I was going to wax philosophical and try to tackle subjects like what is money for, what does it really do for us, what is important in life, life, death, what does it all mean, etc. etc.
But then my brain started hurting and I figured I'd stick to the facts.
Folks, you're learning a lot right as I learn it. Well, I have some skeletons in my closet and I'm not ready to open that closet up quite yet. Let me inch it open.
It's October 10 now (no, it's October 14 but the tenth was on a weekend) and the Dow just hit ten thousand. A year ago, I guess it was sometime in September although I mark it as October 10, 2008 because that's when I picked up the pieces of my broken financial "self" and started over... well, a year ago, I had just lost a lot of money. I can't talk about exactly how and what happened quite yet. It doesn't matter, anyway - suffice it to say that I destroyed something that I thought had been handed down for generations (only money - and yes, I know it's not people and people are more important and...) let's just say that the financial culmination of some lives was in my hands and I didn't handle it well.
Let me skip back now. Growing up, I did not live like a "rich" person, not in the slightest, but not destitute, either. I'd say on the modest side of average in a nicer-than-average side of town. Money was a private subject in my family - and didn't lots of people grow up that way? I had the vague idea that my mother - and even more so, her family of origin - was well off, comfortable, secure... I don't know what other descriptive words can be used because I want to make it clear that I'm not searching for euphemisms for "wealthy" or the like. Most of us think of people with more money than they know what to do with, when we use that word. It's all relative, I guess (the people scraping around for change think that those who can keep the lights on are "wealthy," maybe, but you know what I mean.)
I'm not even trying to make this coherent - a post with a point, I mean. There's no story, lesson, or revelation here, and I'm not currently philosophizing. I'm just sharing with you some things that I uncovered - things easily available for reading by those looking in the right places (but maybe cloaked under considerably more layers just ten or fifteen years ago before the true explosion of the information age AKA advent of the internet.) I have been sort of blown away by the discovery of some things I previously had only vague inklings of and only about 3% of the facts on. I'll share some tidbits, out of order.
Let me put it this way: How would any of you feel if you found a newspaper article from 100 years ago detailing the shooting death of your great-grandmother's nephew (that would make him my... not even going to figure out the label - OK, I know he was my great great uncle's son) as a 22-year-old, unmarried but engaged, while traveling on business, for defending another person who was being beaten (I should note: the person being beaten was of another race, and that's relevant given the year and my family's region of the U.S.)? And the shooter later discovered to have previously beaten to the point of murder another person of the other race. Shooting victim being the son of the town founder (my great great uncle), who was described as "timber baron," "railroad tycoon," "philanthropist," "wealthiest citizen of the county," but who nevertheless never recovered from grieving for his oldest son, and perhaps not coincidentally, didn't live out an especially long life? Sure, there is the church cornerstone with his name, the library, the college, the monument in the center of town, but those birth and death dates on it don't tell the stories of grief, crying till dawn, and "we were afraid he would lose his mind," (exact quote). "Amassed a fortune in real estate" is easier to note in the history books (that I'm ordering from Amazon right now. These are not people you'd read about in Barnes and Noble - these are college-library-collection type books, some of which are in print and I'm going to grab copies.)
See what I mean about money, and what does it mean, and what does it do for any of us? Doesn't stop someone from dying within minutes of an altercation because someone pulled a gun. Wealth can influence the commission of a special train to bring that person back home, but can't change the fact that the person being transported is described as "remains."
Well, but... I guess you noticed, and I noticed, too: This is just a few generations back for me. A hundred years, which is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. I was bowled over that my great-grandmother's brother (that would be my great-great uncle - number of "greats" seem off, but write up a tree and you'll see that's right) pulled in the most money in the county, apparently, through numerous natural resource-related, real estate, and other business ventures, and here I am scrambling to get my net worth in the black. I'm not even going to read anything into that or go into any theories or feelings I have. I'm still sort of reeling from seeing it in print that these people that I knew described only modestly as "teachers," "farmers," etc. had this much going on. More than I do, financially, obviously. I've been feeling like a loser enough already so far in my my life and especially in the last year (again, I should specify, financially - I know the difference between personal integrity/conduct/human worth and finance, but when you take stock of your life and find yourself coming up short and even failing big-time when it comes to money, it can threaten even broader self-esteem and erode hope. Because I know what it feels like to be on the receiving end, recently I defended "Dog" of "Dog Ate My finances when some anonymous person
predicted lifelong failure for her. Someone predicted the same for me some time ago, and while I shouldn't let strangers on the internet shake my confidence, it didn't help when I was already struggling to count myself in as a human being.) Does this discovery give me greater self-esteem or make me feel special? I wouldn't say that... it's more like, as I said, my financial failings are set in just that much more relief, they are just that much more stark. And maybe I'm just that much more driven to recover what I had one year ago. We're all working whatever resources we can for our children, after all, and I feel like I'm also trying to work on behalf of others who are now gone, to get back what they established and passed down, which seems to be slipping away. I wouldn't want to see that happen, not under my watch, anyway.
Are wealthy, successful people most often self-made or are they "helped" along by their background? Good question; (only my guess coming up here...) I think it's often the former but I thought it was a well-known fact that the influence of the latter can't be underestimated. Now I'm philosophizing and getting all sociological and economical, but I don't think it's generally easy or statistically especially likely for people who come from extremely limited means to better themselves and their families financially for the long haul. It can definitely be done but it's like swimming upstream. And those who come from more privileged backgrounds have a leg up, at the very least, although what they do with that is up to the individual. Multi-generational fortunes can be wasted, mismanaged, lost, although it might take time and is less likely to happen quickly or at all, given many descendants (some are just bound to keep the resources going when the opportunity and resources are spread out among many.)
I never wanted to be one to waste or mismanage anything. One of my readers commented back in March when I was scrambling to keep a sliver of something going, "It's understandable that if your mom left you a little money, you'd want to keep it going." She was propping me up in my decision to borrow if I had to, to avoid cashing out. She knew what the issue was but she had no idea of the scope or the scale. Let me wrap up this ramble now. I never knew the far-back origins of anything my mother had although I saw the gory details of her finances when they were divided up. I thought any appreciable remnants of family wealth were now gone, disbursed, dissolved - wasted and mishandled, on my part, anyway. That explains my urge to just kick myself in the head every day from a year ago until now, despite my attempts to pick myself up and keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel.
But now my relative's estate, you'll know if you've been reading, is coming around the bend. The dissection and collation of its ingredients is going on right now. What's contained within it is just about as much of a mystery to me as it is to you. Stay tuned if you want to hear what happens next with that, although don't expect it to be very soon.