variously genteel or non-genteel working poverty. Much as in the highly unequal real world.

Freed from the constraints of geography, age, personal appearance, etc., we all associate here in ways we’d just never encounter in person. I treasure that diversity, and have learned a great deal from it. IMO it’s one of the Dope’s most attractive features. I’m also sensitive to trying to avoid being That Guy at the party who’s obliviously (or worse yet deliberately) making others uncomfortable. Not always easy. When someone is ranting, or just kvetching, about their work / money situation at the bottom of the pyramid, I’d like to be sympathetic and helpful. Without sounding like oblivious “let them eat cake”. Sometimes I decide giving the thread or side-track a pass is the best least bad choice.

4

My sister’s made more money than me overall but it’s never disrupted our relationship. I think it’s because we respect the roles we play at work and also because we’re all reasonably thrifty so all share similar lifestyle. We also both plan for retirement since we were kids; we’ve both had IRAs since we were seven and paid to pick up sticks in the neighbors’ yards. We’ve both been continually employed our whole lives. My point is there can sometimes be common ground despite income differential.

5

I’m the poor resentful sibling, I suppose. Though I’m only resentful when my siblings call me miserly for not spending $10,000 on a vacation or $70,000 on a car or thinking that a $250 dinner more than once or twice a year is extravagant. Or make fun of me for mowing and raking my own lawn.

And I’m still in the 90th percentile of net worth and 80th percentile of household income (now with only one income).

6

I assume I make more money than my brother (he’s a minister), but our total household incomes are probably comparable.

My dad’s sister quit working as a nurse in her 30s or 40s in order to study some kind of New Age quackery; she got financial support from my grandparents while they were still alive. Now that she’s older, she complains that her brothers don’t help her out and that has caused some tension in the family.

7

My brother is an executive and had done better financially than my sisters and I combined, but I don’t sense any resentment from any quarter.

My husband, on the other hand, found out his late brother really didn’t like him and I suspect it’s because his “degree” from an unaccredited Bible College wasn’t as lucrative as my husband’s engineering career. About the only time said brother called was when he wanted something, and we quit helping him decades ago when we decided we didn’t need another dependent. But we’re pretty sure his brother thought we should take care of him instead of buying a new car or taking a cruise.

8

My sister (adopted, two years younger) has been on disability assistance for years, and hasn’t held a job in probably two decades. Besides government assistance, my dad kicks in money every month to cover her nut in community housing. (She still managed to squirrel away enough money over many months to buy herself a TV the size of a drive-in screen, but that’s neither here nor there.)

I’ve been employed at the same desk job for twenty years now and while I don’t live in luxury, I pay all my own bills, take myself to Europe every couple of years and on a few road trip vacations annually as well. I don’t lord it over anyone (truth be told, we haven’t spoken in two years, after she had a massive screaming meltdown over Thanksgiving), but I always got a lot of resentfulness about what a supposed fantastic life I had, when all I did was buckle down and persevere at my office.

As for another wing of the family, I had six cousins on my dad’s side, as he had a Mormon brother. My dad always got a weird vibe that those cousins resented our household for some reason, but he couldn’t put his finger on why. Years later, he was talking on the phone with one of said cousins, who confessed that they’d always heard that we (my immediate family) were really rolling in it while they were doubling up on bedrooms, traveling in a cramped rusty van, yadda yadda. Which was total nonsense: we penny-pinched for almost my entire childhood and never took a trip more exotic than driving around New England, staying at roadside motels. Nowadays, said cousins mostly have high-paying jobs, and travel the world with their own broods. Perception is a crazy thing.

9

My sisters didn’t want to work after they had babies so Mom paid their bills. Now that Mom is in her late 80’s my sisters are starting to worry about who’s going to pay their bills once she’s gone.

My husband and I chose to be DINKs (Double Income No Kids) and are now enjoying a comfortable retirement.

There was a major meltdown a couple of years ago when we refused to co-sign for a sister to buy a small place out this way because she didn’t have a job and we didn’t want to end up paying her mortgage and basically supporting her because she wouldn’t feel obligated to get a job and pay her own bills.

