Dear Abby,
“My wife and I are
50-year-old professionals who have paid every penny of the cost for our two
daughters’ college educations. Our
oldest went on to law school and has incurred more than $100,000 in law-school
loan debt. She has struggled to find a
job as an attorney, and I’m no longer sure she still wants to practice
law. She is married to a medical student
who also has significant student loan debt.
Two nights ago I made the mistake of telling her that her mother and I
would help pay her student loans … She and her husband spend their money on
frivolous luxuries and are not responsible financially. My wife and I live frugally. We withdrew money from our retirement
accounts to help fund our daughters’ college educations. We now need to increase our retirement
contributions and pay for maintenance and repairs to our home that we delayed
while paying for their tuition.”
A Hard Earth Reckoning Truth is that we can’t forever float
by on someone else’s coat tails.
The well will
eventually run dry.
NOTE: This is not to presume that
the daughter isn’t pulling SOME of her own weight. She obviously invested enough of her own time
and energy and had sufficient diligence and discipline to get through both college
and law school. But that’s simply not
enough! Unless and until everything we “get” is by our own hand and we’re both “paying it back” and “paying
it forward”, we’re not playing a sustainable game.
The teenager who gets a minimum wage job at age 16 and blows
all the income on unnecessary indulgences is creating a bottomless pit of
unrealistic expectations for himself/herself.
For a truly sustainable existence between the ages of 16 and
35, we’d be packing our own lunch, eating Raman noodles for dinner, working two
jobs (just like we’ll essentially be doing by age 40 … school and/or training
for the NEXT job being one job), paying taxes equivalent to all the services we’re
getting, shopping at Big Lots, Good Will and the Salvation Army store, driving
8-year-old Ford Focuses, owning “Go Phones” for emergency use only, putting something aside for emergencies and eventualities, and entertaining
ourselves by jogging around the neighborhood or participating in community
sports.
It’s not that we don’t “deserve” what everyone else has. It’s just that they don’t “deserve” it
either! The world economy is in dire straits
in 2012 because a whole lot of people borrowed money they couldn’t pay back,
spent money they didn’t have for things they didn’t need, and paid fewer taxes
than necessary to support all the “entitlement” programs we have come to depend
on.
And in the process, we’re making the rich get richer as our
out-of-control spending pushes the stock market to levels substantially beyond
reasonability.
Earl Pitts has been un-gently nudging us for years … “Wake Up, Umurika!”
It’s more than half-past time to start taking him seriously.
“Life will turn out
the way it’s supposed to be when we start doing what we’re supposed to be
doing.” [Adapted from an old farm
house calendar] Quartermaster
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