I still don’t know how much my parents earn! Dad’s retired now, so I doubt the information will do me much good at this point anyway. I don’t know how I got past the college forms. I think my parents filled those out for me.
I remember being curious about it and being told something like “enough to put us comfortably into middle class.” Nowadays, I have no idea what that meant, but it satisfied me at the time. Whatever the number was, I’m sure I would have thought it was HUGE. Anything over $1000 was just an enormous amount of money to me!
I’m not sure why I would have ever needed that information. By the time I was ready to go out on my own, I’d had many conversations with my parents about what type of salary would support various lifestyles. Knowing how much they made wouldn’t have helped with that. Their circumstances were very different from mine.
I’m 19 and I don’t know my parents’ salaries. I know what they do to earn their money, I have a general idea of what they can and can’t afford, and if I sat down with a calculator and searched for relevant info for a few hours I could probably get it pretty damn close. But why? It’s really not important. What’s important is that they taught me how to handle my own money and live within my means.
Go ahead and keep teaching your kids how to budget, BTW. I don’t know if schools are teaching budgeting now, but I graduated from high school in 2004 and I don’t remember ever learning in class how to budget, or even learning in class that it wasn’t a good idea to buy things I couldn’t afford. A lot of people I know never got that message, anyway. If you feel uncomfortable telling your kids your salary, tell them that how you live and budget is much more important than the specific digits. Isn’t that what they really need to know, anyway?
BTW, there’s a book/test called the RAT that’s basically an amatuer SAT for solving real-world problems like budgeting, relationships, housing, finding a career, maintaining home and car, personal safety (including understanding their alcohol “limit”), etc. I’d suggest you look into that, if only as a checklist of things they need to know before they’re adults. IANAParent but IMO if your kids can score decently on that test by the time they’re seniors in high school you’ll have done damn fine by them.
Why did he need to “give her” the lifestyle she wanted? If she wants to be upper-middle class, she can go to school and get a degree of her own and a good job, and then if she wants to subsidize someone who’s important to her she can, or if she wants to be with someone on equal socioeconomic ground she can. IMO thinking that way–that she can’t achieve her dreams without a manly man stepping in and buying them for her–would probably do her a lot more harm.
Thinking back, I never knew how much my mother made until the other day I was looking over her resume and it included salary points. I still don’t know how much my dad makes, and I’ve been out of the house for nearly a decade.
I’m not sure it’s done us children that many favors, honestly, not having a bar to compare against, or really knowing the value of things when we were growing up. Personally, I’m lucky that I make enough to be comfortable, but I still struggle with keeping my financial stuff organized and knowing the value of things. For me, something that made a big difference was having a lot of friends from different socioeconomic groups and seeing how they handled financial matters – I have strong suspicions that my siblings don’t do that so much. While my sister seems to have a clue, I don’t think my brother does.
I think the advice in the thread about pointing out how much things cost and what take-home after taxes is, etc, is sound. Including the ‘living within means’. If I ever spawn (god forbid), that’s probably what I will do.
Does anyone else remember being asked to provide their parents’ income level at school? I remember filling out forms at the beginning of each school year (at public school in NY state), which asked for things like who to contact in an emergency, and a fairly specific range of income. This seems so bizarre to me now, I even asked my brother if he remembers this, and he does. And I still remember what number my mom told me to fill in on the form.
I like the idea of talking to kids about the general notion of income and monthly expenses without getting too specific about the numbers. I also strongly support the idea of talking, again in a general sense, about reasonable expectations for incomes for different careers, even with younger kids. I have been amazed at some of the misconceptions some incoming college students have about this. By the time they are in high school, I think they should know the rough outlines of cost of education, salaries/hourly wages, and benefits for careers that they are interested in.
That said, it’s important that the kids understand that they can’t just say “Oh, _____ make lots of money, I want to be a ______.” (a) They have to understand what will be expected of them in that path and (b) they have to like doing it, so they don’t end up waking up every day and feeling miserable about going to work. Lots of people say “I’ll be a doctor/lawyer/actor/athlete and make lots of money!” and don’t realize that (a) there’s a reason they get paid that much money; they work like hell and spend a lot of time being dirt poor first and (b) being a rich lawyer who would rather be a chemist is as bad as being a middle-class chemist who would rather be a lawyer. For example, I have a friend who’s a very talented artist and loves drawing, but is fixated on studying medicine and becoming a doctor although he (college sophomore) has a slippery grasp on basic algebra and is afraid of blood. He says he likes helping people, and it’s true, he does, but more importantly he wants to be rich. I hope for his sake that it works, but it doesn’t look good from here.
I grew up dirt poor, and didn’t have a clue how much money came into the house, how much money it cost to feed the family, how much the house payment was, never got allowance, etc. As a result, I had absolutely no clue how much it really took to support a household and made some terrible financial decisions that I’m still paying for (literally) years later. I made sure Hallkids knew how much it cost to support a household–including how much money was coming into the household and where it was going and why. (“Yes, $X is a lot to spend on car insurance every month, and no, I haven’t been in any auto accidents, but this is what happens if I don’t pay $X each month for car insurance.”) This enabled them to have a much more realistic perspective on their finances, and was quite apparent when they went off to college (an expense that they were solely responsible for–each Hallkid is/has put themselves through college on their own dime). While other kids were calling home for money, or using Daddy’s credit card, the Hallkids were much more aware and responsible about THEIR money.
My parents never told me, but I remember when I was maybe 12 or 13, my dad had to fill out some questionaire where you select the amount of money your household made. My dad selected “$100,000-$150,000”, between him and my mom. I remember thinking that was more money than I could ever comprehend making in my entire life.
Now I realize that’s probably about average. But at 12 or 13, it was extremely difficult to not brag about how rich my parents were. I even did brag about it a few times, if memory serves.
Anyhoo, as I got into college they were more open about their individual salaries, and now as i’m settling into a career they’re extremely open about salaries, retirement, pensions, savings, investments, etc. They did it right… giving me the information when I was old enough to appreciate what it all meant. Except letting me see that questionaire… I wish that didn’t happen in retrospect.
I don’t see what the big deal is. I’ve known hom much my parents were making ever since I understood what a million was and I never used that information to belittle anybody.
You too? I just fell behind my younger brother by a couple of thousand (damn it ;))
I don’t see the need for secrecy about incomes, I pretty much knew how much my father made a year while I was growing up, after that I just didn’t care enough to ask. If a family member or friend ever wants to know how much I make, I would have no problems telling them.
Heh. No competition. I’m the corporate minion, sister is going back to grad school, brother is the proverbial basement dweller. I just stare over the fence sadly at all the code monkeys who make mad $.