We are greedy and selfish and horrible people who haven’t had any of them call and ask for money since. I’m kinda liking it this way :slight_smile:

Bless your heart.

10

I don’t think it’s about the money as much as it’s about personalities. Envious people will begrudge whoever is more fortunate than them, while mocking those less fortunate. If it’s not money, it’ll be something else: job, spouse, children, health, religion, politics, etc. Always with the judging, they are.

I am fortunate that my siblings are not envious.

11

Mostly thanks to my husband, we are financially secure. For my part, I’ve worked steadily at a decent job and am not a spender.
My immediate family is not doing nearly as well, particularly my brother, who has always worked in construction or yard work. I would describe his lifestyle as abject poverty. No one has ever expressed any resentment towards us, but I worry about it. In some ways, I had an easier time in life than my brother did.
I always downplay the differences when I can. For instance, we are having the kitchen remodeled next spring. I haven’t told any family about it for this very reason.

12

I haven’t a clue what my brother makes. I’m an English teacher, he’s in a blue-collar trade. I suspect I make more than him but I do not know this for sure. However, his wife works and mine does not, I have two kids I’m still supporting, he does not. I have savings and retirement accounts, I strongly suspect he does not. So he likely has more discretionary income than I do. But I have a mortgage with LTV of 58%, he lives in a house owned by my dad and I suspect pays nothing (I know the power is still in dad’s name…). My vehicles are late-models in good repair and 4 of the 5 are owned outright, we have a minimal payment on the 5th one. He drives clunkers that spend more time on jack stands than driving down the road. Overall, I’m much happier with my standard of living that I would be with his regardless of our respective incomes. I have financial stability and control that I see no evidence of him having.

My mother made more money than any of her other siblings and I know it created some animosity for at least one of her brothers. He called her once maybe 10 years ago, before she got sick, and asked for money. I don’t know how much but it was quite a lot. Mom refused to help him – he’s single, lives in a home he owns outright, an worked at the time full-time as a delivery driver for FedEx. After that he only spoke to her at family functions, which were quite rare.

Mom got very sick this past summer and was hospitalized several times. He doctor wanted to put her on hospice. My brother called all of her siblings – 5 of them – and told them that if they wanted to see their sister again they better get to Oregon ASAP. None of them did and she passed on September 6. Apparently they were all shocked (“but she was doing so good!”). Anyway, I’m digressing. I don’t know if her financial stability and healthy income fed into the distance between her and her siblings that had arisen near the end of her life. Now that mom’s gone I’m not sure how much contact I’ll have with them. I’m still salty they never came to visit her before she passed, although I know she wasn’t concerned.

My father made much less, probably by an order of magnitude, than his brother. They get along well so I don’t think it was an issue although I know there were times my dad wished he could pay to have a car repaired rather than doing it himself, or pay for some service like cable TV that was too cheap to pay for. The operative word there is “cheap.” He had the money but chose not to spend it; his parsimonious ways are legendary.

This is/was the case with us. Both my parents were college educated and made decent but not spectacular money. As noted my dad was cheap and didn’t want to spend money on anything; I learned well into adulthood that they paid down their mortgages – they owned two separate but adjoining homes, one was a rental – with a decade to spare on both of them. Our house was big but not at all fancy or luxurious. We never vacationed anywhere we couldn’t drive to in a couple of days or less, my parents only bought one new vehicle during my entire childhood, we didn’t splurge on gifts at Xmas or birthdays… the list goes on. OTOH my aunts and uncles moved often, buying increasingly bigger and expensive homes. Many bought into the McMansion & ARM mortgage craze in the mid 2000’s and paid dearly for it (none of them still live in those homes having lost them or had to sell them at a loss post-2008). Their children have by and large followed the same pattern. My dad still lives in the house he and mom bought in 1986; my brother now lives in the other one. My dad drives a newer Hyundai Tucson but that’s only because he needed something that my mom could get into and out of easily. If not for that requirement he’d still be driving his ca. 2008 Nissan Rogue, which replaced his 1989 Toyota Van. 3 new vehicles in 25 years. My aunts and uncles, and now my cousins as well, replace their vehicles every 3 or 4 years and always buy brand new. I can’t even fathom having a car payment my entire life. So yeah, we were not big spenders compared to the rest of the family. But for some reason my family thinks we were. I’ve still, at age 42, not left the country or indeed been further east than Yellowstone park. Most of my cousins travel internationally on a regular basis. My suspicion is that, because both my parents were professionals working for the VA, they fit the stereotype of upper middle class simply by their career choice and that perception has trickled down to my cousins. I have an MA and am a teacher. I guess that’s supposed to make me well-off? I’m confident I’m more stable than my cousins or my brother but as noted have less discretionary income than those do.

