The American Dream and obsession with wealth

As a young man, I was very money-motivated. I jumped down in to the corporate trench and shoveled shit with the best of them. I went around the world to some of the nastiest, war-torn hellholes to get a jump on the rank and file 20-somethings in my career field. It worked, I got ahead and became well compensated. Then I started to look around and realized that I was starting to get really out of touch with loved ones, friends and family because I was gone all the time and generally had a very different lifestyle.

In my late twenties I decided it was time to come back to the U.S. and start a family and I have become a very family oriented person. I have a wife, 2 kids, and 2 dogs now. Not to mention a house and 2 cars to maintain. Fortunately, I was able to prop up the family while my wife finished school and started her career. As luck would have it, her career blossomed to where she makes almost as much as I do now. This wouldn't have been easy to accomplish if I hadn't sacrificed as a younger man to make it happen.

It's strange, I'm in my mid-thirties now and I feel the pendulum swinging in the other direction again. Now that I have a family, I look at college prepaid account costs (over $300 per child per month from birth for a state college tuition), then figure mortgage, retirement and all the other bills and it starts to make me nervous. I am left with the constant feeling that my situation is temporary. I may be successful now but it could change on a moments notice. Guys in my career field reach their early fifties and fade away, get laid-off, etc. and never work a day in the field again.

So recently I have changed tack and started to try to earn as much as I can and work toward starting my own company or other revenue streams to ensure that I don't get left in the cold. I don't necessarily look at this as being driven by money so much as being driven by the comfort and long-term security of my family.

 

Being straight up about, I would consider us successful and near wealthy. I don't think we're wealthy yet, because we have aggressively used the money that we've earned to remove debts. We have no credit card debt, both cars are paid for, we did 100% financing on our house 7 years ago and just cleared out the 2nd mortgage this year, and were saving that money in big chunks on a monthly basis. We have been following the Smart Couples Finish Rich plan and I gotta say if you have the discipline it works out well.

I said all of that first, because I have to admit tha while it is nice to be able to afford SCUBA certification and trips what was really great was the fact that my oldest dog has probably lived 4 years longer than she would have otherwise and with a high quality of life. We've treated mast cell tumors, a really nasty ulcer, and a fibrosarcoma over the last 4 years. I joke with our vet that I put her into that SL550 she drives and I hope she likes it.

My maternal grandfather grew up poor as dirt and died a very wealthy man. He always said "if you have a problem that money can solve, then you don't have a problem." Easy translation is that usually money is not the problem in the first place, but a symptom.

My addendum as somebody that saw some lean times and difficulties growing up was "if you have a problem that money can solve, then you don't have a problem . . . but having that money anyway never hurts."

 

I would be quite happy to make enough money to pay rent on an apartment AND be able to afford to pay the rest of my bills. At this point in my life, I do not have a steady enough paycheck to even consider moving out of my parent's house. Beyond living on my own, I think it would be nice to some day own a house and have enough money to help my (future possible) kids pay for college so that they do not have the level of debt I am currently in.

 

I was fortunate to have a fairly secure middle class upbringing, and frankly that is all I'm really after for myself. I do make pretty good money, as does the wife. We bought less house than we could afford, pay cash for our cars, and carry no more than $500 debt on all 3 (yes, only 3) credit cards. I would much rather have a comfortable low maintence life than have a huge house, expensive car, and have to sweat paying for them. I live in a 1600 square foot colonial with no fancy trimmings (1.5 baths, no central air, small deck, etc.) , and drive an '08 RAV4.

Through hard work, I'm pretty much where I want to be security-wise. I can go out to eat, buy shitloads of booze or go see a ballgame without thinking twice about it. If I lose my job tomorrow we wouldn't have to sweat it in the slightest. We are by no means rich, but we have a nice nest egg. Just last week we were assessing our financial situation, and during the conversation i was startled that we had numerous small financial assets tucked away that I had sort of forgotten about.

That and our moderate lifestyle, are a winning formula for us.

