Stuck in the Boom: The Unrealistic Financial Views of Older to Younger Started Long Before the advent of Millenials
It was 1995, and I attended a school near Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Tuition without financial aid was $11,000 a year, and the college fund my grandmother had established for me tapped out at $6k. It was all she could do. My parents had encouraged me to save myself for college. Still, they would then harangue me with “your first job is school,” school became my second job when there were chores around the house that they didn’t want to do themselves.
I did work through high school and managed to sock back a few thousand dollars. At the time, the minimum wage was $4.25 — even when I found a job that paid $5.25 and socked back close to every penny, I wasn’t quite covering tuition with my high school jobs.
I wound up at the private school because the financial aid package covered far more than the state school my parents had attempted to manipulate me into attending; my mother also wound up pushing for me to attend the rural school because she believed the isolation would keep me from “running wild.” (My mother lived in a default state of slut shame, and no one could be as pure as her — which, in the end, turned out to be one of her loudest hypocrisies.)
