I have decided to post some thoughts about personal finance in this blog. The subject has been a favorite of mine for a long time, and it sits at the center of several topics such as economic and demographic trends, managing a family, psychology, and building and maintaining close relationships. As an example, children are no longer net economic assets to their parents, but rather a series of very large expenditures. In this world, the value of managing this series of expenditures versus available resources is high, especially if the family is large. Mismanaging the expenditures may lead to stress, bankruptcy, failure of marriages, and low individual prospects.
In this changed world, it seems worthwhile to raise our level of thinking on the subject and to challenge what we think we know. I am not looking for the one true approach that would put our lives in straight-jackets of long-term planning. Rather, the goal is to play a smart game that would tend to maximize our happiness in the world in which we live.
You are so right. It used to be that the more children a family had, the more they could help with the family finances as it shows with the Amish in today's world. But the Amish stopped advancing about 1910 when the automobile came in as they were concerned that the modern era would break up their families with cars and telephones and electricity doing the dirty deed. It does keep the family close and intact and it does keep the children around so they can help out economically in their agrarian type of society. But I don't want to live that way and so we have to be able to adapt to the modern computer world in a different way.
My husband's dad lived a rural life with some of the Amish-style revenue but was stymied in how to raise his family. When the children went to school and participated in school activities, it was a detriment to helping pull the family together on the farm. He didn't realize what was happening and couldn't ever really adjust. School activities cost money, they didn't pay money back to the family and so the burden was on him to do it all. He had 11 children and because he was blindsided in the change in society it was tough to come up with the ability to provide for their needs. Consequently he was always quite upset.
The big problem is realizing that there are trends happening culturally and adapt. I felt that when we raised our family, our parents had modeled how to go about living in the world. But I learned to live in the old style world and felt like I had one foot in one world and the other foot in another world that was continually changing. How I had wished that someone could mentor me and prepare me with how to adapt.
I think that in the present world where the top-down endeavor which causes Daniel's list of problems can be helped greatly when we have a stable set of values that don't change even as the world changes. In that way we can bounce off the culture's ideas to this more secure set of standards and be able to flow better. We would make better monetary decisions, feel secure and at peace with ourselves with the side-effect of good relationships.
Posted by: Jeanne Schmelzer | October 01, 2006 at 10:00 PM