Clutter and Different Generations: Baby Boomers and Their Parents

I notice that today’s young people don’t seem to keep as much stuff as my generation has kept, and certainly not as much as their grandparents kept. I think there are several reasons for this.

I was born at the end of the baby boom, so I had parents who were born during the Great Depression. They were raised with relatively little in terms of material goods, and by parents who were poor. My maternal grandfather lost everything in the stock market crash of 1929, while my paternal grandmother raised a large family as a teenage mom whose husband left soon after their youngest child was born. As a result, these people valued…no, treasured…every item they owned, and particularly anything that could possibly be useful, right down to pieces of string.

Since they lived with very little income, they learned to stretch everything as far as possible, and to keep anything on which they had spent their hard-earned income. Even if they no longer needed something, they kept it because “Someone else might need it someday. What if we have another depression?” That’s what my parents grew up hearing and seeing. As a result, I was raised to waste nothing and keep everything.

But that’s not all. Looking back, I realize that I grew up during the golden age of merchandising. The quality of the clothes, housewares, and other products we bought during the 1960s to 1980s was extremely high and also very appealing. I grew up in the Chicago area, so I cut my shopping teeth on Marshall Field’s flagship store downtown, where there were 13 floors of incredible goods, all waiting to be wrapped in tissue by the friendly Field’s employees and placed neatly in forest green Field’s bags or boxes.

My love of fabric began when my grandmother took me shopping at Field’s fabric department, where she bought me my first pattern (clothes for my Barbie doll) and led me up and down rows of gorgeous fabric. Gram could not leave Field’s without a large stack of green boxes. When she wasn’t up for a trip downtown, she would call Field’s on the phone and request something she saw in one of their ads in her morning Chicago Tribune. The next day, the big green truck pulled up and delivered Gram’s new dress, or bedspread, or throw pillows. They were always sturdy and beautiful, qualities which she had come to expect from Marshall Field’s goods.

By the time I became a teenager, we had a new shopping option in our area: Woodfield Mall. Billed back then as the world’s largest indoor shopping mall, it boasted all of the major anchors of the 1970s (J.C. Penney, Sears, and of course, Marshall Field’s). You could spend the entire day there and find an amazing variety of fashionable and well-made clothes, shoes and home goods (mostly made in the U.S.), and also visit many specialty shops that made your shopping experience a lot of fun. All of the stores were full of tempting buys.

Then I got married and we bought a house. It wasn’t hard to fill a big, empty house with furniture, window treatments, and carpeting, not to mention sheets and towels. By now we had Marshall’s and T.J. Maxx, where I could find the same high-quality items sold at the mall, but at discounted prices. Back then, sheets and towels were designed for eye appeal, and before long, our linen closet was overflowing. (My family used many of those items for twenty years; that’s how well-made they were.)

For my generation, shopping was a pleasant experience that eventually became a pastime. No wonder we have so much stuff! Faced with the poor quality of many goods since most of our manufacturing went to the Far East, and companies became focused on how much profit they could make with lower-quality goods, many of us have kept our high-quality goods. It’s hard to let go of something when you know it will be impossible to replace it in the future with something of similar quality. No wonder many Baby Boomers and their elderly parents still have so much stuff!

Next: why today’s young adults have so much less clutter than older generations do.

Moving Back In with the Folks? Eeeek!

Oh, the joy, fear and excitement of leaving home to go off on my own. How well I remember it, even though it’s been, um, a while (let’s just say it was back when James Taylor still had a full head of hair).

Once I was on my own, I couldn’t imagine moving back home with my parents. So when I read this article about how the economy is forcing some adults in their 50s and 60s to move back in with Mom and/or Pop, I was both alarmed and sympathetic.

But when you think about it, it makes sense. Wages are stagnating but costs are rising. It’s been this way for several years, and something’s gotta give. If moving in with the folks keeps a roof over your head, what can you do?

Most people won’t be “moving back home” anytime soon. But to make sure it doesn’t happen, we need to be realistic about our personal financial situation:

  • Are we facing layoffs at work?
  • Are we barely making it on a pension?
  • Do we see lower income but bigger bills in the future?

You have to be honest with yourself. If you refuse to face reality, you’re only postponing the pain, and you may be making it worse, in the long run. But if you make the tough decision now to downsize your life, and make your bills (and your lifestyle) more manageable, you may be able to avoid the fate of those who are moving back in with their elderly folks.

We downsized after an income loss and came through in much better shape than we expected. Life in our McMansion is just a good memory now, but everyone once in a while I look our old house up on Zillow to see how high the property taxes have gone, and think about how we dodged a bullet there. Even the $300+ monthly electric bill is just a bad dream. Best of all, we’re now so financially comfortable that the thought of moving in with my folks (who are still living and just as hard to get along with as they ever were!) doesn’t even turn up on my radar.

My motto is: Bite the bullet and do what you must so you don’t end up sleeping under the watchful eye of your Donny Osmond poster ever again!

 

Get and Stay Debt-Free While You’re Young

This 68-year-old woman had a good income and assets, but thought she was rich and lived like it, buying stuff like there was no tomorrow. She ended up in bankruptcy court. The native Californian ended up moving to the Midwest, where the cost of living was cheaper than it was on the west coast. Now, she finally has a handle on her finances, and sees hope for the first time.

But had she become debt-free back when she had decent money coming in, she could have had a much easier time of things as she approached her old age. This is why it’s so important to work toward debt freedom while you’re young.

We became debt-free at age 44 when we paid off our mortgage. A few years later, a failed business (our main source of income) forced us to sell our house. The proceeds paid for a small house in a cheaper area, and left us money to live off of while we figured out what we would do for a living in the future. I don’t like to think what would have happened to us if we were not debt-free before the business failed.