13

I’ve never felt comfortable asking my brother and sister outright how much they make, but I recently did some sleuthing and discovered that my sister makes about 20% of what I do and my brother makes about 40%.

And yet, I don’t have any tales about my siblings being resentful. Finances just never come up in conversation. I mean, the only really visible sign of the difference in incomes is that I have a nicer house and car than they do, but it’s not like we ever compare the values of our cars or anything like that.

You mention that you were cautious never to mention anything you and your husband did that might be construed as costing money. Just curious what sorts of things you had to keep quiet about. Vacations? Home remodeling?

14

I’m with you on this. ISTM that resentfulness of family members is learned behavior. If you are taught that it is a “thing” and observe the behavior in your parents, through their comments, then you learn to be resentful.

As for myself, we are definitely at a different tier than my remaining sibling. She and her husband have always had strong work ethics, and are very responsible with the money they have. Personally, I have always felt that they were underemployed. They were never ambitious or pursued education, but they are solidly middle-class in a low COL area. We do talk about mostly everything, and day-to-day money stresses can happen no matter what your income level. But I don’t hide our lifestyle out of any fear of resentment. None has ever been expressed.

15

Not so much my siblings, although there’s a pretty vast difference between my assets and a couple siblings. My sisters the twins were never good with money, from their youngest days getting an allowance. They sponged off me a few times until I started saying no. But I’ve never heard “Oh, you have it so easy”, or anything like that.

What I did have was a co-worker who was convinced (and spreading the rumor) that I was independently wealthy and didn’t need to work. Like anyone does credit and collections for the fun of it. Apparently living frugally, saving and being debt-free meant I was wealthy.

StG

16

I make significantly more that my younger sister (née brother), and I attribute my success more to hard work than to luck, although certainly there’s an element of luck to everyone’s life. Life isn’t a zero sum game, of course, so my success has nothing to do with her lack of success, which is almost certainly to do with laziness and making poor choices.

She’s intelligent and creative and capable of performing mental tasks, but has simply never chosen to use those skills, instead, taking the counterintuitive approach of trying to get things the easy way, but never actually getting things (“things” like a steady paycheck, security, etc., not necessarily shit from Neiman Marcus or Pottery Barn or Walmart).

I can’t really hide my success from her. We live frugally with no real conspicuous consumption. Our house when built in 1976 was probably ostentatious, but by today’s standards it’s just an older colonial in a nicer subdivision in a desirable township, but not a McMansion on two acres just a bit west of here. We always have a nice, newer car in the driveway, but that’s because my company leases them to me cheaply, since, you know, we build them.

She can’t really hide her low circumstances. She’s rented her entire life up until recently, when she and her wife finally bought their first home due to an advance on their inheritance from an elderly family member that they help (and they help him a lot and don’t begrudge them that). I’m talking a $30,000 house with meth neighbors (she doesn’t take drugs or smoke or drink, by the way).

There’s no hostility, but they (she and her wife) regard me as “rich,” although we’ve created some wealth by saving and not buying bullshit, we’re not rich. If I were to lose my job at my age, it’s unlikely I’d find another source of equivalent income (or possibly I’m saying that because I wouldn’t want a job with the responsibilities that merit my income). I’m a wage slave, whereas they think I have piles of liquid cash laying about somewhere that I can easily access if my mother suddenly needs a root canal and crown, and I’m an asshole for suggesting we look for programs that exist for this express purpose rather than just writing a check.

