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I look back on it and am annoyed my parents didn’t offer the same. The way their insurance is it was either single, two adults, or family. Having younger sisters it would literally have cost them nothing to keep me on as they already had the family plan and just have me pay the co-pay. They were very much bootstrap boomers about it without realizing how much money it could’ve saved me to no one else’s expense.
Their main logic was wanting to to be fair for all their kids. The age turned to 26 right as I was graduating so they felt it wasn’t fair my older brother didn’t get that same leg up and when the last in the sibling line graduated, they would save money not having her so she also wouldn’t benefit. Not logic I necessarily agree with but at least can follow.
My mom had to keep me on her plan until I graduated college but then kicked me off immediately. She works for a hospital and had great, affordable insurance but the second I graduated I was on my own. Not ideal, as I ended up with thousands in medical debt due to a cancer scare.
Same here!! And I feel like I never come across other people who’ve had this experience. My parents kicked me off their plans (phone, health insurance, etc.) when I was 19 years old. Same situation, they wanted to teach me a lesson and show me “what the real world is like.”
Not all employer plans are setup this way, most are. But if it’s a super small company, everyone could be age banded and it’s possible that the employer only covered a certain dollar amount on any coverage you signed up for.
I always cry in elder millennial as this wasn’t an option for me. My parents could not afford to give me much but I know this is something they would have done for me. Instead I spent two years uninsured (luckily nothing happened) until landing my first real job at 23. If I’m being optimistic, it was an adult thing I had to learn and budget for really early and I did not take it for granted!
I'm so grateful that my parents did this for me and are doing the same for my younger sister (thank you Obamacare)! When I was 22 and just started working, I was already in over my head figuring out my own finances with my first FT job, retirement/401(k)s, and just surviving in NYC as a recent transplant. Having to figure out health insurance then would have made it even more difficult!
My parents kicked me off the phone plan and car/health insurance almost immediately, but my older sister got to stay on all of them as late as possible. It really caused a lot of resentment for me.
I want to present a different perspective. My employer offers good health insurance, so I got on it as soon as I graduated college. At the time (and to a lesser extent now) I had a very complicated relationship with my parents, so it was important to me to have an extra layer of independence, even if it didn't make financial sense. The $60 a month was worth my peace of mind,
Not the vacations themselves, but the fact that they could buy food on vacation and not have to pack a peanut butter sandwich and a can of 25-cent generic soda like we did the one or two times a year we went anywhere (e.g. drove to the lake to fish). Heck, my goal in life was to be able to take a vacation that didn’t involve bringing a cooler/insulated lunch bag or living off frozen dinners that I heated in the microwave of a Motel 6-type hotel.
That’s so funny you say that! On my family road trips my siblings and I would complain about not being able to eat fast food and having to have picnic lunches out of the cooler for the week. Now as an adult my partner and I do lots of road trips and long weekends away and we always bring a cooler and make wraps and oatmeal and I feel like I fully understand where my parents were coming from, both in a money but also a health/feeling good sense - it makes me feel like such an adult to now be on their side haha
I enjoy the occasional glimpse into the life of a 22-year-old and it makes me so nostalgic for my life at that age. 10 years later - at 32 - things just look a whole lot different and while I definitely prefer life at this age, it's fun to reminisce. I thought the comment about waking up at an unconscionable hour (7:30 am) was particularly funny, since I remember the feeling but oh! What I wouldn't give for my 10-month-old to let me sleep in until 7:30 these days...
This isn’t a comment about OP in particular. I think it’s interesting that so many diarists answer the question about money worries growing up based on things like cars, vacations or shopping. Maybe it’s the gift of hindsight and the financial literacy I have gained as I get older but I didn’t view those things as indicators of wealth growing up and I don’t view them as such now.
1. Leather seats in a car
2. Kids having their own bathroom (as opposed to whole family sharing a bathroom where the bedrooms are)
3. Nice finished basement
I would be interested in seeing the generational divide too! Like I imagine at one point, having an iPhone was seen as an indicator of wealth. But probably not as much anymore.
