Three Levels of Wealth
It’s interesting the categories the author chose, as I had a similar tone with my mother when I finally started making good money.I grew up in a divorced household. On one side I had a father and step mother who made large amounts of cash in a relatively inexpensive area. They vacationed regularly to Hawaii and Las Vegas, and prioritized spending money on themselves.My mother and step father combined to earn around $30k, were hyper frugal, and stressed about every expense. Any expense whatsoever was agony, and they made sure my sister and I understood their inability to buy things on a whim.So, as I bounced between houses each week, I yo-yo’d between borderline poverty (although they made it work) and quite high wealth.When I hit my mid to late 20s, my wife and I hit a point where we had no debt. Could go out anytime. Could rent any reasonable home in our area (couldn’t buy because we didn’t have that kind of down payment money), and traveled a few times a year throughout the world. When I contrasted this against how I felt after undergrad, while in grad school, where I was heavy in debt, had no car, and felt constant financial stress, it’s remarkable.As I’ve continued to grow older, I’ve now come to realize it wasn’t the travel, eating out, or the things I could buy that helped me to be less stressed, it was the lack of burden of worrying about how I would pay for X, Y, or Z. I make way less money now as I run my own startup, don’t go out that much as I do all the cooking, don’t travel that much because we can’t afford it, yet I carry the same lack of stress and worry as I did years back.Part of why I’d like to see universal, free at the point of delivery, health care in the United States is for this very reason. I’ve first hand experienced and witnessed the choice of not going to get needed medical care because of the financial burden. UBI is still highly experimental, and many other wealth normalization techniques have severe downsides that potentially outweigh the benefits; however, universal health care has enough clear data points of success in the rest of the world, from my vantage point, that maybe that can be the “level 0” of wealth in the United States.