 

I'm a full time impoverished university student. I spent 15 years before that in enterprise IT and the last few years of it clearing 6 figures pretty comfortably. It's a rough shift - but I'm vastly happier for it. My dad is a guy who spent his entire life chasing the big business thing. He's done pretty well and he's been clearing a half million a year for the last like 5 - but I've watched him go from pretty wealthy to bankrupt so many times. I've watched him work 100 hour weeks for years at a time and end up basically exactly where he started. It seems like his current thing could seriously take off - like this could be the business that actually makes him legit rich guy instead of just overpaid business guy. But the hours he works, the constant setbacks and stress and shit he's put himself through would have killed me. The toxic business culture in enterprise IT was making me sick enough. When I told him I was going back to school - and that I'd lost 70lbs and was healthier than I'd been in years, he immediately started doing the math for what it would cost me - and he's right, if I go all the way to doctorate, the cost of studying and the lost income will never make this a sound financial move. But jesus fuck, I still have a house full of pretty nice stuff, manage to survive with a pretty nice life style and might actually get a career out of this where I don't hate every single working hour of my life.

 

If you spent 15 years as a successful enterprise IT guy and are currently impoverished, you done somethin' severely wrong with your budgeting.

 

I mean yeah financial ruin can strike at any time, but the post seemed to imply it was more a fed-up-with-IT-and-going-back-to-school thing.

 

I tend to go for the cheap joke because this is the Idiot Board.

$0.00. That's how cheap the joke is.

 

In my case it's not exactly unfair. I've over the years invested heavily in real estate, and then had it all end up in the crapper during the GFC, failed to understand options and made poor decisions about how to take my stock options, had my solid and sound investments hit walls based on pure bad luck. I consider the money I spent on mind expanding drugs, dance parties, fetish toys and international travel to be largely the only money I've ever had that I didn't waste. Most of my money at this point goes toward existing and uni books. I survive on a couple of small scholarships and Australian student welfare.

I have a retirement fund that I can't touch with Australian law that's pretty decent. Mandatory 9% of career earnings plus a bit extra and it's in a fund that's done pretty well. But since I can't touch it for another 30 years, I consider myself impoverished. I've also learned that if I think something is a good investment, I should take my money and spend it on cocaine and hookers. If I'd followed that advice (more) through most of my investing career - I'd actually be substantially better off.

 

I grew up in a family of four kids, with my mom making social worker wages, and my step dad being the worst businessman that ever lived as an independent contractor. So things were tight. College was not going to be paid for, and I slacked off too much in highschool to get any scholarships. So I joined the military. Military living (for single people, or those with small families) is pretty comfortable, and I would have been happy to retire after 20 years at 38 years old. But I got hurt, got medically separated.

So I switched to the civilian contractor side, where the money is a fuckton better, if you're willing to live in some of the shitholes of the world. Over the last year and two months, I went from being $30k in debt, to having $70k in savings and half of a shiny new Camaro paid for in cash. I'm planning to go to school on the GI Bill for the next few years, which also pays military housing allowances (E-5 BAH in Minneapolis is around $1550). With my wife making, well, honestly pretty crappy money, but still livable, I'm hoping that we won't really have to touch my savings at all until I finish school for my new career path (winemaking).

The challenge I'm trying to get used to right now though is that my wife has been living paycheck to paycheck for years as a single mom. Not because she doesn't spend wisely, but because her bills to income ratio (she's an LPN, making around $45k) was just bad. Now that we're married and splitting finances (joint account for bills, the rest of our money is our own to do with as we see fit), I've been trying to convince her to start saving money. She wants to throw all of this new "extra" money at her debts, and I'm trying to get her to understand that she needs to put money away for herself as well. Otherwise, she'll never truly get ahead. I did convince her that we should each be putting an extra $200/mo into the joint account over what the bills total, so that we can build up several months worth of safety net.


TL/DR version: After growing up poor, it becomes important to a lot of people to not necessarily become rich, but to have enough that they feel safe.

 

Happiness is a fickle thing.

I used to think happiness was piece of mind, but then I realized a lot of retirees and trust fund babies are depressed. The mind needs stimulus to be happy, and playing 18 holes 7 days a week isnt it.


I started my own logistics company 8 years ago. I was tired of making shit wages with a shit boss telling me inferior ways to do something when I knew there were more efficient ways to get the job done. My former coworkers laughed and told me I'd be back in six months. Speed up to current day, the company currently does about $10M gross in revenue a year. Needless to say, I live comfortably on 8 acres outside Atlanta.

All peachy right?

On the opposite side of the spectrum, I work 70+ hours a week, receive an average of one lawsuit a year, and my wife filed for divorce last year because I'm a workaholic.