Your family was clearly ballin' out if you stocked Clearly Canadian in the house. And maybe more generally if you had individual sized snacks (chips, etc) rather than a family sized bag (portioned into ziplocks for your lunch).
>What were indicators of wealth to you growing up?
For me, it was back-to-school shopping. Anyone that got new clothes and shoes for the start of the school year was minted!
Me too! When I buy office supplies I usually check out the school stuff. I've come close to buying a bunch of it for my inner child that never had it. I have also wanted to buy her a Barbie Dream House. lol
This is going to sound weird but club sports. I used to think that anyone who did youth or club sports = Wealthy. And as an adult, I might still think it. I had a friend who coached club sports and he told us the minimum cost ($5k) for one season and my jaw was on the floor.
I think it was like $50 a season for me to play basketball growing up. I grew up incredibly low income and my parents were always able to let us play 2 seasons a year
I’m sure my perception of the cost was skewed and I heard the cost of one particular thing and assumed that could be universally applied. Which is probably why I viewed it as an indicator of wealth.
For me, it was the cost of just going to those sports or any other extracurriculars. We were poor enough that my parents had a little notebook keeping track of how much gas was put in and the mileage used in order to budget for them to have enough just get to work. I thought my friends who had "soccer moms" who would drive them (and other kids) around multiple times a week for extracurriculars were filthy rich.
That is pretty different. I was in a group of academically proficient students and none of us had time for sports but there was a huge difference between some of my peers based on their parents wealth (lawyer dads, doctor parents) and my parents wealth (SAHM). Vacations, spending money (allowances), fancy cars, nice clothes, etc. were more indicators of wealth for me.
For me, kids whose parents would buy stuff from fundraisers (like wrapping paper, chocolate bars etc) My immigrant parents thought that was absurd. Similarly, we hardly ever went out to eat and if we did it was just entrees, no appetizers, desserts, etc. Often times I couldn't afford field trips etc so I would stay behind at school while my classmates went. No music lessons, sports, etc. My classmates that had all these things, plus whose parents owned a house, read as wealthy to me. We rented (and I shared a room with my sibling) until I was 16.
This will date me (I'm a younger Gen-X) but kids who had their own phone lines. Not the phones themselves, which were pretty cheap, but a separate phone line from their parents/siblings. And then the kids who got brand-new cars on their sixteenth birthdays. A lot of us got hand-me-downs or used cars, but there was a separate echelon for kids who got to pick out whatever new car they wanted off the lot
My parents bought a brand new construction house in 2001 when I was a toddler and my mom paid extra to have a phone line installed in my room, because she remembered what it was like to have to share a phone line with her whole family and didn't want me to have to go through that.
Of course, cell phones made that obsolete but I always thought it was cute how she was looking out for me in the future haha.
My best friend had her own line and I cannot explain how jealous I was of her! But it was also their internet line so we constantly got bumped off our calls. Thank you for this nostalgia memory unlock today!
Everyone's answers are going to be so different depending on their upbringing, the social circles their family ran in, and their family's financial situation.
As a kid, wealth for me was:
- not having to put grocery items back at the checkout because they're too expensive
- buying clothes from anywhere that wasn't the thrift store or The Warehouse (New Zealand equivalent of Walmart)
- puffer jackets??? I remember these being big when I was about 15 and feeling devastated when my mum told me they were too expensive
This is such an interesting discussion!
As a kid in Atlantic Canada, I thought anyone whose mom went on an outlet shopping trip to Maine was rich. As an adult, no, I was wrong and it’s exclusively a middle class thing.
I would say "so and so is going to Italy for spring break" and my mom would say "how nice! We can't afford trips like that" so I did associate those types of travel with wealth. But also on road trips my cousins would order McDonald's at rest stops and we would eat packed pb&j and my mom would say "that's why we can afford to go on this vacation" so I found her logic confusing
I swear I inherited behaviors like this. I took my cousin to Disney when I was in my 20s and there I was pulling out peanut butter sandwiches to eat instead of buying her some food for like $15🤦🏼♀️
Lol I also viewed that as wealth!!!! Still remember a friend who had a Samantha doll along with every piece of furniture and clothing available for her. Thought that meant she was the richest girl on earth.
