Reply to What is it like to be “house poor”?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]No eating out. No vacations. No activities for your kids. No splurges. No new clothes. No going to the movies. No replacing things that get broken that aren't necessities. No upgrading phones. No streaming services.
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This is how I grew up.  Nice house.  Nothing else.  It also means extreme stress in every recession or downturn.  Even as a kid, I constantly worried that we'd end up homeless because there was no padding.  It was our really nice house or, if my dad lost his job, our car.[/quote]

As a a kid, why were you burdened with the knowledge of your parents' finances? My kids are completely unaware of our financial situation. [/quote]

This post is so privileged it's essentially nonsense.  Only middle class and up kids get the option to be unaware of their family's financial situation.  It's hard to be oblivious to having your house foreclosed on, having cars that break down all the time, moving when your rent goes up, not being able to afford school trips and instrument rental fees, etc ad nauseum.  Money is the thing that shielded you from your parents' financial decisions, not discretion.  If you had to eat ramen the last week of every month you would know you were poor, even if your parents never sat you down to say "we are poor, I expect you to deal with that reality."[/quote]

I will add, as an UMC kid, I wish my parents would have given me more insight into how the money stuff worked. I was always told we were "comfortable" but I never knew what that meant - and whenever I asked I was told not to worry about it. I had zero idea how to allocate resources, budget, save for retirement, save for ANYTHING. I feel like this opaque practice toward money is part of why I didn't really conceive of how bad an idea it was for me to take out $160k in student loans in my 20s - which I am just now almost done paying off, in my 40s.

I don't blame my parents or anything like that. Just, there are tradeoffs to sparing your kids having to think about money. I wish my parents had involved me more in how money was made, saved, and spent, so that I didn't have to figure it all out for myself.[/quote]

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