Only after the divorce did I ease up a bit on my business. I cut back on the hours and dont sweat the small things anymore. I think the divorce probably saved my life as I was heading for an ulcer and probably a heart attack. I'm much happier now that Ive had a paradigm shift on my outlook on life.

Happiness comes from within.

 

Focus: No, I'm not happy at all with my current lifestyle although I do recognize that while it is constantly improving I've made some serious errors in judgement that have held me back for years. If I'd have chosen a major in and stuck with it or if I'd have chosen to enlist in the armed forces or if I hadn't done certain things... You get the idea. Its always the "if's" that fuck you up.

Right now I'm making more money that I've ever made in my life; I've moved up via networking from making $20 a day to $8.00 an hour (putting in 50-odd hours a week) and loving every minute of it. I don't have many expenses since I'm still living at home with my family, driving a used vehicle, and opting for the cheapest phone/plan I could find. So that's allowing me to save up a modest amount of money, but it's not quite enough for me. I have a great desire to be wealthy, which for me would be the level at which I can build a house, have a couple of decent cars, and enough passive-income/savings to cover most of my expenses. Being ultra-rich is and forever will be beyond my grasp; and I'm fine with that, my goal in life is to attain a respectable level of financial and personal comfort while recognizing that I am not likely to ever retire.

Some people say that happiness comes from within, and frankly I look at that as a load of horseshit. It's external factors that determine how happy you can really be, and if you're living at or below poverty level, then you're probably going to be miserable. Having an optimistic attitude can only take you so far before you need to change or avoid those external factors working against you. Speaking personally what's holding me back from being really and truly happy is my temporary inability to live the lifestyle that I want. Putting in fifty hours or more a week doesn't bother me, I have no children or spouse/girlfriend, and I take great pleasure in my work; what makes me unhappy however is not coming home to the house I want to build to enjoy the nicer things I want in my life.

 

This may be of interest: <a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill#Major_empirical_findings" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_tr ... l_findings</a>

 

We could but...no. I don't want to do that. Nope nope nope.

I'm still looking for work here, work that won't COST ME to work. That shit is annoying.

Our goal before we leave this duty station is to build up a solid savings account, repair my divorce/temporarily homeless/not having my shit together damaged credit (me doing it, not him), and try to cut what we owe on the house by at least a third. That's a huge order, and we may not do it, but at least we're prioritizing those things.

 

While there's a direct correlation between socioeconomic status and happiness, it's often overestimated.


If this were true, there wouldnt be any rich, miserable pricks. Again, peace of mind is a much stronger factor in happiness.

Being financially well off is just one variable of many when it comes to peace of mind. Your bank account might be fine, but if you're constantly concerned about lawsuits or employee bullshit, that can be detrimental in one's level of happiness.


Rflagg, if you're truly miserable right now, money isn't going to fix all aspects of your depression. You're using money as a scapegoat for the rest of your troubles. Dont do that.

 

Studies have shown that there is a break even point where an increase in salary doesn't correlate to an increase in happiness. I believe that it varies based on location, but averages about $75K per year. I guess below that you have financial woes and above that you have mo money mo problems. I understand that. My husband and I are comfortable. I probably pilfer away more money then I should but really enjoy the comfort of knowing that ..... if I want it....I can probably have it. With that being said, I grew up on the poor side so am pretty frugal by nature. We could very easily survive six months without making a penny, that is in an emergency savings account that it untouchable unless there is a true emergency. Hasn't been yet. I despise rampant consumerism, I understand it to a point but it can quickly just turn vulgar. Not the "I just got a promotion I worked hard for so bought myself one LV handbag as a reward"....that is fine. But this....one of my friend's exes and father of her child is married to this......thing. Meanwhile my friend had to take him back to court for more child support. For all the females out there, you may recognize the red bottoms and know that these are a minimum of 1K a pop. And she lives in fucking KC and never goes out. Just buys them to show on Instagram. Just gross.

 

Me and the wife both come from middle class families growing up. We both always had what we wanted and needed. Always went on one holiday a year. Right now we both of our standard wages per 40h/week is around the happy mark that has been mentioned. We really need to start saving more, but I bought a house really cheap 1 year before we got married, so 5 years ago. It need work, but all the money we are putting into it, would still make it cheaper then buying the same house fully done, because I am doing 99 percent of the work myself/family. Everything should be done by the end of summer this year that is expensive, drainage this year.