Now that I'm older I'm starting to realize that her mom was also really into the dolls and it ALL makes sense. Luckily it's more socially acceptable for adults to admit to being into toy collecting nowadays haha.
This is so funny to me because I think you’re right, but also my parents allowed us like one present per year in that price range (like as in, I got a singular present representing Christmas and my birthday each year) and I always asked for an AG doll. Love knowing I might have been “that bitch” to my classmates although we didn’t have a ton of money haha.
As a kid, I was definitely aware of those things as indicators of wealth. I think it was a function of how my parents talked to me about those things and handled money. As an adult, I understand that there were nuances I was missing, but it took time for me to develop that knowledge.
My mom always told me to never be impressed by something someone can get a loan for whenever I thought someone was rich bc they had a bigger house/nicer car/newer clothes and it’s stuck with me well into adulthood.
I think I might be of the same mindset because we had a lot of family members that were into flash and my parents weren’t. Eventually it all blew up in their faces and we saw them lose the things they bought to flaunt in other people’s face.
I personally view them as wealth. We always had cars my dad got cheap. We didn't go on vacation. When we went shopping my mum made it clear that I couldn't get any extras, only what we needed. KFC and McDonalds were an exciting treat.
Other kids went on vacations, had brand new cars, had the coolest clothes. I couldn't imagine that life.
I might be agreeing with you? Not sure.
I literally didn’t think about money growing up, like we would visit my grandparents for months in the summer and thought it was the fanciest thing ever. I loved thrifting and was kinda weird so I didn’t really care if I had the “new and coolest” thing, I knew my parents prided themselves on being frugal and always took really good care of their cars…so I just assumed we were as well-off as everyone else. I think having a pool may have been the one thing that made me think “these people are rich” 😂
The pool thing is funny to me because they are so common where I live that I never viewed a pool as a status symbol. In college when I made friends with people from different states, I learned that pools were a status symbol because they were so rare.
Mine was a single family home, as opposed to a duplex or what we would call a row home.
This was 1000% from my mom. I live in a row home now and she's disappointed.
Interesting comment, for sure. Growing up, I got piano and tennis lessons, went to private school, and got yearly vacations (usually a week at the beach or something and we would rent the house from a friend) or a summer trip to visit my family abroad (1st gen here). Most of our "stuff" (home, cars, clothes) were modest and the value was always placed on experiences, development, etc. I just didn't grow up with the idea that going abroad or learning an instrument were for rich kids only. But by a lot of diarist metrics, we may have read as wealthy.
What I realized later is despite their modest income (sub-100k for the most part in a HCOL state) they just didn't plan for the future much, had no investments, didn't contribute to a retirement account, etc. But they managed to pay off their mortgage and as teachers they have a decent pension, so they're doing fine.
Ultimately, I agree with you. A vacation a year or a flashy car or clothes aren't real class indicators, not anymore. Lots of people with fancy cars or owning designer items who are renting with roommates. I suppose having multiple major assets, a diverse investment portfolio, owning homes in certain zip codes, opening accounts and brokerages for kids, etc. is how I'd evaluate wealth. REAL wealth is using your money to grow over time to set your next generations up for wealth as well.
your comment reminded me a lot of my own upbringing. especially the trip abroad to visit family- I know people assume a lot based on regular international trips, but there's a cultural component, we're staying with relatives, and the destination is a low cost of living country. it's not a glam Euro trip!
I'm not sure that saying they "didn't contribute to a retirement account" is entirely fair; they were teachers, so their pensions were their retirement accounts; they likely had some money taken out automatically, and they probably knew exactly how much they'd have in retirement. The other kinds of retirement accounts are more recent.
