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My parents often get upset at my wife and I for spending money on things that they see as unnecessary, saying things like, “When we were struggling to pay our bills, we went without phone, television, and only ate spaghetti, hot dogs, and soup/sandwiches. You guys are out there buying energy drinks, new shoes, and Apple Watches, when you should be saving all of your money for later.”
They don’t get it. They don’t get that while, yes, we should be saving more money than we are, we aren’t interested in depriving ourselves of every enjoyment that life has to offer while doing so.
I am a massive tech nerd. I don’t understand fashion, I’m not interested in modifying my car, and I don’t care about having a huge house. I have clothes, I have a car that gets me where I need to be, and I have a house that is enough for my family.
My parents valued very different things than I did, and they also had four children, while I only have the one, who always has everything she could ever need. We have our home, my wife and I both have vehicles, we pay all of our bills on time, and we maintain a relatively modest savings.
While my parents wanted to save every spare penny that they could as they were raising us, and they didn’t care about enjoying the wonderful things that the world had to offer, seeing them as meaningless and pointless, I am very much the opposite, likely due to the fact that I NEVER got a single thing that I asked for on Christmas or my birthday while growing up.
Now, I recognize as an adult that to make such a statement is extremely shallow and pretentious, but when you’re a kid, and you see all of your friends getting exactly what they asked for during Christmas and their birthday, and from the age of one to the age of 17, you literally never once got a single big thing that you asked for (and not because your parents couldn’t afford it, but because they saw spending money on such things as a massive waste), you start to really resent those holidays.
And until I met my wife, I really did. I got really depressed and hostile around the Christmas holidays. I made sure to put on my happy face and buy everyone else presents, but still, I never got a single big thing that I wanted (not that I expected my parents to spend real money on me now that I was an adult).
But then this wonderful woman came into my life, and asked me why I seemed so sullen around Christmas. I didn’t want to tell her at first, knowing how ridiculously shallow it would sound, but she truly understood. She said that she couldn’t imagine growing up as a child, never once getting the thing that you wanted most for either Christmas or your birthday, and from that year on, she sought to ensure that I always got exactly what I wanted both for my birthday and Christmas, just like I always had for everyone else.
I never told my parents about my resentment of Christmas and my birthday. They wouldn’t have understood, and likely would have gotten quite angry with me for “not being satisfied with what I got”.
But I am the way that I am today largely because of the way I was raised. When you come up as a child, being almost entirely deprived of the things that you believe to be most important (as a child, obviously), you tend to go a bit overboard once you start making your own money, and you have the ability to finally get everything that you want.
And boy, did I. I got my first job when I was 15, and every single check was spent in totality the day that I got it. I was a skater at the time (and still am, to a much lesser degree), so my entire check would go into replacing the deck that I had broken, or getting new shoes to replace the shredded ones I had been wearing for a whole three months, or replacing bearings, or wheels, or buying new Thrasher shirts, etc.
And it only got worse as I got older and started making more money. I would buy huge TVs and the newest gaming console and new computers. I didn’t start to slow down with my spending until I had my daughter, at which point my priorities violently shifted to her. I no longer worried about getting the newest of everything, as I knew that I had to spend all of my money making sure she had everything she needed. When she was born, I was still working at Wawa making $12 an hour, and her mother wasn’t working. It was extremely rough.
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