Money

My older sister and I have this vulgar habit of putting dibs on our mom’s best stuff. Pointing to the valuable Roseville vases, crystal aperitif glasses, and heirloom doilies that were hand stitched by our great-grandmother one hundred years ago, we’ll march through Mom’s home, saying things like “That’s mine someday.” This strikes me now as being rather sinister, but Mom considers the behavior perfectly acceptable. She likes knowing that something of her and our forebears will endure.

What remains taboo, on the other hand, is the matter of cold, hard cash and Mom’s liquid assets. It’s impolite to talk money, you know.

I can’t be the only ungracious child to have invested energy in approximating my mother’s net worth. My algebra: Neither of my parents had been big earners, per se. But Mom did bank a life insurance payout when dad passed away, about seven years ago. I’ve never known how much. Then my grandma died last summer, and Mom inherited a little more. She has been provided for, I guess you could say, and I’ve always expected a similar fate was in store for me one day.

The “greatest generation,” of which my grandma was a platinum member, saw the rise of the middle class and is thus said to have squirreled away oodles of dough. Grandma started her golden years much in this way, having inherited plenty of money from well-off in-laws about fifteen years ago. But years of spending on health care and prescription drugs, while also floating her not-so-solvent loved ones, ate away at Grandma’s initial six-figure nest egg. And she wasn’t unique in her way; the old folks, by and large, are dying broke these days. Their baby-boomer next-of-kin can now expect to inherit on average just twenty-nine thousand dollars, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s enough to buy, say, a new Volkswagen or dig oneself out of some minor credit card debt. But it’s hardly the stuff of legacy, and probably not enough to keep trickling down the family tree.

As for the big-spending grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Generations X and Y? Well, they’ll make due with far less than twenty-nine thousand dollars. The estimated inheritance for children whose parents were born between 1931 and 1947 is nineteen thousand dollars.

These sorts of dire financial predictions have become fashionable lately—as I suppose they always do when the next generation starts writing financial advice columns. I’ve been hearing about the financial debasement of Generation X since college. And now a whole crop of youngsters is claiming to be the most maxed-out generation in the history of the world, and they’re writing books like Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young and Strapped: Why Americas Twenty- and Thirtysomethings Can’t Get Ahead. (Considering the macro-economic picture—that is, the federal deficit—they may be right after all. But obviously, no one cares about that sort of insolvency; it simply “doesn’t matter,” as Dick Cheney famously said.)

Yet there is gloom and doom thundering on the horizon that cannot be ignored. One estimate paints the average American as having eight thousand dollars in credit card debt. Most of us are not saving for retirement, regardless of age. Our health care costs are in a reckless upsurge. Our Social Security “net” is fraying. And as the lines between socio-economic classes continue to blur, even those of modest means have developed tastes for the finer things—certain downtown lofts and seventeen-dollar-per-pound cheeses, say. It all adds up to not very much. And unless we’re so lucky to have a rich benefactor (or two—that’s how it goes), most of us can expect little relief in the form of wealth transfer.

Mom couldn’t give Grandma’s old furniture away. But ears perked up around the dinner table one night, a few months back, when Mom broached the forbidden topic and promised to share a “little” inheritance with each of her children. How much? When pressed, Mom later issued an exact figure—five hundred dollars. Chump change. Initially misconstruing what “little” meant, one of my sibs offended Mom greatly in asking for several thousand dollars up front. Said Mom, rather testily, “This is my inheritance. Someday you’ll get yours.” And that was the end of that. —Christy DeSmith