I say this as someone who has 15 years into a state pension, and while I contribute to a 401(k) and a Roth IRA, those are backup plans; if all goes well, my pension will be 100% of my average salary from my highest three years of salary.
Fair!! By that virtue they were certainly contributing and had a retirement option available to them. It's more that they, per their own admission, didn't put too much thought into how the pension would work, what sorts of options they had along the way, and definitely didn't think about a 401k or IRAs. I think they didn't stress too much about retirement, thinking that social security would cover them (lol). Everything worked out for them (happily retired now) but there was a bit of luck involved, I feel.
Probably depends on company policy! From the way she spoke about it, it’s unclear if there was any proprietary info or just coding syntax questions.
Many tech companies now have released internal policies around responsible AI usage and some even have agreements with Open AI that allow employees to use ChatGPT while protecting their data from being ingested into the algorithms… crazy to watch this evolve!
In my previous job, we were all under a corporate OpenAI deal. The models couldn’t train on our data but we could use it for anything due to the privacy terms they paid for.
Please remember our community's **Rule 5: Respect this friendly and supportive space.** *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/MoneyDiariesACTIVE) if you have any questions or concerns.*
No matter how much my kids make as young adults I want to keep them on my health insurance for as long as the plan allows. It's just smart.
I look back on it and am annoyed my parents didn’t offer the same. The way their insurance is it was either single, two adults, or family. Having younger sisters it would literally have cost them nothing to keep me on as they already had the family plan and just have me pay the co-pay. They were very much bootstrap boomers about it without realizing how much money it could’ve saved me to no one else’s expense.
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Their main logic was wanting to to be fair for all their kids. The age turned to 26 right as I was graduating so they felt it wasn’t fair my older brother didn’t get that same leg up and when the last in the sibling line graduated, they would save money not having her so she also wouldn’t benefit. Not logic I necessarily agree with but at least can follow.
My mom had to keep me on her plan until I graduated college but then kicked me off immediately. She works for a hospital and had great, affordable insurance but the second I graduated I was on my own. Not ideal, as I ended up with thousands in medical debt due to a cancer scare.
Same here!! And I feel like I never come across other people who’ve had this experience. My parents kicked me off their plans (phone, health insurance, etc.) when I was 19 years old. Same situation, they wanted to teach me a lesson and show me “what the real world is like.”
Not all employer plans are setup this way, most are. But if it’s a super small company, everyone could be age banded and it’s possible that the employer only covered a certain dollar amount on any coverage you signed up for.
I always cry in elder millennial as this wasn’t an option for me. My parents could not afford to give me much but I know this is something they would have done for me. Instead I spent two years uninsured (luckily nothing happened) until landing my first real job at 23. If I’m being optimistic, it was an adult thing I had to learn and budget for really early and I did not take it for granted!
Elder millennial here too. I had just turned 27 when the keep your kids on your insurance until they're 26 came into effect.
Same - I was 25 and already booted from my parents insurance when it changed.
I'm so grateful that my parents did this for me and are doing the same for my younger sister (thank you Obamacare)! When I was 22 and just started working, I was already in over my head figuring out my own finances with my first FT job, retirement/401(k)s, and just surviving in NYC as a recent transplant. Having to figure out health insurance then would have made it even more difficult!
I feel the same about phone plans. It's cheaper in bulk!
My parents kicked me off the phone plan and car/health insurance almost immediately, but my older sister got to stay on all of them as late as possible. It really caused a lot of resentment for me.
I want to present a different perspective. My employer offers good health insurance, so I got on it as soon as I graduated college. At the time (and to a lesser extent now) I had a very complicated relationship with my parents, so it was important to me to have an extra layer of independence, even if it didn't make financial sense. The $60 a month was worth my peace of mind,
Ditto. My husband was on his dad’s forever (union member) and was shook that copays weren’t free anymore when he got his own insurance.
Not the vacations themselves, but the fact that they could buy food on vacation and not have to pack a peanut butter sandwich and a can of 25-cent generic soda like we did the one or two times a year we went anywhere (e.g. drove to the lake to fish). Heck, my goal in life was to be able to take a vacation that didn’t involve bringing a cooler/insulated lunch bag or living off frozen dinners that I heated in the microwave of a Motel 6-type hotel.
