Keeping up with the Joneses - part 1

American Family and Johnny have both written posts that have really made me think about my beliefs about money and what it means to be “successful” and how I can instill healthy attitudes about financial matters in my daughter.

For the past couple of years, I’ve really been struggling with an unhealthy desire to “keep up with the Joneses.” The desire itself isn’t really a surprise – I know where it comes from. But I still haven’t really figured out how to combat it.

The desire stems, in large part, from my parents and their responses to their parents and childhood circumstances. Let’s start with my mother. She was raised in a fairly liberal upper-middle class family. My grandfather was a chemical engineer and my grandmother was a teacher – a working mother and a feminist in a time when both of those things were very unpopular. I believe that my grandmother’s primary mission as a parent was to raise independent, educated, and strong daughters – which she did in spades. My mother got her bachelor’s degree, her master’s degree, and her law degree – all before the age of 25, and all while raising two small children. While in law school, she met my step-father. He had been raised in a single-parent household on the stereotypical “wrong side of the tracks.” While going through the “rich” neighborhoods with the big houses, he made a conscious decision that he would do what was necessary to make enough money to live like that. So, he essentially pulled himself up by his bootstraps and put himself through law school while he was in the military.

While I was growing up, my parents consciously decided to by the biggest and most expensive houses they could afford – a theory that ultimately led them to buy a house after my brother and I both graduated from college that was twice the size of the one we lived in while we were in high school. In addition, my mother had the express goal of raising me to be a successful, educated, and strong woman. She decided (and told me several times) that a good way to do that would be to teach me to appreciate the finer things in life, believing that if I wanted expensive things, I would be sure to finish my education and get a job that would enable me to pay for those things. And if I did that, then I would be successful.

As a result of my stepfather’s desire for big houses and my mother’s desire for expensive things, it is no surprise that I grew up equating stuff with success. This belief was compounded by my reaction to my father – who, for most of my life, I regarded as the epitome of what not to do. He was raised in a blue collar, factory worker household and was thrifty (or cheap, depending on your perspective) to a fault. Everything in his apartment (for most of my childhood, he lived in apartments rather than buying a house) was bargain basement or used. Despite the fact that he had a very good job as a computer engineer, he either never wanted anything new or never could bring himself to spend money on anything new.

To be continued.