Moneybox
It’s impossible to say no. But it’s hard to say yes, too.
Illustration by Anna Kim/Slate.
This is Emotional Investment, Joel Anderson’s column about money and how we think about it. To suggest a subject, or get in touch, email [email protected].
Looking back on his childhood growing up in North Carolina, a man who I’ll call William told me that when he was a kid, he was mostly oblivious to the struggles of his single mother. But by the time he was a teenager, he understood where they lived, financially.
“My adult teeth were coming in at a weird angle and I was like, ‘Please, I don’t need to go to the dentist. Don’t worry about it,’ ” William said. “My mom was like, ‘Wait, let me see,’ and she called the orthodontist. She said, ‘Nah, this is going to go a long way. Think of it as an investment.’ ”
She eventually found a Black orthodontist who cut her a break. “He gave my mom a $2,000 discount,” William said. “And she paid monthly for those braces for two or three years. It was probably $130 [a month].”
William’s mother has the autoimmune disease lupus, and she provided for their household mostly with Medicaid payments. What she did with her son’s braces was nothing new—she was diligent about clipping coupons and finding bargains at discount clothing and furniture stores throughout his childhood. And when she needed to, she’d ask one of her sisters or a close friend for a little loan to hold the family over.
All this effort meant William felt he had pretty much everything he needed as a kid. “We always had food in the crib, lights, water,” William told me. So it came as a surprise when he realized how precarious things were: “I remember her telling me when I was a little younger—I thought we were middle class, and she was like, ‘We’re kinda poor. But we’re good.’ ”
They navigated their financial reality in all kinds of ways. William and his mother lived with an aunt for a couple of years, then moved to an apartment in a neighborhood his mother soon found too dangerous for them. They moved again, and again. William tried to shrug off the realization that he didn’t have the nice new clothes his classmates sometimes did. He also understood there was no chance she was going to be able to help him financially with college.
When he started his first job, at age 14, he used the money to buy his school clothes and supplies. “And I remember my mom was so happy and proud of me for doing that. I liked seeing my mom smile like that, so she didn’t have to worry about that,” he said.
For his next job, William joined his mother doing part-time shifts at the local Target, sometimes even working the same hours. Even though that might feel strange to most people, he didn’t mind it. “Honestly, it wasn’t even that bad,” he told me. He said his mother gave him and his best friend rides to and from work, and she sometimes protected him from overzealous managers. And he understood that she now needed the money she made from that job.
But what really surprised William was that his mother sometimes needed his Target income, too.
“She was always like, ‘You can always say no, it’s OK,’ ” he told me. “But that’s like your girlfriend telling you that you don’t have to get her a gift for her birthday.”
Which meant, of course, that he couldn’t say no. It’s a feeling that hasn’t left him more than a decade later, even as her requests have come a lot more often.
“Sometimes she doesn’t like the way I say [yes]. ‘Well, if you don’t want me to have it, just say no,’ ” she would say. “But honestly, I feel like I can’t say that.”
William’s plight reminded me of something I read in a study about how the racial wealth gap persisted even for college-educated Black Americans. “Black college-educated heads of household … are more likely to financially support their parents, in addition to their children,” said Tatjana Meschede, author of the study and a senior research scientist at Brandeis University, in a 2018 interview. That’s because Black college-educated households are more likely to be from families where previous generations were unable to build wealth because of racial discrimination.
“The racial wealth gap presents the largest economic gap, and without reducing it we don’t provide opportunities for the Black and Brown communities that Whites have,” Meschede told me in an email. “In fact, research shows that everyone is consistently underestimating the extent of racial wealth disparities as they are so large that most people have a hard time comprehending them.”
This problem is playing out in real time in William’s life, despite his successes. William got his college degree, even a master’s, from a large regional university in North Carolina. After graduating in 2019, he went on to work as an athletic trainer at an industrial workplace in Charlotte. He may be far from sharing shifts with his mom at Target, but he still helps her out financially.
Today, William is 29, makes $66,000 a year, and lives in a modest one-bedroom apartment. When I talked with him over Zoom, the amenities and layout reminded me of those hastily constructed new complexes in every major metro area meant to absorb recent college graduates and other young adults saving up for a house. He’s carrying on about how you’d expect, from what he told me and what little I could see behind him.
“I pay $1,500 a month, which isn’t bad for Charlotte,” he told me. “They didn’t go up on rent last year, but if they do this year, I might have to make a move. I might move somewhere called Pineville. It’s right outside Charlotte, maybe 10 minutes away. It’s nice, it’s quiet, low crime; pretty nice area and it’s 10 minutes away from my job.”
I took an instant liking to William, almost like he was a younger brother: He spoke glowingly of his mother, whose grit and savvy he truly admires. He also talked about her sacrifices for him and other members of their family, and how sometimes those family members hadn’t responded with the sort of attention or care that he’d expected. He talked about wanting to play more video games, go to more concerts, and maybe sometimes buy a nice pair of Jordans. His desires seemed almost too modest for someone not yet 30.
