My parents are part of the so-called Silent Generation. They were born in the 30s, in the decade before the baby boom started. My father is about five years older than my mother so he remembers being a kid during World War 2. He was born to poor Italian immigrants, but thanks to the GI Bill, after serving four pre-Vietnam years in the Air Force, he got to go to college for free. He wisely studied engineering and his life went straight up from there. My mother was born to lower middle class second-generation immigrants of mixed European descent and her parents were able to afford to send her to UMass on their modest incomes. She graduated debt-free and stopped working as a teacher the minute she started “showing” with me and never really had to work after that.

They were able to buy a new house (actually two), raise two daughters, send them to college (in my sister’s case, numerous colleges), travel the world, and enjoy a decades-long comfortable retirement, including 6+ weeks in sunny Florida each winter. Now, as they enter the final season of their lives, they are in remarkably good health and have various good options. They could sell their two-story home (which they purchased for about 30K in the 60s and is now worth 1M+) and move into one of several different high-end assisted living facilities nearby, or move into their one-floor condo, or adapt their two-story house as needed and just stay there. They have many different options.

From the GI Bill to plentiful and affordable new housing, quality public education (including college), Medicare, Social Security, and generous ongoing veterans benefits, America has been great to them.

Now, I’m not complaining (much) because I’ve been lucky too, but things were a bit different for us. My husband and most of my friends incurred tremendous debt to go to college and grad school in the 80s and 90s. We made sacrifices for me to stay at home for a couple of years when my kids were babies, including buying a dilapidated, antique house with a down payment I had to ask my father for in a humiliating conversation.

We worked hard to fix up that tiny old house with the severely slanting floors, lead paint, and leaking fieldstone basement. I got a job, my husband got a second job, and he also put in tons of sweat equity. We were able to roll his student loans into our mortgage. And then, when we decided to try to sell that house in 2004, we got lucky. I found buyers that overpaid significantly for our house. I met a woman on a playground (another young mom) who wanted to buy a house in our town and I told her that ours just happened to be on the market. We hit it off personally and that predisposed her to like my house more than she should have when she and her husband came to see it with a realtor. We ended up making nearly 150% on that house in just nine years. If we had waited three more years to sell it, the subprime mortgage crisis would’ve been underway and we never would’ve done so well. That one lucky sale set us to be able to get most of the things my parents got. We’ve achieved a similar lifestyle to theirs, but without the second home, extravagant travel, and 6+ weeks in Florida each winter.

After we moved to our bigger, newer house, we were super savers and got lucky with some corporate stock from one of my husband’s jobs and were able to give our two kids debt-free college educations. We know this is rare. This is not what most Americans can expect these days.

And as we face very uncertain times ahead, I can only hope that my kids, and their kids, will be able to get most of what we had. We will help them as much as we can, but we have our own retirement to worry about. Who the hell knows what will happen with Social Security and Medicare. We have to be prepared to pay for everything ourselves.

The contrast between what my immigrant grandparents arrived with and what my parents have been able to achieve in this country is staggering. Yes, my parents worked hard and stayed married (divorce is a real wealth killer), but they also happened to be born at a very good point in American history. I think it may turn out that they got the absolute best of America.

Related posts:

La Dolce Vita

The College Experience

Grandparents

My two grandmothers