A few days ago I commented on a post criticizing the talk of offering women $5,000 to have children. It had already been pointed out how that it is peanuts in comparison to the medical costs of birthing that child, and 9 months of prenatal care. Not to mention the 18+ years of post-natal care/needs for both child and mother…

I wrote briefly about my own experience and the decision that my husband and I agreed on when our daughter was very young. If we could not afford to support another child by the time this one was 7 years only, that would be our answer. That was some time between 2005 and 2007 (because you know how pressuring family can be with the “When are you going to have another one?” onslaught after you’ve had one kid), after that it became less of a pressed issue.

If you think about it, that sudden barrage of unrequested encouragement to have more children is like your family round-aboutly stating “ You should be having more sex!”; Its weird. But I digress.

Having written my brief response about our decision to not have more kids being for financial reasons and the fact that even then a lump sum payment of $5,000 would not have been enough to persuade us that we could afford to provide for another child, it got me thinking about wealth and what that means, specifically to my generation.

I’m a Millennial, whatever that means these days. But in reality I toe the line between Millennial and GenX. I have memories through about half of the 80’s, we didn’t have a TV in our house until I was 7, we listened to the radio on the weekend and the record player during the week, and the first TV we had was a B&W hand-me-down from my grandmother. I remember rotary telephones, and know how to use them. I learned to type on electric typewriters and then was required to retake the class using computers to learn word processing. A very long winded way of saying that I’ve seen a lot of “history”.

Those of us born at the beginning of the Millennial generation are now in our 40’s (it hurts to admit that, but my joints remind me of how true it is). We are the Elder Millennials, Xennials, and (probably the most entertaining to me) the Geriatric Millennials.

The parents of most of the people I knew growing up, owned their home, and most of them didn’t have to move around every few years because rent was getting unmanageable. But a scant few of us own homes for our families to live in now that we are adults. I count myself among the lucky ones who were somehow able beat the odds.

I think that many of the others in my generation that long to buy a home, and the next generation that are starting to think about what it would take to buy a home, view owning a home as a signifier of wealth in some way. But even before the economy started going sideways, owning a home has never made us financially wealthy. Every year things get tighter, with rising auto insurance, rising mortgage (which now almost rivals the most I ever paid for rent), utilities, groceries. And don’t even get me started on tuition, and the fact that the job market is as big a shit show as that circus in DC.

Suffice to say, that regardless of our homeownership status… it doesn’t change the fact that we too have been living pay-check to pay-check for the past year or more. And in a lot of ways I lament not having someone else I can defer the maintenance costs to, instead of having to find a way to cover it without having to forego necessities. Though being at the whim of someone else is not something I miss.

I can’t say that I know which is better, but I can say that for the working class… these days, financial wealth is pretty much an illusion. But having family and friends that we can share a smile or a laugh with when all we want is a little distraction from the insanity around us, that is sustainable wealth in my eyes.

How do you define wealth?