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Aug 31, 2022·edited Aug 31, 2022

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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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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Aug 31, 2022·edited Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Thank you for this, truly. It's the most eloquent and concise explanation/argument for the cancellation of student debts that I've ever read. I especially appreciate your point about changing the term "forgiveness," which is the kind of puritanical, American boot-strap language that has done far too few people any few favors for too long.

I grew up in the 2000s and was example #3. I assumed debt was a lifelong choice for intellectually-minded folks, and I believed it was the best move to go into debt for a humanities degree to be able to teach. The silver lining of Covid was that my payments have been postponed until 2023. I am a literary tour guide in Paris and an adjunct teacher at the Sorbonne, where they pay us $40/hour, before taxes. Somehow the calculations don't add up. So thank you for your article. You've made at least one more person feel seen.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Thank you so much for this deep dive into thinking about student loans and debt and wealth. It got me thinking about bankruptcy. I faced a number of things in the last decade that someone with access to wealth would have been able to weather, but I could not, not without taking on a significant amount of credit-card debt. Other debts rose, and I ended up in a position where my only option was to declare bankruptcy. I was shamed for this - by my lawyer, repeatedly; by the judge at the hearing - and it was painful. But looking back on it now, bankruptcy happens to some people, and some people get help from their folks. All the messages about bankruptcy, worth, failure etc exact shame from people who do not have wealth. (I'm now on the other side of that experience, thank goodness, but still wealth free.)

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Excellent writing that brings a brutal clarity to where we are and how we got here. I only wish the people who NEED to read it would read it.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Thank you for this. I've been thinking about wealth since your prompt the other week and I keep coming back to time as the thing that underlies a lot of wealth: how much time someone has to dedicate each day to work they wouldn't otherwise have to do; how much time someone has to spend feeling anxious about what they might do if something goes wrong with their health; how much time people lost when their houses were taken during the financial crisis. For many, the accumulation of wealth takes time—often more time than we've got. Inherited wealth, generational wealth—these things are like time machines or fast-forward buttons. You do such a nice job of here of measuring wealth in a number of subtle ways, time being one of them (both inter- and intra-generatiinallu). In a lot of ways, time is all we've got, which is why, I suspect, we are always asked to trade it for money. The way debt consumes our time is frightening. Wealth frees up people's time and allows them access to other people's time. I think you make such a strong case for debt forgiveness but also, in some ways, for rethinking inherited wealth altogether, which I really appreciate.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

From your lips to the ears of every person persisting in the fiction that they, or their parents, got where they are on hard work and good character alone. Thanks for the clear narrative and thorough explanation.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

God DAMN this piece is good.

One time I think about the racial wealth gap is when I look at GoFundMe's posted by people I know. Not the flashy ones that are going viral. The everyday ones people put up to get help with things a little bigger than they can handle. Extra medical bills but not, you know, kids with cancer attention-getting ones. Unexpected extra bills as a kid goes off to college. That kind of stuff that gets crowdfunded in our wretched system. And even where the dollar needs are fairly similar, I watch my white friends get more donations than my Black friends, and I think it's because white people have a lot more wealth in their networks. Even though my Black friends went to elite colleges and have middle-class jobs.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Absolutely fantastic. Glad you took whatever time you needed for this! I was swamped with work and couldn't engage in the subscriber "wealth" thread and was sorry to miss it, but really glad that you hit here on what I think often gets overlooked in these discussions, which is how land ownership plays into building wealth. The Homestead Act has been glossed over in sepia-tinted stories about U.S. history for so long that few have looked at its origins in theft, much less how it could guarantee a chance at wealth for descendants. And on top of that, if you go further back there's more research coming out tracing today's wealthy and/or powerful families and finding that a lot of them have been wealthy and/or powerful for centuries. Why? Because some royal granted them land in return for services, or allowed them to enclose (steal) land that had been part of the commons belonging to everyone. Which impoverished everyone else and made them dependent on the landowner, who could extract wealth from people as well as land. And it's nice to think this is ancient history but *we're still living with the consequences.* It matters.

And also I love how "your parent pays for" or "your parent gives you" covers so much. When you don't have this (which neither my spouse or I have), you can get really taken aback realizing how much your friends who *do* have it have a lot of things so much easier.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

It strikes me that the zero generation - the one that went to college and leapt into homeownership on the GI bill and rode the post-war boom to solid, middle-class security - that generation was supported by wealth. It was just national wealth. Well, for the white folks, at least.

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I would love to see immigrants included in the conversation. How do they finance their childrens’ education? If you are new to the U.S., how do you accumulate wealth, period, let alone enough to put your kids through college?

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

Love how this puts into perspective the aspect of "all the background things" that we don't think about, don't realise, can't see until someone points it out to us - and then we might resist the idea that where we are is due to a very large dollop of luck in being born into a family that had the opportunity to be *stable* in ways that many other people and their families didn't.

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Aug 31, 2022Liked by Anne Helen Petersen

This is excellent writing, as usual, and you further clarified something I already (mostly) understood so my understanding is deeper and richer.

I was fully example #2 (private not public, with a lot of need based grants from the school as well as Pell). I paid off my UG loans while in a grad program that provided a fellowship for the cost of the program and a job for living expenses. My spouse, who has the kind of quiet family wealth you’re talking about, paid for much of our living expenses, and we used the available public loan money to float some improvement costs for our home (which we purchased in our LCOL area) and paid back.

It all absolutely snowballs and builds.

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It seems like a large portion of the problem in the third scenario hinges on the sentence: “You think, because everyone and everything has told you as much, that the best way to set yourself on a path to success is to go to the very best college you got in.” Without that, might that person have gone to community college and been just fine?

Similarly, in the second scenario a big part of the problem is that, if they foreclosed on a house during the recession, then they had a home that they couldn’t afford. Might they have bought a more affordable home and been just fine?

In both cases, a big part of the problem is the desire to keep up with the Joneses, overextending our finances to the point that we are in trouble. In this case, a better solution might be to make finance and budget courses a mandatory part of high school education, teaching the scenarios you outlined above as possibilities so the right decisions can be made and those outcomes avoided.

I still think community college should be free for all, but I have a feeling that if we implement that without adding financial education, people will keep making the same mistakes, splurging for unaffordable schools and houses and getting themselves major into debt just because that’s what they think they should do.

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I've been thinking about this since the prompt last week and its really made me reconsider some of my ideas and preconceptions. Is what I grew up thinking of as "good luck" and came to understand as privilege, more accurately described as wealth? I am squarely in the demographic described in the 2nd example ('96 HS grad) - parents were college grads with no debt, not high income or much savings but lots of home equity which allowed them to contribute to college/living expenses (I went to a private university but on a tuition waiver due to parent's employment there) so I had very little debt and my husband only had a little more and we were able to purchase a house in our mid-20s and pay off all student loans shortly thereafter. Unfortunately we have squandered a lot of the wealth we should have and now have virtually no savings for our kids who are about to be college-aged. I don't even know what to tell them. We'll help as much as we can and always be a safety net but its not going to go far. We were told go to college no matter what, and they get messages at school about going to the most prestigious school they can but I can't support either of those approaches.

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Anyone want to compare notes on experiences in families where people immigrated to the US between WWI and WW2? My grandparents immigrated from Europe then and my parents were born in the 30's and never lost their Depression era frugality. I'm hugely privileged but my experience has been very different from a lot of my peers.

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