Another comment so good, it deserved its own post. We sure attract smart, well-spoken people to this site. Rose, a millenial, provides some wisdom beyond her years.
For context, I am a Millenial. MY husband is a Gen Xer.
My husband was 16 when his dad died. His family did not have a lot of money and 6 kids to care for. Other than his dad’s social security, which was meager because his jobs were not very high pay, they did not get any outside assistance at any time. He quit school to work days. He finished high school at night and then went on to the community college night classes, while working on a farm 6 or 7 days a week, doing heavy, heavy manual labor and then coming home to study. He paid cash for his education, going when he had the money to pay for it. It took him 8 years to pull it off but he has a degree and it helped land him a managerial job on a farm, a good enough job to allow us to buy a home, own 2 cars outright and have me stay home with our child.
By all rights, when his dad passed he could have jumped on the “poor pitiful me” modern victimhood bandwagon but he is a man and real men don’t do that. I am, as you might guess, more than a little bit proud of the guy. He is a rock. I would walk through hell if he was next to me.
His story and countless others like it prove that it CAN be done. It just takes a LOT of sweat and sacrifice. Whining does not buy you anything but annoyed listeners. If carrying 70 pound cabbage boxes in the blazing sun is what it takes to get ahead, you do it. The only alternative is a lifetime of servitude and self loathing.
I will admit, it is NOT easy to get traction in this environment. We have lost a disgusting amount of money trying to invest in traditional methods as advised by my well intentioned Boomer parents. We got walloped in 2008 and have only just now regained what we lost. Which is maddening because we worked so hard to save what little we had invested. To see it all just melt away was heartbreaking. It also woke us up. Fool us once….
What worked for the Boomers doesn’t work for us. It might never work again. But what my great-grandparents did DOES work. Buy yourself some Horatio Alger and read it like a manual.
We bought a small-ish, 160 year old rural house with some acreage. It needed work but had good bones. You could build a battleship with its oak beams. We can pay the mortgage with one income, and we went for a short mortgage to get rid of it as soon as possible. We have restored it to a working farmhouse. It is clean and neat but not trendy. Screw Martha Stewart if she thinks curing sweet potatoes on racks in the living room is not tasteful.
We dug up most of the lawn and put in a huge garden and fruit trees and bushes and I can hundreds of jars of food a year. We built a chicken coop for meat and eggs. I am trying to talk him into hogs for the back pasture. The idea of homemade bacon almost has him convinced. We buy grassfed beef from a local farm and get a deal because my husband works for them on the side for a break.
I stay at home and am a traditional housewife. This means cooking from scratch, cleaning and repairing things myself and squeezing every penny until it begs for mercy. We do not have cable or dish or cell phones. We line dry laundry on all but the worst of days. Our furniture is antiques that we buy broken and restore. It will last a lifetime. We borrow our entertainment for the library and buy our books at booksales. On the side, for pin money, to keep my brain busy and to fund our homeschooling, I sell excess vintage kids books.
Life is a lot of work but we have truly good and healthy food, a warm, welcoming home, good friends of like mind and a beautiful little girl. We have what matters.
Why am I saying all of this? Because it illustrates a very important principle: you can spend time, or you can spend money. Money is hard to come by, and what you do get Uncle Sugar will steal. Time, on the other hand, if well managed, is plentiful. By raising our own, making from scratch and restoring other people’s castoffs, we use time but save money. I have a good degree and could be working outside the home, but it would be taxable. By my being a stay at home housewife providing many of our basic needs we dodge that, as well as the expenses of childcare and work clothes and mileage on the car. And it lets us homeschool, which frees our daughter from the shackles of public indoctrination. Manual labor for ourselves frees our limited money up for other things. Things like starting a business, which we are working on.
If you want to invest, invest in yourself. Build a foundation that your family can grow on. Forget the snake oil they sell you about retirement. It is nothing but a rat race to get you to forfeit money now, make it unavailable, and then go into debt for things you could have paid cash for if you’d had access to your own money. Invest in solid things, pay off your debts and raise your kids right. And by that, I mean raise them as the Amish do, to pick up where you leave off, to provide comfort to you in old age as you provide them comfort in youth. Be a tribe. Love and family are our strongest weapons. Why else do you think TPTB do their damndest to turn us away from these?
It is true, it IS hard that resources cost so much, but sometimes you just have to bite the bullet and do it to get yourself to where you want to be. Give up what you can, do for yourself what you can, and pay the bloodmoney for what you must have.
There are more than few of us Xers and Minnies who see things this way. A lot of us rediscovering old crafts, skills and values and forgoing the i-crazes. Don’t write us all off. There is still backbone in some of us.
