Context:
- I just found out that the student loans I’ve been saddled with for the past 19 years were completely avoidable because my parents are wealthier than they ever let on
- Something is wrong with my boomer parents—I don’t understand their relationship with money (or life in general). I think they may be seriously mentally ill
What happened
In 2014, my girlfriend and I moved into a rental home in a big city for about $1,500/month.
She later lost her job and it became unaffordable. The stress ended our relationship.
I struggled to stay in my home for the next seven years, until I finally declared bankruptcy and moved out in 2020.
I spent at least $120,000 on my rental home through those years. All down the drain. I liquidated all $30,000 of my retirement savings to try and stay afloat.
What could have been
2014 was a low point in the housing market. There were HUNDREDS of houses available in the ~$150k range, many of them nicer than the one I rented. All I needed was ~$10k for a down payment, and I could have been paying $800 for a mortgage instead of $1,500 on rent, and all of that money spent would be retained in the form of equity even if I still had to move out. It probably would have saved my relationship too (my parents complain about not having any grandkids, BTW).
What my parents say
When I mentioned this to my parents recently, they just said “we had no idea you wanted to buy a house”. NO, I JUST LOVED PAYING MONEY TO A LAND LEECH! I never even thought to ask for help with a down payment, because we were “broke”. My dad gave us grief over every dollar we spent. We never ONCE took a family vacation.
The truth
Today, my parents have $2 million in retirement savings, and no mortgage or car payments. They live in a rural area with a rock bottom cost-of-living. In 2003, they had HALF A MILLION dollars in cash, entirely separate from their retirement plans.
I didn’t summon the spirit of Lenin for book worship. Gosh you’re really holding on to your position so tightly. Listen, you said that we would not be able to build a revolution if it required the working class to differentiate between moderately comfortable people and the bourgeoisie and I summoned Lenin as the quintessential example of someone who led a revolution as someone with a moderate level of comfort and he didn’t do it by personally selling off whatever assets he had and funding other people buying homes or food or whatever. And that’s because the level of wealth required for a single family to be moderately comfortable is immaterial to revolutionary change.
What Lenin did was work towards and succeed at the abolition of private property, not the individual dispossession of people in his income bracket by resentful mobs. He also did not inspire movements by saying that all pensioners (which is what US retirement accounts are functional equivalents of) are selfish and greedy and perpetuate impoverishment of the masses.
And what ladder pulling are you talking about? OPs parents did not engage in ladder pulling. Like most boomers, they likely have a very clear picture in their mind that whatever they manage to save by the end of their life will be inherited by their kids. At best you could say they ladder pulled their specific kid. But it’s not like they personally lobbied for regulations to prevent new entrants to a market or that they personally organized and engineered zoning regulations in their community to pump their property value at the expense of the next generation.
You are individualizing something that is inherently class-centric. That’s vulgar Marxism. And yes, I am saying that to you and wouldn’t use those words with people less versed in the literature. To say it more accessibly, you’re targeting the wrong people. Those people are not our enemy. Those people and we share the same enemy. They may not know it, and based on OPs story they most assuredly do not know it, but it remains true.