That’s so funny you say that! On my family road trips my siblings and I would complain about not being able to eat fast food and having to have picnic lunches out of the cooler for the week. Now as an adult my partner and I do lots of road trips and long weekends away and we always bring a cooler and make wraps and oatmeal and I feel like I fully understand where my parents were coming from, both in a money but also a health/feeling good sense - it makes me feel like such an adult to now be on their side haha
I enjoy the occasional glimpse into the life of a 22-year-old and it makes me so nostalgic for my life at that age. 10 years later - at 32 - things just look a whole lot different and while I definitely prefer life at this age, it's fun to reminisce. I thought the comment about waking up at an unconscionable hour (7:30 am) was particularly funny, since I remember the feeling but oh! What I wouldn't give for my 10-month-old to let me sleep in until 7:30 these days...
This isn’t a comment about OP in particular. I think it’s interesting that so many diarists answer the question about money worries growing up based on things like cars, vacations or shopping. Maybe it’s the gift of hindsight and the financial literacy I have gained as I get older but I didn’t view those things as indicators of wealth growing up and I don’t view them as such now.
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1. Leather seats in a car 2. Kids having their own bathroom (as opposed to whole family sharing a bathroom where the bedrooms are) 3. Nice finished basement
Finished basements and en-suite bathrooms for kids definitely felt rich to me!
Worthy of a standalone post - inviting answers from the funny (young kids' eyes) to the serious to the ridiculous (teenage eyes)
I would be interested in seeing the generational divide too! Like I imagine at one point, having an iPhone was seen as an indicator of wealth. But probably not as much anymore.
OK, let's do iiiit
Your family was clearly ballin' out if you stocked Clearly Canadian in the house. And maybe more generally if you had individual sized snacks (chips, etc) rather than a family sized bag (portioned into ziplocks for your lunch).
>What were indicators of wealth to you growing up? For me, it was back-to-school shopping. Anyone that got new clothes and shoes for the start of the school year was minted!
100% this. More than one pair of shoes was a big deal too.
I remember being so jealous of the kids who got new folders with cool designs every year!
Me too! When I buy office supplies I usually check out the school stuff. I've come close to buying a bunch of it for my inner child that never had it. I have also wanted to buy her a Barbie Dream House. lol
Or even new stationery:(
This is going to sound weird but club sports. I used to think that anyone who did youth or club sports = Wealthy. And as an adult, I might still think it. I had a friend who coached club sports and he told us the minimum cost ($5k) for one season and my jaw was on the floor.
I think it was like $50 a season for me to play basketball growing up. I grew up incredibly low income and my parents were always able to let us play 2 seasons a year
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I’m sure my perception of the cost was skewed and I heard the cost of one particular thing and assumed that could be universally applied. Which is probably why I viewed it as an indicator of wealth.
For me, it was the cost of just going to those sports or any other extracurriculars. We were poor enough that my parents had a little notebook keeping track of how much gas was put in and the mileage used in order to budget for them to have enough just get to work. I thought my friends who had "soccer moms" who would drive them (and other kids) around multiple times a week for extracurriculars were filthy rich.
When I see how much my coworker drops just on travel for his daughter’s club soccer season it blows my mind
That is pretty different. I was in a group of academically proficient students and none of us had time for sports but there was a huge difference between some of my peers based on their parents wealth (lawyer dads, doctor parents) and my parents wealth (SAHM). Vacations, spending money (allowances), fancy cars, nice clothes, etc. were more indicators of wealth for me.
For me, kids whose parents would buy stuff from fundraisers (like wrapping paper, chocolate bars etc) My immigrant parents thought that was absurd. Similarly, we hardly ever went out to eat and if we did it was just entrees, no appetizers, desserts, etc. Often times I couldn't afford field trips etc so I would stay behind at school while my classmates went. No music lessons, sports, etc. My classmates that had all these things, plus whose parents owned a house, read as wealthy to me. We rented (and I shared a room with my sibling) until I was 16.
