bread and water
by rantywoman
I know a younger woman who was in a middling profession and married a teacher/ carpenter several years ago. In 2011 they quit their jobs to travel through Latin America. They then came back to the States and, as far as I can tell, haven’t worked since. He’s dabbling in writing and looking into it as a career; she’s considering something along the same lines. But she’s also trying to get pregnant.
I must say, it’s difficult for me not to ask, “Where is the money coming from?” Of course I can’t do it– it’s impolite– although a couple of people did ask me how I was surviving during my time off.
Does anyone else encounter these mysterious folks who seem not to need to work to survive (but there’s no obvious gilded background)?
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I think that in these situations there is often an under-the-radar source of “family money.” Not Rockefeller-level fortunes, mind you, but some inherited safety net that is JUST enough of a boost to give people some options they might not otherwise have had. A case in point, although not one that involves a sabbatical like the ones your friends took: I have a friend who is in a prestigious but low-paid profession. She comes from a modest working class background, but her parents purchased a house for $10,000 in the NYC suburbs in the early 1950s in one of those post-WWII cookie-cutter developments, and lived there for the rest of their lives. Her father died many years ago, and at some point her mother transferred the house to her. When her mother died last year, the house was by then worth over half a million dollars because of its location. (Trust me, if you picked it up and plunked it down outside the NY metropolitan area, it would be considered a dump.) Now, you wouldn’t consider my friend an “heiress” in the Paris Hilton sense of the term — her father worked a blue collar job his whole life and her mother was a homemaker, she herself went to college/grad school via scholarships and student loans, etc., but the sale of this tiny undistinguished house enable her to put down a substantial down payment on an apartment here in Manhattan. (Most cooperative apartment buildings here require a 50% down payment, and when even a one-bedroom apt in a pleasant but not-fancy neighborhood can cost $800,000++, you can understand why home ownership here is unattainable even for many well-paid professionals unless they have some initial financial boost from family to provide them with a sizable lump sum.) This is something my friend would NEVER have been able to achieve from her own labor, even though she works hard at a serious and responsible job. Yes, after an entire lifetime of work and penny-pinching she might have been able to squirrel away enough for the requisite down payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars, but by then she would be retired and unable to qualify for a mortgage to pay for the remaining cost of the apartment in question! Catch-22. But because of her admittedly non-Rockefeller-size inheritance, she was able to secure a home for herself in mid-life, and by the time she retires, the relatively modest mortgage she took on to pay for the balance of the cost of the apartment will be paid off.
I think you’re right about all that. LA is the same– it’s impossible to buy a house here, even with a high-level job, but many people have inherited their parents’ modest homes which are now worth a fortune.
Oh yes… not always people who don’t work at all, but they have modest jobs (often the wives stay at home or only work part-time), they have huge houses, drive fancy cars, take sunspot vacations every year… our suspicion is they are up to their necks in debt. 😉