Johnny Rico said:
It seems like a lot of young people (pre-college age) have a good amount of money saved up. I think this has to do with parents trying to instill good working and savings habits in their offspring at a fairly young age while at the same time not requiring the offspring to have any expenses of their own; its very easy to accumulate thousands of dollars when you have practically no expenses of your own other than personal entertainment. Then college occurs and the parents make the "you don't have to work while you're in school as long as your grades are up" deal. Then when the offspring graduates and finds that they have rent/mortgage, bills, food expenses, drug/alcohol/tobacco addiction left over from college, etc, etc, etc, all on top of personal entertainment expenses, they panic and take out a credit card. Forget about saving, the average youth in america is more concerned with spending as much as humanly possible all the time. Because they were taught that they can. I've seen this exact scenario play out over and over again -- upper middle class parents trying to provide a comfortable life for their offspring but end up lousing the whole thing up, manufacturing a generation of worthless consumption driven robots. Especially the girls.
Sounds about right for a lot of people.
In my family, my mum and I never keep track of money. If I need it, she gives it to me. That's it. No strings attached. If I had a job and earned money (and I've had over 12 different jobs of all types),
ALL the money went into my bank account. My mum also puts a couple of thousand dollars or so into my bank account every few months (whenever she feels like it), the amount depending on how much I still have in my account. Because of this, I really don't know what money is hers, and what money I earned.
If I need money for going out with friends, or buying something (iPod, necessities, textbooks, etc), I use the money in my account and don't ask her at all. She lets me use my own
judgement to see:
1) If it's worth it.
2) If I need it or would use it enough to justify the costs.
3) Would I be irresponsible in doing so and prevent me from buying stuff that I actually need.
I don't owe her money later, and she doesn't need to pay me back if I buy a digital camera for the family on Boxing day, necessities for the house, or a list of things she needs from the grocery store. We just don't make money a barrier in my family at all. Maybe money is handled a bit different in chinese families. Don't know. The funny thing is that I'm
very good at saving money. I haven't been saving while doing my PhD, and have been relatively irresponsible with money the past 2 years, but once I graduate and start working, there's no doubt in my mind that I'll be able to go back into saving mode.
However, I still had jobs and such because we were quite poor when I was growing up as my dad is a retard. My mum still still tried to give us everything we wanted (within reason). Even then, I didn't
need to ask her if I could buy something, but I almost never bought anything because I had better judgement than that when we had no money.
Right now, I could easily go out and buy the Nikon D50 body + wideangle lens that I want, but I haven't because even though my financial arrangement with my family can be abused quite easily (and I'm sure lots of people would growing up in my situation) and makes me very spoiled, I have also been taught to be financially responsible. Hence no Nikon D50 for me. Not now, anyway.
And yes, I spend money more liberally now, but I do get around US$20000 scholarship money every year, so meh.
