Does anyone feel like their life is going according to plan?
Does anyone feel like their life is going according to plan?
A house, two cars, a healthy relationship ,a career, livable wage, 2.5 kids, a dog. ya know, the expectation many children were told in school.
Everything I hear on social media says this is a myth.
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47 here.. I suppose im at the tail end of the people who still had a chance. We have a house that is half paid off but that needs a new roof, windows, and flooring that we cannot afford to take care of due to inflation screwing everything up. We have 2 cars but they are both 30+ years old and keeping them on the road is taking up most of what free time I have. When we got the mortgage it felt like we had finally 'made it' and that future pay increades would allow us to remodel and modernize our 'fixer upper' but the intervening 15 years has been an escalating shitshow that has us barely able to maintain what we have in its current state. It is starting to look tempting to liquidate the house and extraneous posessions and buy an old RV and become modern day nomads for our remaining years. The only thing really preventing this is that our 2 adult children are living with us still because there are no jobs that pay enough for them to move out on their own and we are not going to just dump them on the curb and say 'figure it out' like my parents did to me...
I'm 5 years younger, give or take. Husband and I have been toying with that idea more and more. Liquidate it all, and buy an RV to travel in, and be happy checked out nomads.
We don't own a house, the absolute lowest rent we can find (within a 20 mile radius of our business) is $2600 a month (1 bed/1 bath), and every year Greystar and their cronies raise the rent significantly. The apartment we are in now is currently listed for right around $3k. It was up around $3200 about a month ago. It's a fucking 1 bedroom.
Food gets more and more expensive. Insurance for everything is easily $1k a month. All the "utilities" just keep going up and up, and being in San Diego, SDGE just keeps bending us over further and further. We pay more for electricity than anyone else in the country, last I heard. Fucking why?! Car payments, and petrol is hovering right around $5.50-$6 per gallon now. We never eat out because it's inevitably over $50, and sucks.
When I graduated high school, a house was somewhere in the $250k to $300k range, in an ok area, but far from most stuff (yay urban sprawl) with interest rates being over 7%. Ok. cool, in todays money that would be solid, but back then, I made less than $9 an hour. Then we had how many "once in a lifetime" financial crisis in the span of what 10 years, right after I got out of school.
Owning a business gets harder and harder each year, and more and more expensive. City and county both keep making up new shit to charge a $300 fee here, a $400 fee there, another $250 fee there. Plus, hacking, banks, and the rest of the shit going wrong, we just had $4k stolen from our payment account, and Intuit (the fucking devil, only behind nestle) just shrug their shoulders, say they aren't a bank, and to get fucked. I just don't want to do any of it anymore.
I also don't have family to help me, so I've always been on my own. Your kids are VERY, unbelievably lucky. I have asked my mother for help once in my adult lifetime, and I was told I didn't deserve it, and I got myself in the position, so I needed to figure it out myself.
I didn't mean for this to turn into a whine fest. But to answer the original question, no, I don't. I did the right things, I started a business to better my life, and while I'd say we are squarely middle class, but what I was promised as a kid absolutely does NOT line up with reality.