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Butch Furse
We’ve noticed that most senior family members want their children to have a better lifestyle than they did. No matter how good the current lifestyle is, mom and dad want the kids to have a better one. Unfortunately “better” seems to be related to monetary wealth.
It appears plenty of wealth will be handed down when it has been projected in 2042 $70 trillion will be the national total inheritance figure. In 2019 the average individual figure was $213,000 per family and $10,000 for the poorest of families. Then that same year for the wealthiest families it was $700,000. Wealth disparity has continued to grow since the Depression with many young families of today starting life paying off debt loads for educational loans, housing and even some tacking on excessive credit card use.
I entered my lifetime less than a decade after the ’29 Depression. I remember in my growing up years when some of my parent’s lifestyle had been rooted from their own experiences living through Depression and WWII times. A local banker gave Dad a broke 400 circulation newspaper that later existed only because Dad sold insurance and ran the movie theater as well. Mom and Dad lived in an apartment in the small hotel before they later moved to a Nebraska community to a larger newspaper where many lifelong traits were engrained.
They did not borrow money, except for business purposes. A certain percent of income was faithfully put into a savings account. A grocery and household budget was adhered to and when the bag of WWII rationed sugar was used up there were no more sweets. Didn’t go anywhere because the old car needed new tires and I can never recall them going anywhere. The only borrowing came when Dad bought a newspaper and subscriptions were sometimes credited to fresh farm chickens, eggs, cream and butter. In later years many of these living styles were softened. Still, credit cards were used very little. “No quick rich” stock market purchases were made and flamboyant spending never entered their lifestyle.
Yep, I learned a lot, and certainly I have a better life because of my parents’ teachings and examples. Those are my inheritance values that are way more valuable than the dollar values cited for the 2019 national average and wealthy inheritances.
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Contentment has one big advantage over wealth; friends don’t try to borrow from you.
RL Furse is publisher emeritus of the News-Register