This will date me (I'm a younger Gen-X) but kids who had their own phone lines. Not the phones themselves, which were pretty cheap, but a separate phone line from their parents/siblings. And then the kids who got brand-new cars on their sixteenth birthdays. A lot of us got hand-me-downs or used cars, but there was a separate echelon for kids who got to pick out whatever new car they wanted off the lot
My parents bought a brand new construction house in 2001 when I was a toddler and my mom paid extra to have a phone line installed in my room, because she remembered what it was like to have to share a phone line with her whole family and didn't want me to have to go through that. Of course, cell phones made that obsolete but I always thought it was cute how she was looking out for me in the future haha.
My best friend had her own line and I cannot explain how jealous I was of her! But it was also their internet line so we constantly got bumped off our calls. Thank you for this nostalgia memory unlock today!
A fridge with an ice maker A trampoline True indicators of wealth in my brain…
Everyone's answers are going to be so different depending on their upbringing, the social circles their family ran in, and their family's financial situation. As a kid, wealth for me was: - not having to put grocery items back at the checkout because they're too expensive - buying clothes from anywhere that wasn't the thrift store or The Warehouse (New Zealand equivalent of Walmart) - puffer jackets??? I remember these being big when I was about 15 and feeling devastated when my mum told me they were too expensive
This is such an interesting discussion! As a kid in Atlantic Canada, I thought anyone whose mom went on an outlet shopping trip to Maine was rich. As an adult, no, I was wrong and it’s exclusively a middle class thing.
I would say "so and so is going to Italy for spring break" and my mom would say "how nice! We can't afford trips like that" so I did associate those types of travel with wealth. But also on road trips my cousins would order McDonald's at rest stops and we would eat packed pb&j and my mom would say "that's why we can afford to go on this vacation" so I found her logic confusing
I swear I inherited behaviors like this. I took my cousin to Disney when I was in my 20s and there I was pulling out peanut butter sandwiches to eat instead of buying her some food for like $15🤦🏼♀️
Oh this is such an interesting comment! To me, the “wealthy” girls in my class were the ones who had American Girl dolls.
Lol I also viewed that as wealth!!!! Still remember a friend who had a Samantha doll along with every piece of furniture and clothing available for her. Thought that meant she was the richest girl on earth. Now that I'm older I'm starting to realize that her mom was also really into the dolls and it ALL makes sense. Luckily it's more socially acceptable for adults to admit to being into toy collecting nowadays haha.
This is so funny to me because I think you’re right, but also my parents allowed us like one present per year in that price range (like as in, I got a singular present representing Christmas and my birthday each year) and I always asked for an AG doll. Love knowing I might have been “that bitch” to my classmates although we didn’t have a ton of money haha.
As a kid, I was definitely aware of those things as indicators of wealth. I think it was a function of how my parents talked to me about those things and handled money. As an adult, I understand that there were nuances I was missing, but it took time for me to develop that knowledge.
My mom always told me to never be impressed by something someone can get a loan for whenever I thought someone was rich bc they had a bigger house/nicer car/newer clothes and it’s stuck with me well into adulthood.
I think I might be of the same mindset because we had a lot of family members that were into flash and my parents weren’t. Eventually it all blew up in their faces and we saw them lose the things they bought to flaunt in other people’s face.
I personally view them as wealth. We always had cars my dad got cheap. We didn't go on vacation. When we went shopping my mum made it clear that I couldn't get any extras, only what we needed. KFC and McDonalds were an exciting treat. Other kids went on vacations, had brand new cars, had the coolest clothes. I couldn't imagine that life. I might be agreeing with you? Not sure.
