I’ve written that I grew up with great financial uncertainty. My father was in sales, and we lived “feast or famine” during much of my childhood. If my father had a good year or a big commission check, we lived (too) well, but more often than not, we lived with a sense of financial desperation. I would argue that ups-and-downs are worse than consistency – even if that consistency was being in worse overall financial shape. Then the behaviors modeled by parents would be consistent and reinforcing. Instead, I saw the lack of discipline of buying a very nice new car or taking a fancy vacation, followed weeks later by arguments about how to afford groceries. My parents had to borrow money from my savings once when I was 10 to make a critical payment and only told me when I saw it later in the bank account passbook.

My parents made it clear that they could not help to support me financially when I graduated college, as it was even difficult for them to help me while in college. They would welcome me back home and reluctantly help support me there, but there was no financial support to underwrite my lifestyle. And I did not want to move home ever again for a number of reasons, so I went out into the adult world to grind, hustle, and keep my own roof over my head. All of my close friends went to Europe after graduation (paid for by their parents) and I stayed that summer at my parents’ home, commuting to my new job in Boston to save up money for an apartment security deposit and first and last months’ rent for a September 1 lease with my buddies returning from Europe. I found the postcards that they sympathetically sent to me that summer when I was cleaning out my parents’ home a decade or so back.

This lack of a safety net when starting my “adulting” didn’t enable me to be my best self. What do I mean? Well, examples might be not being able to help other people financially when they needed it, being financially charitable to the causes I believed in (I did try to donate time), supporting colleagues at work in getting the promotion that I wanted, being demanding to my managers for raises and promotions. I was one paycheck away from having to go back to my parents’ house for much of my early 20s, a few paychecks away in my later 20s, and that feeling made me more competitive, more driven, more cutthroat, and more zero-sum than I would like to admit. I didn’t pick a career or job based on how much I liked doing it – I needed and wanted to earn the most money for my time. I was the first to work in the morning and the last to leave at night, and worked many weekends.

These fear-driven behaviors continued into my mid-career. My wife knew that I was likely working 7 AM to 7 PM and maybe weekends if needed. I traveled a lot for a few jobs and she was a single parent feeding, bathing, and putting our two children at the time to bed Mon-Thurs. That was the price we both paid to know that a roof was over our head, food was in our stomachs, reliable cars were in the garage, colleges were going to be paid, and maybe some money was saved for retirement. Looking back, I didn’t always like myself or my behaviors back then, but I am lucky now to be able to act differently because those financial pressures are in the past.

So my wife and I decided to enable our children to make decisions that would allow them to have a financial safety net when they graduated college. I wrote about how we structured the college decision and paying for college previously. This allowed our children to graduate with enough resources to get a shared apartment, buy a used car if needed, and keep an emergency fund. I didn’t want them to experience debt and the same financial desperation that my wife felt, and I felt, when we were in our 20s.

Now that I have had a few children start careers and personal independence, I have seen that there is a cost to this approach of providing a financial safety net. As with many in this new generation, I see them want “fulfilling” and “meaningful” careers, places where they “want” to go to work each day, and also have “work-life balance,” and they are making decisions to optimize for this path enabled by this financial safety net. Frankly, if they had the financial knife at the throat, they wouldn’t be able to make these decisions. Yes, these goals of this generation can be achievable, but in my experience have to come at a cost. My children clearly won’t be able to repeat the financial comfort and success that they experienced growing up (unless my wife and I pay for that), and I guess that is okay if they understand this trade-off. However, most young people want it all and I fear that is too unreasonable to expect.