Why didn’t we know about the Great depression?

This is for the baby boomers. You know who you are. Did your folks tell you about handling money?

They went through the Great Depression. That wasn’t just depressing but the entire country went through a crunch. Everything changed and jobs were lost and money was hard to come by. Families had to depend on each other to get through the day and some didn’t. Bread lines, factories shut downs, market crash, soup kitchens, farmer’s prices dropping and generally a rough time. Every penny had to stretch.

So when the resounding War years came along creating jobs to build tanks and bullets and formally unemployed hobos were sent overseas, the country’s economic recovery turned around. After we won (good thing we were so far away from the real fighting) we could easily transform the assembly lines into constructing cars and refrigerators and housing to keep those vets employed and off we went. (You can check out all the details. This is but a rough overview)

So as kids of this generation why did we not know the value of a buck? Why were we so privilege to have any toy or game or have the latest fashion living in a sheltered community with clean schools and highway vacations and if there was a need for that candy there was always a quarter available?

Why did not our parents teach us the value of the dollar?

There is always the theory that our parents wanted us to be better off than they were so they provided us with material wealth unknown by only the wealthy in previous generations. Shoot, we had television and telephones. Little snotty nose kids grew up expecting all desires to be realized, no matter the cost.

I do remember getting a bank account to put my first penance in for my parents knew that cash was burning a hole in my pocket and I’d be back begging for more. The teller would count the coins and bills and stamp my book with the grand total but I couldn’t have access to it until I went back for a withdrawal. Banks are funny that way. They want your money to play with and you are just secured in knowing they got it in a vault.

Then credit cards hit. These were merely loans from bank participants to get ‘FREE’ money and only had to pay back a minimum fee. Too good to be true and certainly it was yet much of my generation grew accustomed to and even dependent on these plastic card. They provided us with a lifestyle we could not afford but we didn’t care until the rent was due.

While my parents were putting away whatever nest egg they could while paying each bill in full, their children were out living the life of wealth and plenty and when they ran out asked for an interest free loan from their folks.

Maybe the car purchases or the house purchases or the children woke our generation up but we had already wasted years and dollars of frivolous behavior.

Today everyone is tending toward technology to make payments easy. Flash your phone or crypto currency bombarded by global access to investments or kick-starters and let the app tell if you have any money in the bank.

I do not have an answer for what the future holds. I hope I have enough money in the bank to see me through but tomorrow I could check and it could all been hacked and all I have is the food on the shelf but when the electricity cannot be paid how will I cook the processed food? When the lights go out how will I listen to music or write this?

This could happen.