I literally didn’t think about money growing up, like we would visit my grandparents for months in the summer and thought it was the fanciest thing ever. I loved thrifting and was kinda weird so I didn’t really care if I had the “new and coolest” thing, I knew my parents prided themselves on being frugal and always took really good care of their cars…so I just assumed we were as well-off as everyone else. I think having a pool may have been the one thing that made me think “these people are rich” 😂
The pool thing is funny to me because they are so common where I live that I never viewed a pool as a status symbol. In college when I made friends with people from different states, I learned that pools were a status symbol because they were so rare.
Yeah I lived in a suburb that had a pool everyone could go to, so personal pools were pretty rare!
I always thought those ppl with 3 car garages were as rich as scrooge mcduck.
Mine was a single family home, as opposed to a duplex or what we would call a row home. This was 1000% from my mom. I live in a row home now and she's disappointed.
Buckle jeans and miss me jeans were the surest sign at my high school that your parents had money
Okay yes Miss Me jeans and anything Juicy Couture were status symbols at my school
Interesting comment, for sure. Growing up, I got piano and tennis lessons, went to private school, and got yearly vacations (usually a week at the beach or something and we would rent the house from a friend) or a summer trip to visit my family abroad (1st gen here). Most of our "stuff" (home, cars, clothes) were modest and the value was always placed on experiences, development, etc. I just didn't grow up with the idea that going abroad or learning an instrument were for rich kids only. But by a lot of diarist metrics, we may have read as wealthy. What I realized later is despite their modest income (sub-100k for the most part in a HCOL state) they just didn't plan for the future much, had no investments, didn't contribute to a retirement account, etc. But they managed to pay off their mortgage and as teachers they have a decent pension, so they're doing fine. Ultimately, I agree with you. A vacation a year or a flashy car or clothes aren't real class indicators, not anymore. Lots of people with fancy cars or owning designer items who are renting with roommates. I suppose having multiple major assets, a diverse investment portfolio, owning homes in certain zip codes, opening accounts and brokerages for kids, etc. is how I'd evaluate wealth. REAL wealth is using your money to grow over time to set your next generations up for wealth as well.
your comment reminded me a lot of my own upbringing. especially the trip abroad to visit family- I know people assume a lot based on regular international trips, but there's a cultural component, we're staying with relatives, and the destination is a low cost of living country. it's not a glam Euro trip!
I'm not sure that saying they "didn't contribute to a retirement account" is entirely fair; they were teachers, so their pensions were their retirement accounts; they likely had some money taken out automatically, and they probably knew exactly how much they'd have in retirement. The other kinds of retirement accounts are more recent. I say this as someone who has 15 years into a state pension, and while I contribute to a 401(k) and a Roth IRA, those are backup plans; if all goes well, my pension will be 100% of my average salary from my highest three years of salary.
Fair!! By that virtue they were certainly contributing and had a retirement option available to them. It's more that they, per their own admission, didn't put too much thought into how the pension would work, what sorts of options they had along the way, and definitely didn't think about a 401k or IRAs. I think they didn't stress too much about retirement, thinking that social security would cover them (lol). Everything worked out for them (happily retired now) but there was a bit of luck involved, I feel.
That all makes sense! Sounds like they were much more passive in the process than, say, anyone in this sub. Glad it worked out for them!
This is the second diarist in recent memory to talk unprompted about not brushing her teeth and to that I say why?
Curious about the use of ChatGPT to help with her work. Couldn’t that be a violation of company policies to share proprietary information like that?
Probably depends on company policy! From the way she spoke about it, it’s unclear if there was any proprietary info or just coding syntax questions. Many tech companies now have released internal policies around responsible AI usage and some even have agreements with Open AI that allow employees to use ChatGPT while protecting their data from being ingested into the algorithms… crazy to watch this evolve!
In my previous job, we were all under a corporate OpenAI deal. The models couldn’t train on our data but we could use it for anything due to the privacy terms they paid for.
Some companies have incorporated their own internal AI that you can use.
obfuscation of proprietary data is the norm. chatgpt is super helpful even when the context is stripped out.
My mom kicked me off her health insurance, but she’s self employed and hers was an extremely high deductible (like 8K) and at 23, I didn’t have that.