She and I grew up poor, with a divorced mother collecting child support, welfare, and food stamps, so I’m certainly not out of touch with the lumpenproletariat. In fact, it’s the thing I’m most afraid of having to return to, and it drives me to succeed, whereas, my sister was always comfortable in that lifestyle: no need to work, someone will feed us, it’ll just all kind of work out.

17

My brother and I were brought up by a single mom who had to go out and find work to support us after having been a housewife for fifteen years. She worked hard and was extremely thrifty, and we were brought up to do the same. These lessons took for my brother but less so for me. We were the classic ant and grasshopper types.

Now both of us are in our sixties. He worked hard from the time he graduated from high school, put himself through college, bought himself a house, and worked his way up in a small business until he was the owner’s right-hand man. Then the owner died, his daughter inherited, and she cut everyone’s benefits and hours before selling the place to a large corporation, so he retired early on the savings he’d put away and the relatively small inheritance from our mom. He never earned a huge salary, but he was single and had no kids, and he was always very frugal, so he does fine on very little money.

I, on the other hand, never applied myself to higher education, worked at jobs that didn’t take a lot of effort, and spent money as soon as I had it. Luckily, although my husband was no better with money than I was, he worked in computers and electrical engineering and made a good income, and we got better with money as we matured. He co-founded a successful company, and we are now in a much higher income category than we ever dreamed of when we started out.

My brother and I get along very well, and he doesn’t ever show any resentment about how things turned out. I try not to flaunt my relative wealth, and if we’re planning group activities, I try to keep them modest. If he ever needed financial help, I would fall over myself to provide it, but I know he wouldn’t ask unless there was no alternative. We stopped exchanging gifts a few years ago, but that had at least as much to do with us really not needing any more trinkets at our age as with our different financial positions. We take each other out on our birthdays and spend holidays together. If he were a less fair-minded and upright person, he might be resentful, but if he does feel any of that, he’ll never betray it to me.

18

I started never mentioning our vacations or if we were able to afford a new car. Before I learned to be cautious, I once brought up that we had sold my ancient Toyota and then bought a newer, used Honda Accord. My brother acted shocked that I had been so extravagant. I had thought that we were being frugal, as I drove the Toyota for fifteen years and had gotten a good deal on a used Honda.

And I never mentioned any other items we purchased over the years: furniture, a television, a Christmas gift of a pair of pearl earrings, etc. Once when my family visited us in our rented first home in a better neighborhood, my sister called me “spoiled.” This from a woman who had been supported by her mom for most of her adult life.

19

I’m the opposite, my siblings make far more money than I do and own 6 houses while I own none. I don’t resent them in the least (it’s my own fault I slacked off/failed in life,) but I think they regard me with some mixture of pity and alarm.

20

So many of these posts echo my brother. He’s been on disability for anxiety disorder for about 25 years, the bulk of his adult life. Had a few jobs back in the last century but none ever worked out. Mom and dad helped him, financially, so he could afford to live somewhat better than the average poor person (having his own apartment, a car, affording stuff like a good computer, smart phone, etc.). And as mentioned, being poor meant he could throw shade on people poorer than himself, namely immigrants who may be cutting into his public assistance.

My wife and I built-up everything we have with no help from anyone, and when my brother was struggling, we tried to help him, several times, but each time ended in failure and strained relations. After dad died he left us (my brother and I) his remaining small cache of investments in a very lopsided distribution (favoring me, since I was the responsible one with a family, etc.) which added more strain to things (I ‘leveled things out’ eventually). Anyway, yeah, my brother would cast judgement on any purchase I mentioned, like a new bicycle, or a family vacation or whatnot, like I was spending the inheritance, his inheritance money, on frivolties while he toiled away on public assistance and food stamps. A couple years ago he moved to another city and wanted me to “hold onto” some of his money - the stash of cash he kept in his mattress so he would appear poor and not lose his public health benefits. I refused to be a part of any of his finances, and have been consistent on that since the great ‘leveling out’. We are estranged now.