How are you preparing your children for downward mobility?

[Anonymous]

Why prepare now? Dance until the music stops.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Make them work service jobs in high school

That’s stupid. I worked summers at a bar/restaurant and had the best time of my life. You think it would be clever to tell your child that if she doesn’t work hard she will be working an awful job with low pay. I doubt your kids will fall for that. It’s not graduate school or McDonalds.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think this is a real possibility, not a semi sarcastic question. For the vast majority of us. The current system is untenable.

I’m teaching my kids to work hard and be flexible. My DH and I are awkward nerds who never networked. I’ll be teaching my kid to be better at that. We will probably never be good at it but he can improve on my zero level lol.

I’d rather have a good relationship with my kids than try to mold them into walking achievements that will secure ever diminishing spots in the UMC. Flexibility and understanding the need for multiple income streams may serve them better. Practical skills like cooking too.

OP here, I wasnt being sarcastic at all

I am genuinely serious - surprised this is only a couple of pages when a lot of us are going to have to deal with this in the next couple of decades

Look at your lifestyle choices.

[Anonymous]

I see this playing out with my nephews. One didn't go to college and works in a blue collar job, unmarried in his mid-twenties. The other is married with 1 kid and they work from home and live on their parent's rural property. They have tech-lite jobs, college but no advanced degrees or certs. I suspect they'll be first on the list when layoffs come and then the real problems begin. Hard to watch these bad decisions play out in real time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Make them work service jobs in high school

I never made my kid do this. He wanted to and partly because I wasn't buying him whatever he wanted. He wanted to earn his own money. He enjoys working and keeping busy and he's very frugal. He pays for his own car insurance, half of the maintenance plus gas in addition to his own spending money. He doesn't think jobs are beneath him.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't worry about my kids I worry about my grandkids. My kids have trust funds I can't take from them. I want them to go into stable careers even though they don't have to.

Why don’t you create generation skipping trusts if you’re worried about the grandchildren?

I don't control my kids' trusts. Long story. But we are telling them we're not paying $100k for them to major in dance. They can go be lawyers like everyone in our family ten generations back and add to the pot.

[Anonymous]

Tell them to avoid the expensive cities where so many new grads want to go and families subsidize the cost of living. Many can still have it all in smaller markets like Charlotte, Greensboro, Wilmington, Nashville, Cleveland, Madison, WI etc.

[Anonymous]

They come for the professionals, you know. There will be no UMC, no MC. Just oligarchs and the poor.

[Anonymous]

Happiness isn’t doing what you like, but liking what you do. Being happy with what one has, appreciative, etc.
However I don’t think there will be downward mobility for him, we live quite modestly as it is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just do what all the other Boomers are currently doing— finance your kids’ lives until you die and they inherit your wealth.

This is the scenario I'm trying to prepare for

+1
Also, was traveling away from the "elite coasts" and there are so many brain-dead adults. Seriously stupid stupid people*--- that I am reminded that our kids will be the top 5% of intellects without even trying. *I do not know if it's the geo, or drugs, or these people were dropped on their heads. It was astonishing and very eye-opening.

That’s a really awful thing to say.

And just plain wrong. Being smart gets you nothing. That’s pretty much the reason I learned in my 20s. I’m 1% smart and not even remotely close to 1% successful because I lack so many skills and character traits for success. My parents were obsessed with us being smart and literally told us throughout our childhood that being smart and getting a degree was all that mattered, that that would open every door and we’d magically be recruited for fantastic things.

Ha. Haha. My husband and I made a lot of money in spite of many mistakes and are preparing our kids for possible downward mobility by letting them have some realistic fear of it. I will give them exactly the opposite message my parents gave me. Nothing is guaranteed, nothing is fair, and you need to be flexible and hustle.

[Anonymous]

Paying of our vaca house and permanent home so that we will have those assets available to leave to them. They can sell or live in them. Getting them through college without loans.

[Anonymous]

We are preparing them to avoid downward mobility through education. Not everyone has the same starting point. Ours is not fancy.

[Anonymous]

Having many friends who have dealt with downward mobility, I have found that they didn’t really need to be prepared for it. Their parents needed to be prepared for it.

In most wealthy families, there’s the one kid usually the oldest who 150% embraces capitalism materialistic lifestyle. It’s not always the child sometimes they’re disgusted by it too.

I think what happens is they become friends with people who are on the lower end of upper middle class not necessarily middle class and they see how much simpler that life is.

It’s like all the kids that grew up in Chevy Chase and Potomac that now live in four corners or silver spring or Rockville. I really feel like they’re much happier than their parents ever were.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Just do what all the other Boomers are currently doing— finance your kids’ lives until you die and they inherit your wealth.

This is the scenario I'm trying to prepare for

+1
Also, was traveling away from the "elite coasts" and there are so many brain-dead adults. Seriously stupid stupid people*--- that I am reminded that our kids will be the top 5% of intellects without even trying. *I do not know if it's the geo, or drugs, or these people were dropped on their heads. It was astonishing and very eye-opening.

That’s a really awful thing to say.

Trust me. I felt awful thinking it. But I was blown away. I'm still processing. People are not wrong about our elite bubbles I guess.

All you had to do was look at education data to figure this out.

[Anonymous]

Our kids don’t have door dash and Starbucks apps linked to our credit cards like their friends do. We eat out only once a month and then when there’s a school fundraiser at a restaurant. We bring our water/coffee tea on longer day trips so we don’t feel compelled to stop for drinks all the time.

They still have a social life, but it’s not constantly about spending.