Financial Advice: Win the maternity room lottery.

[The Lone Liberal]

Why are some people poor, while other people are rich. The primary reason is the maternity room. If you want to be assured a life without strife, a life with pain, a life with all of the best the world can offer, then you should try your damnedest to win the maternity room lottery. You have no one to blame but yourself if you are born into a working class family.

ON EDIT: Of course your parents and their parents and so on, also, had the bad luck of being born into the working class.

[Yupster]

1. Don't be such a pessimist

My family is a good example of typical American family.

My great-grandparents came into New York from Germany and lived in a small apartment in a ghetto in New York. My grandparents bought an Archie Bunker type place in Brooklyn.

My parents moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island and actually bought a nice house. My parents were the first in the family to be tru;ly educated to the point where they could take professional jobs.

My generation all went to college, all moved from New York and are all middle-class at least.

My kid is the first to go to an expensive private school.

My family shows a gradual progression from immigrant to poor, to middle class, to above.

I think we're more the norm than the exception. It does take time though, and I don't think many families go from poor to rich in one generation.

However, avoid mistakes like having babies before you're educated, teach your kids how to manage their money, and I don't think it's atypical for each generation to start in a better place than the generation before it.

[The Lone Liberal]

2. Hooray for you!

A quick look at reality will reveal your circumstances are an anomaly. For the great mass of American underprivileged the loss in the maternity ward is something that is never overcome. Do you truly believe that the next generation will have the same chances at middle-class success as yours did, or that the gap between wealth and the rest of us is not widening? You must remember that the definition of wealth has changed over the last few decades and that most of us are living on the edge, even those of us in the middle-class. A million today is nothing, it is easy to be a millionaire. It is all relative and in relation to the truly wealth, those who won the maternity room lottery, the middle class is nothing.

[Yupster]

3. I really don't pay any attention to

the Kennedys and Rockefellers. They are not what I strive for. I just want my kid to have it better than I did, and I'm pretty sure he will, or I'm working hard that he can, just like my father did before me and his father did before him.

To me that's an attainable goal. Being a Kennedy is not.

[greatauntoftriplets]

4. Ah, irony, thy name is...

I have an uncle who was born into a working class family (the father was an undertaker who died when my uncle was 12) who did extremely well in the world. His children benefitted immensely from the wealth that my uncle acquired -- and he earned it without the benefit of a college education. There is a vast difference between how that half of the family lives and how my family lives. Yet I was still the lucky one, because my father worked a 9 - 5 job when I was growing up and came home at night vs. having to spend his life working his way up the corporate ladder and traveling constantly for business.

Even so, my family has achieved much without the benefit of great wealth, including post-graduate degrees.