But he was visibly grappling with the burden of being his 59-year-old mother’s safety net, an obligation only likely to grow as she gets older and more infirm.
William really likes his job—with his background, he hopes to someday work with athletes. But he can’t know for sure if there’s a big payday ahead in his career that will relieve his burdens. And he worries about how supporting his mother financially might hamper his dreams, or worse, how it might make him feel about her.
“Honestly, it really started to annoy me sometime last year,” William said. “I don’t want to say that I started resenting her. But every time I got a call, I was like, Man, you’re going to need more this time. And I hate feeling that way, because I feel like I was getting conditioned to feel that way.”
Complicating matters is how his slow-building resentment shows up whenever he thinks about all of the items and experiences just beyond his financial grasp. His obligations to his mom hover over every desire, every quick spin through Amazon Prime, every time he thinks about doing something just for himself.
“I don’t really play video games that much anymore, but sometimes I’m like, Can I go get a PS5 and not think about it?” he said. “Then I remember one time I bought a pair of shoes—and I don’t buy a pair of shoes that often. They were some Nike Dunks. I paid maybe $150 for them. Maybe two days later, my mom asked me if I had $100. And I was like, Damn, sometimes I feel like I can’t spend on myself.”
I could see myself in his irritation, thinking of the things my wife and I have had to put off—our own savings, a down payment for a home, some expensive dental work, to say nothing of weekend babysitting for regular date nights—because of cascading financial crises in our families over the last year. It recalled something Georgetown law professor Dorothy Brown told me in a conversation months ago, about the many obstacles facing Black families trying to build wealth.
“Black families pit grandparents against grandchildren,” she said, a line that returned to me during my interview with William. That immediately stuck with me—when I relayed it to my wife, she grimly nodded in affirmation. I mentioned all of this to Brown when I spoke to her again last week.
“I will tell you, this resonated with every Black reporter that ever interviewed me about my book,” said Brown, author of The Whiteness of Wealth. “They would say, ‘OK Dorothy, let me tell you: This is actually my story.’ And they would talk about, you know, they were paying for their parents’ rent or something.”
For me, it all started in 2015. I got a massive raise while working at BuzzFeed News—I nearly doubled my annual salary of $70,000 after entertaining a few promising job offers. Not yet married and still childless, I finally had some expendable income. I used it to help out my family members.
One of the things I immediately agreed to do was pay off the remaining years of my mother’s car loan. That wasn’t much of a problem, especially since paying the bill online was much easier for me than it was for her.
But when she retired following a string of health troubles a few years later, I kept sending an equivalent amount every month to help with the upkeep of the home and to ease the transition to living on a fixed income. That still wasn’t a big deal and I was happy to do it; my wife understood and had similar financial obligations to members of her family.
But I think we all underestimated how much retirement costs, from the toll of health challenges to car upkeep to the random issues that come with maintaining a 45-year-old home. And though we didn’t underestimate how much it’d cost to raise a child, the obligations quickly ate up any cushion we’d built in the previous decade.
Brown, of course, had heard this story so many times before. As warmly and as kindly as she could, Brown let me know that William and I were both headed for trouble.
“It is a never-ending cycle,” she said. “Your parents don’t like the fact that they’re getting money from you. They want to be able to take care of themselves.”
It’s true. My parents are proud people, Black folks who I now realize pulled off quite a feat in amassing the trappings of middle-class life in a society hostile to their advancement. It’s no surprise that now that they’re no longer able to work, they’re turning to their biggest and most important investment: their children.
“We wind up having to take care of our parents—and we want them to have the best because of how much they sacrificed for us,” Brown said. “But we also have these babies coming up that we would love to graduate debt-free. And where’s the extra money going to come from?”
Once again, Brown left me in something of a daze after our conversation. Her question seemed particularly urgent to me, at 45.
In some ways, I envied 29-year-old William, who at least has more time to figure out some alternatives. Being in a supportive role since he was a teenager primed him to think early about big adult decisions, like buying a home and getting married someday.
“But I’m also trying to make sure my mom is good too,” he said. And that worries him, in ways that go beyond the financial: “I sometimes don’t want to come off as a mama’s boy because I feel like women don’t like that.”
The reality is that William and whoever he might choose to marry will have to come up with a plan for his ailing mother. Not yet 60, William’s mother will likely have to stop working soon because of her lupus.
“As she gets older, I wonder what’s going to happen as she needs more help around the house all the time,” he said. “The main reason I want to get a house is because if anything happens to her, she can come stay with me. As I get older, I realize it’s going to be tough to kind of figure this out.”
If the studies and the experts are to be believed, it’s not a problem that can be solved. It’s an inevitability.
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