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Wren Rosewood's avatar

Thank you for this deep dive. I appreciate these white middle class scenarios and would love to see them done for working class white folks as well as people of color.

I know a lot of my white family members don't understand the amount of wealth that still comes with being working class white compared to other races. My maternal grandfather was rejected when he tried to enlist in WWII due to high blood pressure. Neither of my parents have college degrees and they suffered financially for it because the goalposts shifted - as young adults in the 1970s, living wage jobs existed straight out of high school; by middle-age in the 2000s those same jobs required 4 year degrees and higher positions at the same employer required higher degrees, so suddenly "working your way up" no longer became an option.

I was able to get to where I am today because of what I call "The Loser's Lottery": fortuitous things that we benefited from at the sacrifice of others. My paternal grandfather got lung cancer from asbestos from working at a steel mill and won a settlement. My maternal grandparents owned farmland that became valuable to the County Government because it was on the waterfront and adjacent to a county park. After a long fight, they were paid fairly for it. My father worked as a correctional officer and almost died the first time at age 43 and then did die at age 52; some of the life insurance policy that my mother had for him covered my undergrad student loans.

What if those pay days never happened? Particularly with my paternal grandfather and dad - they worked dangerous jobs in order to earn a middle class income, and then said jobs turned into winning the loser's lottery at the expense of their health and lives. What if my maternal grandparents' farm was somewhere undesirable, even for developers? What if they didn't have my cousin lawyer (whose path to law school and practice was through the military?) to help them get a fair price for their land?

The reality is that we would still be working class, and I'd still be in a boatload of debt from student loans, and would feel really relieved by the loan forgiveness because it would feel like I finally won the lottery for once in a good way. Also, we'd still have more wealth than families of color because even though we suffered we still are worlds ahead in wealth.

What's hard for me is that I'm not allowed to publicly talk about "The Loser's Lottery" per my extended family, so I look much more self-made than I am.

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Chewy's avatar

I grew up ok; child of immigrants but my parents were able to work their way up in their careers sans educations and it set me and my older sister up well. My sister and I were first to go to college, but good school and with enough "know how" to figure out consolidation, etc. I had about $50K in debt that I'm still paying off and will get $20K in relief from. When I met my partner I knew they were well off but didn't realize all the ways wealth works. A few things I've noticed:

*First, the amount of strategy that goes into avoiding paying taxes. I thought everyone just paid what was due at the end of the year but for my partner's family they do things like give my partner a check every year for the maximum gift amount to avoid estate taxes when they die. Same thing for my partner's parents which means my partner gets a full salary in gifts just to start. Recently my partner's parents moved real estate holdings into an LLC that's owned by my partner and their siblings but that the parents still use for themselves for all intents and purposes; doing so was a way of off-setting taxes they would have had to pay from the success of their business. This off-set was in the mid-six figures.

*Second, my partner consistently thinks of budgeting and money in terms of their net worth. As someone with debt who had a negative net worth up until two years ago (and is only on the positive side because of 401K I can't access) I worry about money and budget in terms of what my salary covers and what I spend. My partner knows that even if salary doesn't cover spending, they don't have to worry. This blows my mind.

*Third, my partner and their family aren't bad people but consistently believe that their wealth is due to their hard work and being frugal. For example, they do a lot of things around the house on a DIY basis like not paying for a landscaper and doing it themselves. For my family, the goal was to have enough money to not need to spend time on things we could pay other people to do. I think the fact that we always *had* to do the DIY work meant that not having to do it was the goal. My dad still fixes his own car, he refuses to pay repairmen for appliance problems because he would rather figure it out on his own *and* because he can't afford to. My partner's dad recently totaled his expensive car trying to fix it himself.

*Finally, my partner consistently says that they grew up middle class. I don't think this is an instance of making $250K to live paycheck to paycheck like the article suggests but rather the mindset that allows a very wealthy family to think of themselves as just hard working americans whose hard work has paid off. In this way, my partner is very uncomfortable with student debt relief because it feels like someone isn't working hard enough.

Please don't share all of this outside of culture study, it's something my partner and I are working through and is very hard in ways that are surprising and have made me feel so completely illiterate when it comes to really understanding wealth. It seemed helpful to share.

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