I Heard it Downtown

I think my family, myself included, is addicted to a lifestyle it cannot afford any longer. This has been one of the roughest years for my mom, financially. Yet she went to Greece and still vacationed in North Carolina. I went to England and France. My sister Amy’s going to Colorado on a ski trip this weekend. After the inheritance from my step-grandfather, I bought a new guitar on a sweet deal, but even then that money probably would have been better spent on law school applications and a possible security deposit on an apartment.

All of that plus my mom put down a lot of money on a new driveway and, until this week, was sending two kids to college simultaneously after paying loads of money to send my oldest sister to a private school. But times were good back then.

Don’t get me wrong, I am still grateful for all that I have, particularly three supportive parents (I consider my stepmother a parent on fairly equal footing as my mom and dad) who all have excellent, well-paying jobs and who invest extraordinarily in the education of their children. Now that I’m a college graduate, however, and the economy is in poor shape, I’m going to have to adjust the way I live considerably. The good news is I will probably end up being a healthier, more frugal citizen. But it’s not as if I’m terribly looking forward to making these changes.

So, there it is. My educated, upper-middle class family, completely spoiled, is going to have to get used to the fact that we may never get to be fabulously wealthy and stop living like we are considerably well-off when we’re not. And while we’ll still be in better shape than the majority of people in the country and in the world, we’re not exactly inclined to accept that our hopes and dreams might not be fulfilled after all.

Which may turn out to be a good thing in the big picture.