Indeed.
Likewise,
atjar, you might remember that most of the people to whom you are speaking are from a different generation than yours.
In yours, you could reasonably expect to, say, work a job (or two, or even three) over the summer, and have sufficient funds as a result to pay for the following year’s tuition, board, and books at college. My father, who is almost 70, did precisely that, and it was laudable.
**Right. My dad is just a little younger. Back in the late 60s, he’d earn around $1,000 over the summer and school tuition at his Protestant private college cost around $1,500 for the year.
**
ETA: DH’s parents were able to help him with school, though he got mostly scholarships. Mine did not help me. As a result, though I worked 2-3 jobs the entire time I was in college, I still have about 20K in loans to pay off. That’s a burden on any family’s finances. If we had that money, we could invest it for the future, but we can’t. Bear in mind that that balance is lower than that of most of my generation, and that it represents about $400 each month in payments. I took them out, I’m responsible for them, but there’s no argument that they make things more difficult than they could be.
**$28k is actually the average for new college graduates with student loans and a bachelor’s degree. (About 7 in 10 new college graduates graduate with debt.)
ticas.org/posd/map-state-data**
The young SAHM with a $400 student loan payment is pretty much par for the course these days. I’m of the previous generation of SAHMs (a 1995 BA), and I had a total of $6k in student loans. It took about 12 or 13 years (!) to pay off at around $65 a month–they’re very persistent critters if not dealt with very firmly.
Thanks to my own experience and even more so the experience of younger women that I bump into, one of my biggest goals is to ensure that our children will graduate from college debt free.
Well, for one thing, we’re paying almost twice what you paid for much of your working life in FICA/social security taxes, in no small part because your generation tended to only have one or two children.
**Let’s be fair–the US total fertility rate has been hovering around 2 children per woman since the early 1970s. **
Though we pay a far higher rate, and you’ll collect far, far more than you ever put it because of our contributions and because of your younger retirement age, our generation can’t reasonably rely on Social Security for retirement. The system is so far beyond broke that to expect that we’ll have it available in 25 years is foolish at best.
There is that.
We are working and saving this hard partly to fund your retirement, partly in the hopes that we can retire someday, and partly with it ever in our minds that our children must go to college as well, and that they will require our assistance to do so.
)
Oh I have some great (well, looking back they’re great) memories of those times. Then it was totally frustrating though!!
But when we talk about it, it inevitably comes down to choosing it or choosing something enriching for the kid(s)