Nominally about student loans, mods can move it there if they feel like it isn't different enough, but I really liked the framing of the issue as being about wealth rather than student loans. That cushion they mention in the fourth paragraph I quoted is hugely important. When families can cushion younger members from the bumps that could derail them, everything works better in their lives. As Dave Ramsey likes to say, it turns a disaster into an inconvenience. Wealth is the Missing Piece Wealth is the floatation device that spreads vertically and horizontally through your family, buoying all those close enough to gain access. The size of that floatation device — and how many people it can keep afloat — depends on how many people are bolstering it (through their own security) and how many people need its support. Wealth is having an emergency fund to help others in your family, and enough others in your family also having an emergency fund that the need will always be distributed. Wealth is inheritance, of course, but wealth is also planning for retirement in a way that assures costs will not be shouldered by other family members. Wealth can take the form of a union pension, or assistance with a down so the borrowers don’t have to take out mortgage insurance. And wealth is not having to take out student loans — or, if you do, only having to take out a very small amount of them. In the vast majority of cases, class security is not the result of individual income, but familial wealth. And while we understand this concept when it comes to, like Scrooge McDuck and the privilege of his cartoon nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie…..or Logan Roy and his four feckless and/or reckless children, it’s much harder to conceive of when it comes to those who aren’t spectacularly, lavishly, publicly rich. Take the families in the first two scenarios above. Both would likely think of themselves as middle-class, and their yearly income level might align with that understanding. But they have wealth: in their homes, in their credit score, in their savings, in their ability to cushion their child’s intermittent economic needs.
Great article. My wife and I always planned for a secure retirement, which is where we are in life, and to be able to help our children. We have found that our material needs are few and our wants nonexistent. We are wealthy in friendships and relationships and have found nothing else other than good health to be more important. It gives us so much pleasure to share our wealth, such as it is, with our children and grandchildren while we are alive. They can have our cushion when we die.
